Changes to Visa system integrity fees

From April 25, 2026, Visa will increase its excessive retry system integrity fees for interregional transactions in the AP region, Europe, Canada, UAE, and US.

After this date, these fees will increase from 0.15 USD per non-compliant retry to 0.25 USD.

What system integrity fees does Visa apply?

Category 1 – issuer will never approve

Visa charges a System Integrity Fee when you retry an authorization after an authorization request or account verification was declined with a Category 1 response code. This response code category means the issuer will never approve the transaction.

Category 2 – issuer will never approve

A Category 2 response code means that the issuer may approve the transaction but cannot do so at that time. You can retry these transactions 20 times in a 30-day period.

If you retry an authorization beyond this limit, Visa charges you a fee for the 21st and each subsequent retry. Note that Visa has separate retry counters for Cardholder Initiated Transactions (CITs) and Merchant Initiated Transactions (MITs).

Category 3 – data quality

If you have more than 25,000 card-not-present declines with a Category 3 response code within a 30-day period, Visa charges this fee on every subsequent transaction at the Card Acceptor ID level. This response code category means that the issuer cannot approve the transaction with the details you provided.

You can implement data quality controls to ensure accurate authorization requests. If you receive a data quality response code, revalidate the data before retrying authorization.

How to reduce Visa system integrity fees

To reduce these fees:

• Set up controls to detect Category 1 response codes and do not retry these transactions. These transactions may be declined due to issues like account closure, suspected fraud, or cancelled recurring payments.
  
• For Category 2 response codes, review your transaction data to understand where you exceed the retry limit of 20 times in a 30-day period and set limits to not exceed these limits. You may also wish to stagger retries to allow temporary issues to resolve.
  
• For Category 3 response codes, we recommend reviewing your transaction data to identify and address common data health issues. Consider using Integration Health to pinpoint the most common performance issues for remediation.

If you have any questions on how to reduce your system integrity fees, please contact your Account Manager or raise a support request through our webform. We’ll be happy to help.