Scheme fees
Scheme fees are the charges a card scheme such as Visa or Mastercard bills to acquirers and issuers for using its network, separate from interchange. They are not capped in the UK or EU, their schedules change several times a year, and a single card transaction can attract more than a dozen of them.
How scheme fees are calculated
Scheme fees come in two kinds. Transactional fees are charged per authorisation, clearing record or unit of value, at rates that depend on region, card product and channel. Non-transactional fees are charged per card, per account, per programme or for optional services, and are calculated on monthly aggregates instead of individual payments.
The schedules behind them are long. Submissions to the Reserve Bank of Australia describe fee schedules "often 400 pages long" and schemes with "up to 800 categories of fees" (RBA summary of submissions, 2025). Non-transactional fees reach the invoice one to two months in arrears (Adyen help). Interchange is capped in the EU, scheme fees are not (Ryft, 2026), and the UK Payment Systems Regulator found core scheme and processing fees to acquirers rose by more than 25% in real terms between 2017 and 2023 (PSR final report, March 2025).
Where scheme fees go wrong on a bill
Scheme fee errors usually come from a fee applied to the wrong region or card product, a fee charged twice, a pass-through marked up by a processor or sponsor, or an optional service still billed after you opted out. Fee change notices applied before their effective date cause a steady share as well.
Behavioural fees, charged when processing behaviour breaks a scheme rule, are harder still. The PSR recorded acquirers saying behavioural fees they cannot understand cost them "hundreds of thousands of pounds" (PSR PS26/1, July 2026). The Reserve Bank of Australia found that some payment service providers absorb fee inaccuracies instead of investigating them, because the fees are complex and revised often (RBA conclusions, March 2026).
How to check scheme fees
Checking scheme fees means matching each invoice line to a fee code in the schedule in force that month, then recalculating it from the transactions or counts it was based on. Transactional fees are checked row by row. Non-transactional fees are checked by testing the count behind them, such as active cards.
Keep every fee notice with its effective date, because the right rate depends on the date of the transaction. Mark optional services you have cancelled, so a charge that continues stands out. From July 2027 the PSR requires Visa and Mastercard to give UK acquirers the fee logic needed to reconcile billed fees to their originating transactions (PSR PS26/1). FeeVerify reads the schedules and notices into rules and recalculates every transaction against them, so each scheme fee variance arrives with the fee code and clause attached.
Worked example
An acquirer processes 1,000,000 transactions in a month at an average of £50. Of these, 50,000 are cross-border and carry a cross-border assessment of 0.60% of value. The invoice applies the assessment to 80,000 transactions, because 30,000 domestic transactions were tagged with the wrong issuing region. The rate and figures are synthetic.
| Line | Transactions | Value | Fee at 0.60% |
|---|---|---|---|
| Expected cross-border assessment | 50,000 | £2,500,000 | £15,000 |
| Billed cross-border assessment | 80,000 | £4,000,000 | £24,000 |
| Variance | 30,000 | £1,500,000 | £9,000 |
The £9,000 sits inside one invoice line that looks normal on its own. It only shows when each transaction's issuing region is checked against the card range, which is why a transaction-level recalculation finds it and a review of invoice totals does not. Synthetic figures for illustration.
Start with one month of your own data.
A pilot begins with the agreements that protect both sides, then your contracts and one month of settlement data, scoped with a payments specialist on the first call. The 30-day diagnostic re-costs every transaction against them and shows each variance with its clause, before any recurring fee.