Visa refund authorization waiver in the UK and Ireland

Visa has required acquirers and issuers to support refund authorization in the Europe region since 2020.

In the refund authorization flow, we, as your acquirer authorize a refund with the card scheme before processing it. This allows the scheme to verify the customer’s account is valid before we make the refund.

For the UK and Ireland, Visa granted a waiver for this requirement that they’ve extended several times. They recently published a new update to advise that they’ve further extended this waiver until October 19, 2025.

It’s also worth noting that Mastercard recently mandated refund authorization globally, excluding the United States, Brazil, and airline transactions.

What refund authorization means for you

When refund authorization is enabled, you may see more refund declines. However, this has benefits. Your customer’s bank will have visibility of the pending refund, making it less likely that the customer will dispute the transaction.

Additionally, if you receive a refund decline, you’ll know that the customer's account is no longer active and can contact them to arrange an alternative refund solution.

You don’t need to make any changes to enable refund authorization in regions where it’s required by the schemes. We automatically trigger authorization on your behalf in this scenario.

Identifying refund declines

View our refund docs for more information about how to identify a refund’s status. You can either query the payment in the Dashboard or subscribe to webhooks to get notified when a refund declines and view the corresponding decline reason.

When refund authorization rolls out in the UK and Ireland, we’ll be carefully monitoring issuer readiness. Should any issuers not be supporting refund authorization once its mandated we’ll be sure to raise this with the card schemes, helping to keep your refund flows moving smoothly.