Agentis analysis of Mastercard's Excessive Chargeback Merchant program shows a merchant who breaches the monitoring threshold faces monthly assessments starting at $1,000 and scaling past $100,000 for repeat violations. That's on top of the standard per-dispute fee, not instead of it.
Total card transactions processed in a typical month.
Total chargebacks (disputes) received in that same month.
Your Chargeback Ratio
30 bps
Basis Points Over Visa's "Excessive" Threshold (70bps)
-40 bps
Min. Published Monthly Assessment If In Violation (Mastercard ECM)
$1,000
Max. Published Monthly Assessment, Repeat Violation (Mastercard ECM)
$100,000
| Tier | Threshold | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Above Standard | ≥50 bps | Early monitoring tier |
| Excessive | ≥70 bps | Highest standard Visa monitoring tier |
| Excessive Merchant (regional) | 150–220 bps | Merchant-level threshold; exact bps varies by Visa region |
Source: Visa: Acquirer Monitoring Program Fact Sheet (2025) (retrieved August 7, 2026). Visa's fact sheet defines ratio thresholds but doesn't publish a dollar-per-dispute fine. See the Mastercard table below for published dollar assessments.
| Program | Monthly Assessment Range | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| ECM (Excessive Chargeback Merchant) | $1,000–$100,000 | Assessed monthly while in violation; escalates with consecutive violation months |
| HECM (High Excessive Chargeback Merchant) | $2,000–$200,000 | Higher-severity tier; also carries a $5-per-chargeback issuer recovery fee beyond 300 chargebacks/month |
Source: Mastercard Excessive Chargebacks FAQ (via J.P. Morgan Merchant Services) (retrieved August 7, 2026). Published via an acquirer's distribution of Mastercard's program terms. Mastercard's own exact ratio/count entry threshold is set in the acquirer notice and isn't independently confirmed here. Contact your acquirer for your specific entry criteria.
| Monthly Transactions | Monthly Chargebacks | Ratio | vs. Excessive Threshold (70 bps) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5,000 | 10 | 20 bps | 50 bps under |
| 5,000 | 25 | 50 bps | 20 bps under (at Above Standard) |
| 5,000 | 35 | 70 bps | At threshold |
| 5,000 | 50 | 100 bps | 30 bps over |
Source: Visa: Acquirer Monitoring Program Fact Sheet (2025) (retrieved August 7, 2026). Agentis synthesis: illustrative transaction/chargeback combinations run through Visa's published ratio formula (chargebacks ÷ transactions × 10,000) against its published 70bps Excessive threshold.
How we calculate this
Visa's monitoring tiers come from Visa's own 2025 Acquirer Monitoring Program fact sheet. Mastercard's assessment ranges come from an acquirer-published copy of Mastercard's official Excessive Chargebacks program terms. We cite the acquirer distribution explicitly since we couldn't locate a direct Mastercard-hosted version. Read our full methodology →
Expert Insight
Most merchants only think about the chargeback fee: $15, refunded if you win. That's the wrong scale of the problem for merchants running promotions or acquisition campaigns that spike chargeback rates temporarily. Cross Visa's or Mastercard's monitoring threshold and the exposure jumps from a per-dispute fee to a monthly assessment. Mastercard's own published range starts at $1,000 and scales past $100,000 for repeat violations. That's a fixed cost regardless of your average order value, which is why the ratio itself, not any single dispute, is the thing worth watching.
Udi Razmovich, CTO & Co-Founder →On top of. The per-dispute fee (see our true cost of a chargeback page) is charged for every individual chargeback regardless of your overall ratio. The Visa and Mastercard monitoring-program assessments described above are a separate, additional monthly cost that only applies once your chargeback ratio crosses the network's threshold. Visa's 2025 fact sheet sets the Above Standard tier at 50 basis points and the Excessive tier at 70 basis points, but it publishes ratio thresholds only, not a dollar fine. Mastercard's Excessive Chargeback Merchant program publishes monthly assessments of $1,000 to $100,000, and its High Excessive tier runs $2,000 to $200,000 while a merchant stays in violation. The ratio itself is simple arithmetic: chargebacks divided by transactions, multiplied by 10,000. At 5,000 monthly transactions, 35 chargebacks puts you exactly at Visa's 70 bps threshold. To apply this to your store, calculate the ratio every month and watch it closely during promotions, since those are the periods that spike chargeback rates temporarily.
Agentis analysis of Shopify Payments' and Stripe's published 2026 fee schedules shows every chargeback carries a fixed $15 dispute fee. Lose the dispute, and the full order value gets reversed on top of it. Industry-reported win rates put the odds of getting that money back at under 44%, per Chargebacks911's 2026 data.
Agentis analysis of Stripe's, Shopify Payments', Mastercard's, and Visa's published dispute documentation shows dispute fees are flat: $15 at both Shopify Payments and Stripe, regardless of reason code. What changes across Stripe's 8 documented dispute categories is the evidence required to contest each one, not the price.
Agentis finds margin leaks automatically.
Data last updated August 7, 2026. Browse all Chargebacks pages →