INDUSTRYPAYMENT PROCESSING
Visa retired Level 2. What B2B merchants actually pay now
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Payment Review Editorial Team
Payment Review Editorial Team
For years the advice to any business that sells to other businesses was the same: send Level 2 data with your commercial card transactions and Visa will lower your interchange. As of 18 April 2026 that advice no longer describes Visa's rate schedule. The general Level 2 category is not on it.
This article works from Visa's own document — Visa USA Interchange Reimbursement Fees, Visa Supplemental Requirements, dated 18 April 2026 — rather than from other guides, because the guides currently disagree with each other about what changed and when. Some say Level 2 ended in January 2026, some say April. Both dates saw something happen, and the difference matters if you are trying to work out why your statement moved.
These are the interchange rates Visa publishes for purchasing cards (which include fleet cards) and corporate T&E cards, effective 18 April 2026:
Read that list as a ladder. A card-not-present B2B sale that used to reach a Level 2 rate now lands at Commercial Card Not Present, 2.70% + $0.10, unless the enhanced data qualifies it for Product 3 at 1.75% + $0.10. That gap is 0.95 percentage points. On $100,000 a month of qualifying corporate and purchasing card volume it is roughly $950 a month, or about $11,400 a year, before your processor's markup and before Visa's participation fee.
The Large Ticket line is worth noticing separately. At 1.30% + $35.00 it only beats Product 3 above about $7,750 a transaction, which is why distributors with a mix of small and very large invoices can see two quite different economics inside the same merchant account.
Visa business credit cards — the cards a two-person company gets from its bank, not a purchasing card issued by a procurement department — are priced in their own table, with five spend tiers. Effective 18 April 2026, from Tier I to Tier V:
Product 3 is the enhanced-data category, and on this table it is priced above Product 2 at every single tier. That is the opposite of the relationship on the corporate and purchasing table, and it is the reason several payments consultancies described the January 2026 repricing of small-business categories as a shock rather than an adjustment.
Be careful about reading the numbering as data levels. Visa uses the same Product 1 and Product 2 naming in its consumer credit tables, where it denotes card product tiers and has nothing to do with Level 1, Level 2 or Level 3 data. The industry write-ups of the small-business change do not agree with each other about which category enhanced data now routes to, and we could not resolve that from Visa's published schedule alone, which lists rates without describing qualification criteria.
So do not take anyone's word for it, including ours. Pull an interchange detail report and count which categories your small-business card volume is actually settling in. If you have never done that, our guide to reading a merchant processing statement covers where the qualification detail lives and what to do when your processor does not provide it.
The field list has not changed much. What changed is that Visa validates it. Product 3 qualification asks for the full Level 3 set alongside each transaction:
There is also an arithmetic rule that catches integrations which have technically been sending the fields for years: the payload has to add up. Quantity multiplied by unit amount, plus tax, plus shipping, must equal the authorised total. Placeholder values, zeroes and filler text disqualify the transaction rather than being ignored.
The other structural change is that Visa now scores the merchant, not only the transaction. Processors describe two states: merchants whose data is consistently complete and accurate are treated as verified and receive the enhanced-data rate on settlement, while merchants who are not verified can still earn the incentive but only after Visa has checked the data. Several processors also report that Visa reserves the right to reclassify transactions and claw back the discount if it later finds errors. We could not confirm the clawback window from a Visa document, so treat the specific number of days you may see quoted as unverified.
None of this applies to Mastercard. Processors publishing guidance through 2026 — Finix's explainer was updated on 16 April 2026 — report that Mastercard continues to run both Level 2 and Level 3 programs, with less rigid validation than Visa now applies. If you sell to businesses on both networks, you are running two different rulebooks through one gateway, and a configuration that satisfies Mastercard will not necessarily satisfy Visa.
Enhanced data is not a setting. Somebody has to have the line items, and something has to carry them from the system that holds them into the authorisation message. That is two separate problems, and merchants usually only discover the second one.
On the gateway side, NMI lists Level 3 processing among its gateway features, and PayTrace is built around it: our review found automatic Level 2 and Level 3 data capture to be its core differentiator, purpose-built for B2B and B2G sellers rather than retrofitted from a consumer product. Cybersource is where large merchants usually end up, though our review is blunt that it is not built for small business and that nothing about its pricing is published.
On the source-system side the question is whether your invoices already carry item codes and units. EBizCharge exists for exactly this seam — our review describes deep embedded integrations with more than a hundred ERP, accounting and CRM systems including QuickBooks, NetSuite, Sage, Dynamics, Epicor and SAP — although the review does not assess its Level 3 handling specifically, so ask about that directly rather than assuming it.
It sharpens an old point. An interchange saving only reaches you if your pricing passes interchange through. On flat-rate or bundled pricing your rate is the same whether a transaction settles at 1.75% or 2.70%, so every dollar Product 3 saves is a dollar your processor keeps. B2B merchants with real commercial card volume are the clearest case in the whole market for interchange-plus.
Two of the processors we review make that unusually easy to verify. Helcim publishes its entire margin table, from interchange + 0.4% + 8 cents in person down to interchange + 0.15% + 6 cents above $1M a month, which is rare enough that our review treats it as the main reason to consider them. Stax inverts the model differently: a flat monthly subscription tiered by volume, with interchange passed through at direct cost and 0% markup, plus 8 to 15 cents a transaction. Neither review evaluates Level 2 or Level 3 handling, so treat them as pricing structures that let a Product 3 saving reach you, not as B2B specialists.
None of this is a reason to panic about a rate change you cannot control. It is a reason to find out what you are actually qualifying at, which most B2B merchants have never checked, and which is the only number in this article that is about your business rather than about Visa's.
