Chargeback monitoring programs, and the thresholds behind them.
Below a threshold, a dispute costs you the sale and a fee. Above it, you are in a program — and the costs change character entirely, from per-case charges to monthly penalties, mandatory remediation and a genuine question about keeping the account.
What this page settles.
Three questions, in the order most people ask them.
What a monitoring program is
Individual chargebacks are handled per case: you lose the sale, you lose the goods, and you pay a fee whether or not you win. That is covered in full here.
A monitoring program is what happens when the card networks stop treating your disputes as individual cases and start treating your business as a pattern. Both Visa and Mastercard run them, both publish thresholds, and both measure monthly.
Entering one changes the economics completely. The costs stop being per-dispute and become monthly. You acquire reporting and remediation obligations. Your acquirer, who carries the risk alongside you, starts paying attention — and their attention is what ultimately decides whether you keep the account.
The published thresholds
These are the figures the networks publish, as reviewed on 8 October 2026. They move: Visa’s merchant ratio was lowered from 2.2% to 1.5% on 1 April 2026, a little over a year after the program launched. Treat anything you read online, this page included, as a prompt to confirm rather than an authority — your acquirer and the networks’ own rules are the only sources that are current by definition.
Visa — VAMP (Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program). A merchant ratio of 1.5% marks the excessive level in most regions, applied monthly. Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa remain at 2.2%. There is also a separate 20% enumeration ratio aimed at card-testing activity.
Mastercard — ECM (Excessive Chargeback Merchant). A chargeback ratio of 1.5% or more together with 100 or more chargebacks in a calendar month. The condition generally has to hold for two consecutive months before designation.
Mastercard — HECM (High Excessive Chargeback Merchant). 3% or more with 300 or more chargebacks in a month. Exit normally requires three consecutive months below the threshold.
The minimum counts matter as much as the percentages. A small merchant with twelve disputes on four hundred sales has a 3% ratio and is nowhere near Mastercard’s program, because the count test is not met. A large merchant at 1.6% with thousands of disputes very much is.
Why you have two different ratios
This is the part that catches people, and it is the most useful thing on the page.
The networks count different things.
Mastercard’s ratio is built from chargebacks — disputes actually filed against you.
Visa’s VAMP ratio is built from fraud reports and disputes together, measured against settled transactions. Fraud notifications that never became chargebacks still count. That is a meaningfully wider numerator, and it means a merchant with good dispute-handling but a fraud problem can be comfortable on Mastercard’s measure and in difficulty on Visa’s.
They also differ on denominator timing, which sounds academic and is not: whether this month’s disputes are divided by this month’s transactions or the previous month’s changes the answer for any business whose volume is growing or seasonal.
The practical consequence: “my chargeback ratio” is not one number, and you should ask your provider for both. If they can only give you one, ask which network it describes and how it is calculated.
We have seen merchants reassured by a 0.6% figure from their processor who were, on the other network’s measure, considerably closer to a threshold than anybody had told them.
What it actually costs
Three layers, and they escalate.
Program fees. Monthly charges while you are in the program, per the network’s schedule, usually passed to you by your acquirer. These are published and they rise with how long you stay in.
Remediation. You will be asked for a plan — what is causing the disputes and what you are doing about it. That is time, and sometimes it is a genuine change to how you take payments.
Your acquirer’s response, which is the one that matters most and is not on any published schedule. An acquirer carrying a merchant in a monitoring program is carrying network scrutiny and potential fines. They may impose a reserve, slow your funding, require changes, or decide the relationship is no longer worth it.
That last possibility is why this page is in the fees cluster but is not really about fees. The fee is survivable. Losing the ability to accept cards, and then trying to board elsewhere with a monitoring-program history, is a different order of problem — and it is why the merchants who come out of this well are the ones who acted at 0.7%, not at 1.4%.
Getting out, and staying out
Exit is mechanical: get back below the threshold and stay there for the required period. Doing it is the hard part, and almost all of it is prevention rather than argument.
Refund before it is disputed. A refund does not count against your ratio. A chargeback does, and winning it does not remove it. On any borderline complaint, refunding is both cheaper and ratio-neutral.
Fix your billing descriptor. A large share of “fraud” disputes are honest customers who did not recognise the name on their statement. If yours is a holding company name, change it to the trading name people know.
Be reachable. A customer who can get hold of you asks for a refund. One who cannot calls their bank.
Watch the fraud side specifically, not just disputes. Because Visa counts fraud reports, address verification, security codes and 3-D Secure affect your VAMP ratio directly, not only your losses.
Monitor the ratio monthly rather than discovering it. Ask your provider for the figures every month. If that is difficult to obtain, that difficulty is itself worth weighing.
If a single product or channel is driving it, deal with the product. Subscription billing, free trials that convert, and long delivery lead times are the three most common sources, and none of them is solved by getting better at representment.
What we charge
Interchange + 0.50% + 10¢ in person, interchange + 0.75% + 25¢ keyed, with no contract and no monthly fee. Dispute fees are a real cost and we will tell you ours before you sign rather than after.
We will also tell you your current ratios on both networks, and whether we think you have a problem, before it is anybody’s emergency. Send us a statement.
While we are on the subject
What is a safe chargeback ratio?
Well below the published thresholds, because the thresholds are where consequences begin rather than where problems do. Many acquirers get uncomfortable long before a network does, and theirs is the opinion that decides whether you keep the account.
Do refunds count against my ratio?
A refund is not a chargeback and does not count. That is precisely why refunding a borderline complaint before it is disputed is usually the cheaper outcome.
Does winning a dispute remove it from my ratio?
Generally no. The dispute was still filed and counted in the month it occurred. This is one of the strongest arguments for prevention over representment.
Who tells me my ratio?
Your acquirer or processor. It is a reasonable thing to ask for, and a provider who cannot or will not produce it is telling you something.