Your effective rate ticks up. Nothing about your business changed. You call your processor and they say "that's the interchange update" — and it sounds exactly like the kind of thing a processor would say to avoid a conversation.

Sometimes it's a real answer. Sometimes it's cover. Here's how to tell them apart.

The semiannual update is real

Visa and Mastercard republish their interchange tables twice a year, in April and October. Both networks have run on roughly this cadence for years, and every acquirer in the country passes the changes through.

An update can:

  • Raise or lower rates in specific categories
  • Add new interchange categories, or retire old ones
  • Change the qualification rules that decide which category a transaction lands in
  • Adjust network assessment and access fees

The important part: your processor genuinely doesn't control this. When interchange moves in October, your cost moves in October, and their markup can be completely unchanged.

Why your rate can move even when no rate moved

The subtler version — and the one that confuses people — is when the rules change instead of the rates.

Interchange categories have qualification criteria: settle within a certain window, include specific data, use a particular acceptance method. When a network tightens those criteria, transactions that used to qualify for a cheaper category start landing in a more expensive one.

Nobody raised a rate. Your mix shifted underneath you. Same transactions, more expensive bucket.

How to tell an update from a markup increase

This is the whole point, and it's checkable.

Get a statement from before the change and one from after. Then:

  1. Compare the interchange section. On interchange-plus, interchange is broken out separately. If those line items moved and your markup line didn't, it was genuinely the update.
  2. Compare the markup. Your processor's percentage and per-transaction fee should be identical across an interchange update. If your markup changed in April or October, that's your processor — not the networks. They may be counting on the timing to blur the two.
  3. Check the fixed monthly fees. Statement fee, PCI fee, gateway fee, batch fee. Interchange updates don't touch these. A statement fee that went from $10 to $15 in October is not an interchange update, no matter how it's described.
  4. Look at your category mix. If the same volume is landing in different interchange categories than before, that's a qualification-rule change — real, and worth asking how to re-qualify.

What to actually do about it

  • Diarize April and October. Pull the statement after each update and recalculate your effective rate. Ten minutes, twice a year.
  • Ask for the summary. Most processors publish a customer-facing note on each update. Request it. A processor who won't produce one is telling you something.
  • Chase the downgrades, not the rate. You can't argue with a published interchange table, but you can often fix why transactions are landing in expensive categories — batching daily, sending AVS and CVV, adding Level 2 data on commercial cards.
  • If the markup moved, push back. That's a repricing, and most agreements let you object to a fee change — sometimes with a right to cancel penalty-free.

The reframe

"It's the interchange update" is true often enough to be a credible answer and vague enough to be a convenient one. The way to know which you're getting is to look at whether your processor's markup moved — because that's the number they control, and it's the only one that should never change on the card networks' calendar.

Ask for the before-and-after statements. A processor who's telling you the truth will hand them over without friction.