The Visa and Mastercard settlement sends you no money. It sorts your customers into three price tiers instead

If you took a Visa or Mastercard payment in the US at any point since December 2020, you are in this settlement. You did not sign up for it, you are not allowed to leave it, and it will not send you a dollar. What it will do is put a hard ceiling on the cheapest cards in your customers' wallets, leave the expensive ones exactly where they are, and give you the right to treat the two differently. The one date on it that belongs to you is 14 September 2026.

The question everyone asks first: is money coming?

No. The court-authorized settlement website puts it in one sentence: "There is no monetary payment to Class members in this Settlement."

You may be thinking of the other one. There were two cases running side by side. The cash case settled years ago, and its deadline to file a claim closed on 4 February 2025. That door is shut. This one is about rules and rates only, and it pays nothing to you directly.

So if a processor or a "claims recovery" firm calls you about signing up for this settlement, there is nothing to sign up for. You are already in it automatically.

What was agreed, and by whom

Visa and Mastercard signed the deal on 10 November 2025. On 9 June 2026, Judge Brian M. Cogan in the Eastern District of New York gave it preliminary approval, which is the court saying the deal is worth putting to the class, not the court approving it.

You are in the class if you accepted Visa or Mastercard cards anywhere in the US at any time between 18 December 2020 and 9 June 2026. That is a very wide net. It includes the store you opened in 2023 and the one you sold in 2024.

The rule changes, if they are finally approved, run for at least eight years.

Worth knowing who negotiated it in your name. The named class representatives include a dental practice and a business trading as a hair salon. This is not a case argued only on behalf of big-box retail.

Your customers are about to be sorted into three tiers

This is the part the coverage skips, and it is the part that decides what the deal is worth to you.

The settlement splits US credit cards into three categories and treats them completely differently:

• Standard consumer. Visa Traditional and Traditional Rewards, Mastercard Core and Enhanced Value. The plain cards.
• Premium consumer. Visa Signature, Signature Preferred and Infinite, Mastercard World, World High Value, World Legend and World Elite. The points-and-lounge cards.
• Commercial. Business and corporate cards.

The famous 1.25% cap only applies to the standard consumer tier. Premium and commercial rates are not capped. They are frozen at whatever they were on 31 March 2025, for five years, and that is all.

So the one hard ceiling in this deal sits on the cheapest tier, and the tier that costs you most is simply held still. Which of your customers fall into which tier is not something you can guess. It is something you have to look up, and that is the whole game here.

What that does on a real ticket

The settlement agreement files Visa's actual posted rates as of March 2025 as an appendix, including a Small Merchant Fee Program for merchants under $280,000 of annual gross Visa consumer credit sales. Those are real numbers, not estimates, so we can just do the arithmetic.

Take a salon or a clinic on the Small Merchant Services rate, and a $100 ticket:

• Plain consumer card (Traditional Rewards): 1.70% plus $0.10, so $1.80.
• Premium card (Visa Signature Preferred): 2.30% plus $0.10, so $2.40.

Same haircut, same chair, same fifteen minutes. Sixty cents apart depending on which piece of plastic comes out.

Now apply the cap. The plain card falls to 1.25% plus $0.10, so $1.35. The premium card does not move. It stays at $2.40.

The gap between your cheapest customer and your most expensive one goes from 60 cents to $1.05. The settlement does not close it. It widens it by three quarters.

A cafe sees the same shape. On the Small Merchant Restaurant rate a plain card is 2.10% and a premium card is 2.60%, so a $6 latte costs 12.6 cents against 15.6 cents. Cap the plain card at 1.25% and it drops to 7.5 cents while the premium card sits still.

That is not a criticism of the deal. It is the actual mechanism, and it tells you where to point your attention.

Nothing changes tomorrow. Here is the clock

Two dates in the agreement do the work, and both hang off a defined term called the Settlement Approval Date, which arrives once notice has gone out and the court enters final judgment.

• Rule changes: within 90 days of that date. Surcharging, declining card categories, issuer-level discounts, digital wallet choice.
• Rate changes: no earlier than four months after it, and timed to land with the networks' April and October rate releases.

The fairness hearing is 16 November 2026. Work forward from there and the earliest realistic release for the rate cut is April 2027, with October 2027 just as plausible. Do not build next year's budget on it.

