Every guide to crypto payments opens the same way. Cards cost you 2.9 percent. Crypto costs you 1 percent. Switch and keep the difference.
That comparison is wrong in both directions. The card number is too low, because it leaves out the cost that actually hurts. The crypto number is too low, because the headline rate is not what lands in your account.
Here is the real math, with the sources, so you can check it against your own statement.
First, four numbers that are not the same number
Most articles about payment costs mix these up, and once they do, nothing after that can be trusted. They are four separate layers:
Interchange goes to the bank that issued your customer’s card.
Assessments go to Visa or Mastercard for running the network.
Processor markup goes to whoever moves the transaction and deposits your money.
Effective rate is all three added together. It is the only one that matches your bank statement.
When someone says “2.9 percent,” they mean an effective rate. When someone says “2.36 percent,” they mean something narrower. Comparing those two directly is how merchants end up believing they are getting a good deal.
What cards actually cost
Combined Visa and Mastercard credit card swipe fees averaged 2.36 percent in 2025, against 2.02 percent in 2010, per Nilson Report data cited by the Merchants Payments Coalition.
That rise has nothing to do with your business. It tracks the shift toward premium rewards cards, which carry higher rates than standard ones. Your customer collects airline miles. You buy them.
On top of that sit base assessments, roughly 0.14 percent at Visa and 0.1375 percent at Mastercard. Identical for every merchant, no negotiation.
Then the markup, the only piece you control. Stripe’s standard US domestic card rate is 2.9 percent plus 30 cents, with more for international cards, currency conversion, and manually entered transactions. An interchange-plus account might charge interchange plus 0.20 percent plus a dime.
One thing changed recently that most merchants have not priced in. In June 2026 a federal judge granted preliminary approval to a revised 38 billion dollar settlement between Visa, Mastercard, and more than 12 million merchants. Average credit swipe fees drop 0.10 percentage points for five years, and standard consumer card rates are capped at 1.25 percent for eight. The settlement remains subject to challenge.
Worth keeping in scale. Visa and Mastercard credit card swipe fees totaled 118.8 billion dollars in the US in 2025, against 25.6 billion in 2009. Across all brands, credit and debit together, the total was 198.25 billion.
Sources: Motley Fool, average processing fees · Reuters, settlement approval · Inside Outdoor, 2025 swipe fee totals
What crypto processors actually cost
The published rates are genuinely low.
Coinbase Commerce charged a flat 1 percent. BitPay runs volume-tiered: 2 percent plus 25 cents under 500,000 dollars monthly, 1.5 percent plus 25 cents from there to a million, and 1 percent plus 25 cents above it.
Then the gap opens between the sticker and the statement.
Network gas is passed through to you on most platforms. Some processors absorb it as a customer-side cost during a promotional window, then move it onto your balance later. Check whether your statement breaks network fees out as a separate line. If it does not, you are paying them without seeing them.
FX spread on the fiat off-ramp is the expensive leg. Some processors convert in-house and quote you a USD figure with no surprise. Others add a margin set by their banking partner, and that margin is not on the pricing page.
Withdrawal minimums keep your money on the platform. Every floor and frequency cap is a reason to leave a balance somewhere you do not control, where a future fee change applies to it.
Added together, an analysis pulling official 2026 pricing from six processors found these lines move all-in cost by 30 to 200 basis points, turning a 1 percent headline into something closer to 1.8 percent.
One more item belongs in your risk column, not your cost column. Coinbase discontinued the standalone Commerce portal after March 31, 2026. Its replacement, Coinbase Business, was initially available only to merchants in the US and Singapore. Everyone else had to move.
If your payment rail is a hosted product owned by someone else, their roadmap is your roadmap.
Sources: BitPay pricing · Eco, processor fees compared · Coinbase, Commerce transition
The cost that decides the comparison
Processing fees are what you can see. Chargebacks are what settles the argument.
A chargeback is not a refund. A refund is something you choose. A chargeback is the issuing bank pulling funds out of your account, governed by network rules, with a fee you never agreed to and cannot negotiate.
