NABU, APF and the acronyms nobody translates for you.
Two of the most common acronyms on a processing statement, charged on every authorization rather than as a percentage of the sale. Individually tiny, collectively meaningful, and genuinely painful if your average ticket is small.
What this page settles.
Three questions, in the order most people ask them.
What the acronyms stand for
NABU is Mastercard’s Network Acquirer Business Unit fee. APF is Visa’s Acquirer Processing Fee. Discover and American Express have equivalents under their own names.
Both are small fixed amounts charged on each authorization that touches the network. Both are published by the network, passed down through the acquirer to your processor to you, and identical for every merchant and every provider.
That is genuinely all they are. The reason they cause so much confusion is not that they are complicated — it is that they appear on your statement as four letters with a number beside them and nobody has ever told you what the four letters mean.
Why they are charged per authorization
This is the part worth internalising, because it changes who should care.
An assessment is a percentage of the sale. A $5 sale pays a small amount; a $500 sale pays a hundred times more. The cost scales with the value of what you sold.
NABU and APF are fixed. The network does the same amount of work routing a $5 authorization as a $500 one, and charges accordingly. The cost does not scale with the sale at all.
The consequence: as a share of revenue, these charges are inversely proportional to your average ticket. A coffee shop and a furniture retailer pay exactly the same per authorization, and for one of them it is rounding and for the other it is a line worth looking at.
There is a second consequence that catches people out. They attach to the authorization, not the settled sale. A declined card still generated an authorization and still costs you. So does an authorization you never captured — which is separately penalised by a misuse of authorization fee on many statements.
Who this actually hurts
Run the arithmetic on your own numbers rather than taking anyone’s word for it, because the answer varies enormously.
Take every fixed per-transaction charge on your statement — your processor’s per-item fee, NABU, APF, any authorization fee — add them together, and divide by your average ticket. That percentage is what fixed charges cost you, and it sits on top of every percentage rate you were quoted.
On the worked statement across this site, 48,500.00 of volume across 1,240 transactions is an average ticket of about $39. A dime of fixed charges per sale is roughly 0.26% of revenue. At a $9 average ticket, the same dime is 1.1% — larger than many merchants’ entire quoted discount rate.
Which is why a business selling cheap things frequently should care far more about per-item charges than about percentages, and why a provider quoting a very low percentage with a high per-item fee may be quoting you the wrong way round.
If you sell coffee, the dime matters more than the basis points. If you sell sofas, it is the other way around. Any quote that does not let you see both numbers separately cannot be evaluated either way.
The other per-transaction acronyms
While you are looking, the same part of the statement usually carries a few relatives:
AVS fee, for checking the billing address on a keyed transaction. Worth paying — it reduces fraud and usually improves the interchange category, so skipping it often costs more than it saves.
Authorization fee, your processor’s own per-authorization charge, as distinct from the networks’.
Voice authorization fee, for authorizing by telephone. If this appears regularly, something in your setup needs attention.
Batch or settlement fee, charged when you close the day out rather than per sale. Check how often your terminal batches — some are configured to settle several times a day, which multiplies this for no benefit.
All of these are in the full A to Z list, and all of them behave like NABU and APF: fixed, small, and much more significant than they look if your tickets are small.
What you can and cannot do about it
Cannot: negotiate the rate. Every acquirer pays the same. A provider offering to reduce NABU or APF is describing their own markup under a borrowed name.
Can: reduce the number of authorizations you generate, and that is not as trivial as it sounds.
- Fix a high decline rate. Declines cost you authorizations and produce nothing. If a meaningful share of your transactions are declining, that is both a revenue problem and a fee problem.
- Stop double-authorizing. Some workflows authorize at order and again at capture. Worth checking with whoever configured your system.
- Batch once a day. Not a per-authorization saving, but it stops the batch fee multiplying and reduces downgrades at the same time.
- Consider minimum card amounts where it is lawful and appropriate for your trade. Card network rules permit a minimum on credit card transactions up to a set amount; whether it is right for your customers is a commercial judgement, not a fee one.
And the structural answer, which is the honest one: if fixed per-item charges are a large share of your cost, the thing to compare between providers is the per-item fee, not the percentage. That is the number that moves your bill, and it is the number a headline rate is designed to draw your eye away from.
What we charge
Interchange + 0.50% + 10¢ in person, interchange + 0.75% + 25¢ keyed. The dime and the quarter are our per-item fee, stated plainly so you can hold them against anyone else’s. NABU, APF and the rest of the network charges pass through at cost.
Send us a statement and we will total every fixed charge on it against your real average ticket, which is the only way to know whether they matter to you.
While we are on the subject
Can I avoid NABU and APF?
Not on card transactions through those networks. They are charged per authorization and passed through by every acquirer at the same rate. What you can influence is how many authorizations you generate.
Why are they charged on declined transactions?
Because they attach to the authorization, not the sale. A declined card has still used the network. A run of declines therefore costs you money without producing revenue, which is worth knowing if your decline rate is high.
Are these the same as assessments?
They come from the same source but behave differently. Assessments are a percentage of volume; NABU and APF are fixed amounts per authorization. On a small average ticket the fixed ones matter far more.
My statement does not show them separately. Why?
On tiered or flat-rate pricing they are bundled into the headline percentage. You are still paying them; you simply cannot see them.