One detail almost nobody has picked up. The rule changes are keyed to the Settlement Approval Date, which needs the district court's judgment. A separate defined term, the Settlement Final Date, is the one that waits for appeals to run out. So if the judgment is appealed, on the face of the agreement that appeal does not by itself hold up the rule changes.

Whether the rate cut ever reaches you depends on how you are priced

Interchange is the wholesale fee that goes to the card issuer. The settlement's FAQ says it is "typically the greatest part of the fees paid by merchants", which is true, and also not the whole bill. On top sit network assessments and your processor's own margin.

That matters more than the cap does:

• If you are on interchange plus, where your statement itemizes the wholesale rate and then your processor's markup, a cut in interchange reaches you automatically.
• If you are on a single flat rate, one advertised percentage on everything, a cut in interchange changes nothing on your statement. Your price is a fixed number. It does not move when the wholesale cost underneath it moves. The saving stops at your processor unless your processor decides to lower its posted price.

Check which of the two you are on before you assume anything. If it is the flat rate, this settlement's rate cut is not yours. Its rule changes still are.

The rights you get, and the two that are worth using at your size

If the deal is approved, Visa and Mastercard have to change their rulebooks so you can:

• Decline whole card categories. Accept standard consumer but refuse premium consumer, or refuse commercial, or any combination, and choose differently for Visa than for Mastercard. Issuers will have to put visual identifiers on newly issued premium and commercial cards, and the networks have to provide, free of network charge, technology that lets you identify the card category at the point of sale.
• Surcharge credit cards at either the brand level (all Visa credit) or the product level (all Visa Signature, say), but not both, capped at the lesser of 3% or your cost of accepting that card. If you cannot work out your cost of acceptance electronically before authorization, you are allowed to treat it as 3%.
• Surcharge one network and not the other, and surcharge Visa or Mastercard whether or not you also surcharge the other credit cards you take, such as American Express or Discover.
• Discount by issuer, and run dual pricing, one total for a card and another total for cash.

Four things to hold on to before you get excited:

• Credit only. None of the surcharging changes touch debit.
• State law still wins. The agreement says in terms that nothing in it affects your duty to comply with state laws on surcharging. Some states restrict it. Check yours before you print a sign.
• Surcharging has paperwork. Thirty days of advance written notice to your acquirer, clear disclosure at the point of sale, and the dollar amount of the surcharge printed on the receipt.
• Refusing a category is a blunt instrument. Declining premium cards means telling the customer holding the nicest card in your line that their card is no good here. In a business built on regulars, that is a lot of margin to gamble for 75 basis points.

You cannot opt out. You can object, and it costs a stamp

This is a Rule 23(b)(2) class, which means it is mandatory. The FAQ is blunt: "You cannot opt out of or be excluded from the Rule 23(b)(2) Class." The rule changes apply to you whether you like them or not, and so does the release that goes with them.

Your one lever is objection, and it is genuinely open to a one-person business. You do not need a lawyer. You mail a signed Statement of Objections to the Clerk of Court at 225 Cadman Plaza East, Brooklyn, New York 11201, with copies to designated class counsel and defendants' counsel, postmarked no later than 14 September 2026. The settlement website sets out the exact format, and it is a page long.

Worth knowing what you are being asked to approve while you decide: class counsel will ask the court for fees, expenses and service awards of up to $206,000,000, paid separately by Visa and Mastercard.

If you want to speak at the hearing, the Notice of Intention to Appear is due on the same date.

What a buyer will read into your card mix

Here is the second-order effect, and it lasts longer than the rates do.

From the day those visual identifiers land and your terminal can tell the categories apart, your own payment data answers a question you have probably only ever guessed at: what share of your revenue comes from business customers rather than walk-ins?

Commercial card volume is account revenue. The office that orders catering every Thursday. The firm that books the same three treatment slots each month. That revenue is contracted, repeatable and not tied to you personally, which is exactly the revenue that carries a higher valuation multiple than the same dollars taken one customer at a time.

Until now, an owner sitting across the table in a sale said "a good chunk of our work is corporate" and the buyer discounted the claim, because there was nothing behind it. Card category data turns that sentence into a number, from your own merchant statements, over as many years as you keep them.

Which means this settlement quietly hands you a measurement tool for the least owner-dependent part of your business, several years before you need it. Start the count now and by the time anyone asks, you have history rather than an assertion. Our note on recurring revenue for local businesses covers what to do with the answer.