Mastercard’s 2026 research with Javelin puts merchants’ average chargeback handling cost at 128 dollars per case: 82 dollars internal, 46 dollars third party. That figure is the cost of dealing with the dispute. The reversed sale, the shipped product, and the shipping itself are on top of it.
Rates are climbing. Sift measured an average chargeback rate of 0.26 percent in Q3 2025, against 0.17 percent in Q1. Card-not-present ecommerce commonly runs higher, in the range of 0.5 to 1 percent, with wide variation by vertical.
Fighting them is not a solution. Merchants win roughly 45 percent of the disputes they actively contest, and net recovery lands near 18 percent once you account for the ones nobody fights.
And there is a ceiling. Both networks run dispute-ratio monitoring programs. Mastercard’s Excessive Chargeback Merchant level begins at 100 chargebacks in a month combined with a 1.5 percent ratio. Visa operates its own threshold, which it lowered in 2026. Cross either and you do not pay a larger fee. You lose card acceptance.
Check your own threshold with your acquirer. It is the single number most merchants cannot name, and it is the one that can end the business.
Sources: Mastercard and Javelin · Sift, Q4 2025 Digital Trust Index · Chargewood, threshold comparison
Running it on a real store
Take an online store doing 50,000 dollars a month at a 150 dollar average ticket. Roughly 333 transactions.
Cards, at Stripe’s standard domestic rate. 2.9 percent plus 30 cents is 1,450 dollars plus about 100 dollars in per-transaction fees. Call it 1,550.
Now disputes. At a 0.6 percent card-not-present rate, that is two a month. At 128 dollars of handling cost each, plus 300 dollars of reversed sales, plus whatever the goods cost you, that is at least 556 dollars more.
All in, roughly 2,106 dollars. About 4.2 percent.
Crypto, at a 1 percent headline. 500 dollars. At the 1.8 percent real take rate once gas, spread, and payout fees land, 900 dollars. No chargebacks, because there is no mechanism for one.
All in, roughly 900 dollars. About 1.8 percent.
The gap is real. It is not the gap the marketing claims, and almost none of it comes from the headline rate. It comes from disputes.
That is the finding. If you take one thing from this page, take that.
Where this breaks down
Two honest caveats, because the math above has edges.
No chargebacks cuts both ways. A customer who gets nothing has no recourse through the payment rail. Your refund policy is now doing work the card networks used to do for you. Merchants who treat irreversibility as a feature and skip the customer service investment find out what that costs on the second order, not the first.
Volume matters. Below roughly 20 to 30 transactions a month, fixed costs and withdrawal minimums swamp any percentage saving. The math works at scale and inverts at the bottom.
What you do with it afterward
Everything above assumes you convert to fiat immediately. That is the expensive leg, and it is the one merchants examine least.
Settle to a bank account every week and you pay the off-ramp spread every week. Holding balances in stablecoin and converting on your own schedule rather than your processor’s moves that cost from automatic to deliberate. Platforms built for treasury rather than checkout, Uphold among them, handle the holding and conversion side separately from whoever runs your checkout.
Whether that is worth doing depends on whether you have a use for the balance. If every dollar goes straight to payroll, convert and move on. If you carry a float anyway, the off-ramp is a decision, not a fee.
How we checked this
Every figure on this page went through two independent verification passes against primary and current industry sources.
One claim came back wrong and was corrected. We originally dated the Visa and Mastercard settlement approval to April 2026. Preliminary approval was granted in June 2026. April was when the judge began reviewing it.
Three claims came back contested, and we cut the specific numbers rather than pick a side.
NOWPayments’ current rate. One check found 0.5 percent, another found current pricing starting at 1 percent. We removed the figure.
Visa’s dispute-ratio threshold. One check found 0.9 percent, another found 1.5 percent effective April 2026. We described the mechanism and told you to get your own number from your acquirer.
The scope of the Coinbase Commerce shutdown. Both checks agreed on what happened and differed on how to describe it. We used the more precise version.
We would rather publish a smaller number of figures you can rely on than a longer list you cannot. If you find something here that is wrong, tell us and we will correct it on the page.
Rates current as of publication. Visa and Mastercard update interchange in April and October. Processor pricing changes without notice. Verify against the provider’s current pricing page before deciding anything.