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The payment processing rates offered vary by country. It rarely goes above 1% in Germany unless you're really not shopping around or are really low volume.

A % of that also goes to the issuing bank*, not to MC/Visa, so I suspect the mentioned 0.2% is talking about what MC/Visa has as their cut.

*: That's also how banks can profitably offer things like cashback.

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Depends if we are talking credit or debt cards

The low fees are for debt and high for credit cards and VISA/MC won't allow you to accebt only the debt cards

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The fees for those are still often comparatively lower to the US rates posted above. Credit cards are also not popular here, so while I do own one, I suspect average % of a merchant still remains low. Amex also offers pretty good rates to low-volume merchants here to have more acceptance to my understanding.
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This is incorrect.

Visa's processes ~$14T in transactions. At 0.2% thats roughly ~$28B in revenue (VISA posted ~$40B in revenue in 2025) versus 2% is $280B in revenue.

EDIT: The 2~3% you're talking is the payment processor fees which get divvy'd out to acquiring processors, acquiring banks, gateways, merchant processing, etc. etc.

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The amount going to Visa/MC is 0.1-0.13%. The vast majority of CC interchange fees go to the issuing banks, not Visa/MC.
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Not in EU.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/fees-for-...

> Specifically, the regulation:

> caps interchange fees at 0.2% of the transaction value for consumer debit cards and at 0.3% for consumer credit cards;

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Visa and MC were capped at 0.5% for the network before that change went in as well. But we have no idea what actual rates were beside the cap as they were negotiated with each card issuer based on their risk profile and customer base.
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