Payment Processing · Industry
Two fees on your April statement got bigger, and a third appeared. None of them is interchange, none of them is your processor's markup, and none of them is negotiable. They are network service fees, and in April 2026 Visa and Mastercard both restructured them the same way: they stopped billing tokenization and card-updating services when a merchant used them, and started billing them as a rate on every card-not-present authorization instead.
The individual numbers are small enough to skim past. The direction is not. Both networks have converted a set of optional, per-use services into a toll on online sales, and Visa has already published the next increase, which lands in April 2027.
The Digital Commerce Services Fee, or DCSF, has existed since October 2023 at 0.75 basis points with a minimum of $0.0075 per transaction. On 1 April 2026 it went to 1.5 basis points on domestic US card-not-present transactions and 3.5 basis points cross-border, with the minimum rising to $0.01.
At the same time Visa folded four services into it that were previously billed separately: Token Authentication Verification Value, Visa Account Updater and Real Time VAU, Visa Digital Credential Updater, and Visa Credential Enrichment Services. Those are no longer line-itemed. A merchant can now use them as much as it likes for the same rate — and a merchant that uses none of them pays the same rate anyway.
The minimum matters more than the rate for most merchants. At 1.5 basis points, the $0.01 floor binds until the ticket reaches about $67, so a shop with a $40 average order pays the floor on every domestic sale. That is $0.01 where it used to be $0.0075 — a third more. Above $67 the rate binds instead, and the increase is a straight doubling. Cross-border the floor stops binding at about $29, above which the fee has more than quadrupled.
Visa published the following step at the same time. From 1 April 2027 the DCSF becomes 2.25 basis points domestic and 5.25 basis points cross-border, with the minimum at $0.0125. That is three times the October 2023 rate, arriving in two announced moves. Canada gets the same structure from 1 June 2026, and the European figures follow in April 2027.
Visa also introduced a Card Present Token Fee on 1 April 2026 — 0.01% domestic and 0.05% cross-border on authorised, network-tokenised card-present transactions. In practice that means a tap from a phone or watch. Contactless from a plastic card is not tokenised in this sense; a digital wallet is. If your in-store mix has shifted to wallets, this is a new cost on volume you already had.
Mastercard's Digital Enablement Fee restructured on 6 April 2026, and the shape is almost identical. The minimum on transactions of $100 or less went from $0.02 to $0.025. The rate on transactions between $100 and $2,000 went from 2 basis points to 2.5. And a maximum appeared: $0.50 on transactions of $2,000 and above.
Those three numbers describe one continuous schedule rather than three brackets. At $100, 2.5 basis points is exactly $0.025; at $2,000 it is exactly $0.50. So the fee is 2.5 basis points of the ticket, floored at $0.025 and capped at $0.50 — which is worth knowing, because the cap is the only genuinely good news in the April changes for anyone selling big-ticket items.
Mastercard also widened what the fee covers, adding Return Risk Intelligence and BIN Lookup, among other services, to a bundle that already included Automatic Billing Updater, Account Status Inquiry, address verification, CVC2, First Party Trust and transaction fraud monitoring. Same pattern: more services in the bundle, more basis points on the bundle, nothing itemised.
Both fees are described in the network release notes as billed per authorisation. That is not the same thing as per sale. It is worth asking your processor directly whether declined authorisations are billed, because for a merchant with a high decline or retry rate the answer changes the cost materially — and it is the sort of thing that only ever appears as a lump on a statement. Our guide to reading a merchant processing statement covers where pass-through network fees surface.
Visa launched the Digital Commerce Authentication Program in the US on 18 April 2026. Unlike the fees above it is optional, and it runs in the other direction: it pays an interchange incentive on eligible card-not-present consumer credit transactions.
The published structure has three levels of qualification:
Net of the program fee, that is 5 basis points for token-only, 5 for enhanced data, and 10 for enhanced data with a token. The best available outcome is a 10 basis point improvement on qualifying interchange, and only the top tier gets it.
The enhanced data is the part to read carefully. Qualifying means passing device ID, IP address, email address, full billing address and phone number to Visa through the 3-D Secure rails, using Visa Data Only — authentication data submitted for scoring rather than for a cardholder challenge. That is a meaningful amount of customer information moving to the network on every eligible transaction, in exchange for a rate improvement. It is a legitimate trade and plenty of merchants will take it, but it is a trade, and whoever signs off on your privacy notice should know it is happening.
The scope is narrower than the marketing suggests. DCAP covers customer-initiated transactions on consumer credit. Debit is out. So are merchant-initiated and stored-credential transactions, recurring billing, mail order and telephone order, account funding transactions and instalments. A subscription business, whose renewals are merchant-initiated by definition, gets the incentive on the first sale and nothing on the renewals.
Visa has also said that transactions failing its data quality standards will not qualify and may be subject to compliance enforcement — so submitting the fields badly is worse than not submitting them.
The payments consultancy CMSPI estimated the April 2026 US network fee updates at roughly $3.0 billion in additional annual merchant cost, of which it attributed about $122 million to the DCSF change, about $125 million to the Mastercard Digital Enablement Fee, up to $771 million to DCAP-related changes including a reduction in the existing network token interchange benefit, and about $15 million to the new card-present token fee. The largest single line in its estimate was not on this list at all: about $2 billion from the sunset of Visa's Level 2 interchange programs, which we covered in what B2B merchants pay now.
Those are one firm's estimates rather than network disclosures, and should be read as such. The rate changes themselves are published and are not in dispute.
The practical consequence is that the gap between interchange-plus and flat-rate pricing has widened in an unobvious direction. On interchange-plus, network service fees are passed through, so every one of these changes reaches you within a billing cycle and shows up as a slightly larger unexplained block on the statement. On flat-rate pricing they do not — the processor absorbs them, until it reprices.
That is not an argument for flat rate. It is an argument for knowing which one you are on. A merchant on interchange-plus with Adyen or Dharma Merchant Services has interchange and network assessments passed through at cost, and can at least reconcile the change against the published schedules. A merchant on blended pricing with Stripe or Shopify Payments will not see them at all, and will instead see a pricing change at some point with no stated cause.
Three things are worth doing before your next statement:
If your gateway sits between you and the acquirer — Spreedly and Braintree both do — the enrolment question goes to them rather than to the network, and the answer is not always the same across the processors behind a single integration.
Interchange gets the attention because it is the biggest number and because it is the subject of litigation and legislation. Network service fees get almost none, and they are where both networks have been quietly moving revenue: from optional services billed on use, to mandatory bundles billed as a rate on volume. The 2027 DCSF rate is already published. Nothing about that structure suggests it stops there.
