Industry · Payment Processing
Between February and September 2026, the administrator of the $5.5 billion Visa and Mastercard interchange settlement paid about $632 million to roughly 689,000 merchants. If you accepted cards in the United States at any point from 1 January 2004 to 25 January 2019 and filed a claim before the February 2025 deadline, one of those payments may already have reached you, or your claim may be one of the hundreds of thousands still waiting.
This article explains what has been paid, how much each payment works out to per dollar of fees, why most of the money is still in the fund, and what a merchant who used Square, PayPal or Intuit during those years should expect. It works from the court filings and the official settlement website, paymentcardsettlement.com, as they stood on 21 October 2026. It is not about the separate settlement over future card fees and rules, which pays nobody anything and which we covered in a previous article.
The settlement received final approval in December 2019, and the Second Circuit upheld it in March 2023. Claims ran until 4 February 2025. Payments Dive, reporting on the administrator's latest filing in October 2026, put the number of merchants who filed at about 1.47 million, out of about 2.12 million registered taxpayer identification numbers.
On 30 October 2025 the court approved what it called an initial, partial distribution. Class counsel's motion of August 2025 proposed $426.1 million for 605,472 claims whose owners had agreed with the administrator's fee figures and had no other open issue. By 22 May 2026, according to a declaration from Epiq, the class administrator, more than $414 million had gone to more than 597,900 claimants, with about $4.1 million of that round still to send.
A second round, approved on 15 June 2026 and paid on a rolling basis from September, covers two groups: about 75,000 merchants whose only problem had been a mismatch between the business name on the claim and the name the administrator held for the tax ID, and 8,400 whose transactions had been wrongly flagged as belonging to merchants who opted out. Epiq put that round at no less than $182 million. Payments Dive reported in October that $212.8 million of it had been paid, bringing the total to $631.7 million for 689,340 merchants, and that the fund still held $5.02 billion on 30 September 2026. The settlement website says only that more than $4.5 billion remains.
Each payment is a share of the fund in proportion to the interchange fees a merchant paid on Visa and Mastercard transactions over the class period, which the settlement calls Interchange Fees Paid. The court filings give enough to work out what the partial payments have been on that basis:
So a merchant whose interchange over those fifteen years came to $20,000 would have received about $235 so far. The settlement's own FAQ answers the obvious complaint directly: the interchange merchants paid during the class period is far larger than the $5.5 billion fund, so payments are a percentage of fees, not a refund of them.
The partial rate is low on purpose. Epiq's August 2025 declaration explains that it divided the money not by the fees on claims actually filed but by all the interchange in the transaction data it holds, a figure the motion says is more than twice as large. It also deducted expected future costs and ignored the interest the fund will earn. Epiq described the result as a rate that is likely far lower than the final one. The FAQ says everyone who received a partial payment will receive more once outstanding legal issues are resolved and claim review is complete. Neither document puts a number on the final rate, and we would not trust anyone who does.
The settlement website lists ten reasons a claim may show a blank payment status, meaning it is not eligible for payment yet. They include insufficient proof that the person filing could act for the business; a tax ID claimed by more than one party; a dispute over the administrator's fee figure; a claim in an audit population; a payment that would come to less than $5; and a tax ID linked to a payment facilitator or a branded petrol supplier.
Disputes are a large part of it. By August 2025 Epiq had received research requests, in which a merchant asks the administrator to look again for its transaction data, for 193,222 tax IDs, and sales data submissions for 35,015 more. It had also resolved over 90,000 conflicts between merchants, third-party filers and companies that had bought claims, with more than 16,000 still being settled. Merchants who do not accept the administrator's answer can appeal to a special master and then to the court.
The other part is two legal questions about who the merchant is.
A payment facilitator signs up many small businesses under its own merchant account, which is how Square and Intuit's QuickBooks Payments have worked. The question in the settlement was whether the facilitator or the business selling the goods had "accepted" the cards and was therefore the class member. In May 2024 the district court decided it was the business. The Second Circuit affirmed that on 4 May 2026, as it did a parallel ruling that branded petrol stations, not the oil companies whose brands they sell under, are the class members. Square and Intuit themselves had filed requests to opt out of the class.
While those cases were on appeal, the court ordered class counsel to put the money that could be owed to these merchants in trust: $2.9 billion for payment facilitator customers and $450 million for branded petrol retailers. Because the administrator's data carries no reliable marker for a facilitator's customer, Epiq funded the trust generously, sweeping in every transaction flagged as a facilitator's in Visa's data, every transaction whose merchant name carries the asterisk that typically signals a facilitator, every tax ID on Square's and Intuit's opt-out lists, every tax ID a facilitator registered, and all transactions associated with PayPal. If you sold through any of these during the class period and filed, your claim is likely to be in that population and unpaid.
The losing sides asked the Second Circuit to rehear both cases in May 2026 and could still ask the Supreme Court to take them. Epiq's May 2026 declaration says that if the rehearing petitions are denied, it and class counsel plan to recommend a third partial distribution covering the claims held back only because of these appeals. When this article was written the settlement website said it was unknown when final payments would be made.
Since 2012 the court has found some third-party claims-filing solicitations misleading, and since 2018 those companies have had to tell merchants that they do not need a service to take part. On 18 March 2025, after the deadline, the court went further: filing companies must remove the ability for new class members to sign up, and every solicitation must say that the deadline has passed, that free help is available from the administrator and class counsel, and that information is on the court-approved website. Solicitations without that wording may be treated as misleading.
Many merchants signed up before the deadline. Filing companies generally work on contingency, keeping a share of whatever is recovered. A merchant that signed with one, or sold its claim for a lump sum, should expect the terms of that agreement to apply to its payment, and conflicting registrations over the same tax ID are one of the reasons payments are held. If you are approached now with an offer to file or to buy your claim, the court's order means the offer should state the deadline has passed. Class counsel are paid from the fund, so merchants owe them nothing directly.
The damages settlement looks backwards. It pays for interchange charged between 2004 and early 2019 and does nothing to the rate on your next sale. The rules and rate changes in the separate settlement Visa and Mastercard reached in November 2025 are a different matter, still awaiting final approval; we set out what that agreement would change in our article on the swipe fee settlement. The fees you pay today are on your monthly statement, and our guide to reading a processing statement shows where interchange sits on it.
