Visa Fines: What the Published Assessment Schedule Says

Visa publishes its fine schedule, and almost nobody in merchant services quotes it. The Visa Core Rules edition of 18 April 2026 sets out an escalating series of non-compliance assessments in Section 1.11.2.2 (ID# 0000482), starting at a USD 1,000 compliance case fee and running to USD 150,000, with a separate schedule for significant violations that reaches USD 1,000,000 a month.

One thing to understand before the numbers. Every assessment below is levied on the Member, meaning your acquirer, not on you directly. Nobody at Visa sends a merchant an invoice. What reaches you is whatever your merchant agreement lets your acquirer pass along, which is a contract question rather than a rules question.

The two general schedules#

Which schedule applies depends on which part of the rulebook you broke. Violations of Chapter 1, the Visa Core Rules, fall under Tier 1. Everything else falls under Tier 2.

The compliance case fee is assessed immediately on notification. Every level after that fires only when a response date passes or an agreed remediation deadline is missed. The schedule is a clock, not a penalty for the original act.

That design matters. A rule violation that gets corrected on the first notice costs USD 1,000. The same violation left unaddressed through six missed deadlines costs USD 150,000 on Tier 1, and then keeps climbing.

Significant violations run to a million a month#

Section 1.11.2.6 sets out a separate and much steeper schedule for what Visa calls a significant violation.

The rules define that as a member action, error or omission, intended or unintended, known or unknown, that presents immediate or substantial risks, economic or otherwise, or where the member knew or should have known, or its knowledge can be fairly implied, that the conduct violated the rules.

On a confirmed significant violation the assessment is USD 50,000 at notification. If the response date or remediation deadline passes, the assessment runs between USD 50,000 and USD 1,000,000 each month, and the rules say it continues in increasing amounts at Visa's discretion until the violation is corrected.

Note the phrase "at Visa's discretion" appears in both schedules. Section 1.11.2.1 reserves Visa's right to deviate, including applying a Tier 2 assessment to a core rule violation. The tables are a framework, not a tariff.

Specific programs override the general schedule#

The general schedules apply unless a named program in Chapter 12 covers the violation. Two with published amounts are worth knowing.

Dynamic currency conversion, Section 12.3.3.1 (ID# 0030703). If an audit identifies a merchant outlet, ATM or branch violation, the acquirer faces a non-refundable assessment of up to USD 10,000 or USD 50,000 depending on the nature of the violation, and the Tier 2 general schedule on top of that. The DCC rules themselves are covered in our post on dynamic currency conversion.

High-integrity risk acquirer registration, Section 12.5.5.1 (ID# 0026381). Failing the registration requirements costs USD 100,000 per calendar month for Tier 1 and Tier 2 merchants, or USD 25,000 for Tier 3, plus USD 2,000 per high-integrity risk merchant or sponsored merchant identified, per month. Continued non-compliance can end with Visa prohibiting that acquirer from acquiring high-integrity risk merchants at all.

That second one explains a pattern merchants see without understanding. An acquirer facing USD 100,000 a month plus USD 2,000 per unregistered merchant has a strong reason to offboard a category quickly rather than work through the paperwork. The exposure sits with them.

What this means if you are the merchant#

You will not be assessed directly. What you should take from the schedule is three things.

Correcting a violation on the first notice is the whole game, because the first notice costs USD 1,000 and the escalation is driven by missed deadlines rather than by the severity of the original breach.

Your acquirer's exposure shapes its behaviour toward you. A freeze, a reserve or an offboarding often reflects their assessment risk rather than anything about your transactions. The structural version of that argument is in our post on dedicated versus pooled accounts, and the payment facilitator model concentrates it further.

And read your merchant agreement for the pass-through clause. The rules decide what Visa charges your acquirer. Your contract decides what your acquirer charges you. If you have been offboarded and are trying to come back, our guide to MATCH list recovery covers that path.