Visa VAMP in 2026: The New Thresholds and What They Mean for Your Account

What actually changed on 1 April 2026?

Two things, and the second matters more than the first. Visa's excessive threshold under its Acquirer Monitoring Program dropped from 220 basis points to 150 for merchants in the US, Canada, Europe and Asia-Pacific. And the calculation changed: disputes and fraud, which used to be monitored under separate programmes with separate ratios, are now added together into a single combined ratio.

That second change is the one that catches people. A merchant running comfortably under the old dispute threshold and comfortably under the old fraud threshold can be over the new combined line without a single number having moved. Nothing about the business changed. The arithmetic did.

Because programme rules are updated periodically and enforcement details vary by acquirer, confirm current figures against Visa's merchant resources or with your own acquirer rather than relying on any secondary source, including this one.

Who is newly exposed?

Anyone who was sitting between 1.5% and 2.2%. That band was acceptable before and is not now, and it is a wide band containing a lot of legitimate high-risk merchants who thought they had headroom.

What does it actually cost?

Penalties are assessed per violating transaction in any month you are over, which means the cost scales with your volume rather than arriving as a flat fine. A merchant doing meaningful monthly volume can accumulate a five-figure annual charge without ever being formally terminated, and that is before an acquirer decides to raise your reserve or reprice the account in response.

The indirect cost is usually larger than the direct one. Crossing a monitoring threshold changes how your acquirer sees the account, and that shows up in your reserve, your limits and your rate at the next review.

Why does the combined ratio hit high-risk merchants hardest?

Because high-risk verticals tend to carry both components. A subscription business has disputes from forgotten renewals. An affiliate-driven offer has disputes from expectation mismatch and a fraud component from the traffic. Separately, each might have been survivable. Added together, they are what the threshold now measures.

If you run more than one of these patterns at once, recurring billing plus paid or affiliate traffic, assume you are closer to the line than your dispute number alone suggests.

What should I do first?

Calculate your combined ratio the way Visa now does rather than the way your dashboard has been showing it. Many merchants track disputes and fraud on separate screens and have simply never added them, which means the first time they see the real number is when the acquirer sends a notice.

Then work the controllable half. Most of what moves a dispute ratio is unglamorous and fast: a billing descriptor customers recognise, renewal reminders before the charge lands, a cancellation path that takes as long as signing up did, and cutting the traffic sources that produce the worst ratios. Those are the same levers covered in reducing a dispute-driven ratio, and they typically show results within a cycle.

How fast can I get back under?

Slower than you would like, because chargebacks lag sales by roughly 30 to 60 days. Changes you make today affect transactions that will not be disputed for a month or two, which means a merchant who reacts to the first penalty notice is already two months behind the problem.

That lag is the whole argument for watching the number weekly rather than monthly. By the time a monthly figure looks wrong, the traffic that caused it converted six weeks ago. If your ratio is climbing now, that is the moment to intervene, not when the notice arrives.

Does this change how I should think about the old 1% rule?

Not really, and that is the useful part. Working to a 1% ceiling was always conservative relative to the formal thresholds, and it still is. What changed is that the gap between "comfortable" and "penalised" narrowed considerably, so a merchant who treated 1% as a soft guideline rather than a hard target has much less room than before.

Treat 1% as the operating target and the formal threshold as the cliff, not the goal. You can preview how the rest of your account reads to an underwriter with the Merchant Risk Profiler.