Every quarter the card networks republish the fees they charge to process a card. The October 2026 cycle is heavier than most: Australia has capped interchange by regulation, Visa is rebuilding how Canadian online transactions qualify for a rate, and Mastercard is adding new per-authorization charges. None of it changes what you pay us. You are billed a flat blended rate, so a network raising a fee does not reach your invoice. What it can do is fall: in the first quarter of 2027 we re-evaluate our blended rates and pass any savings back to you.
When a customer taps a card, the money that leaves their account does not all arrive in yours. A slice goes to the bank that issued the card. That slice is called interchange. A second, smaller slice goes to the network itself (Visa, Mastercard, Discover, Interac) for carrying the transaction, and those are called scheme fees. Together they are the wholesale cost of accepting a card.
Those numbers change four times a year, and nobody asks merchants first. Most platforms pass the movement straight through, which is why processing statements are famously impossible to read: the rate you were quoted is not the rate you paid, and the difference shows up as a line item you did not agree to.
We do not do that. Your rate is set on your agreement, not indexed to interchange. We take the variance on both sides.
The headline item this quarter is a pair of new Visa fees aimed at vehicle rental. One charges 0.25% when a business captures more than it authorized. The other charges 0.50% when an authorization is left uncaptured above $200, which describes a security deposit hold almost exactly. Operators who read the notice and recognised their own deposit workflow had a reasonable scare.
It does not reach you. Those fees are scoped to two merchant category code ranges, 3351 to 3500 and 7512, which cover car and truck rental agencies. We checked every merchant account on the platform against them. Not one RentalTide operator sits in that range. Boat, jet ski, ATV and tour businesses are classified under 4457, 4468, 7032 and 7999, all of which Visa left untouched. Your deposit holds are not about to be taxed.
The same is true of Mastercard's fleet fuel restructure and Discover's car rental reclassification, both effective October 23. Neither touches a category any of our merchants use.
Ordered by the date it takes effect. The direction column describes the effect on the wholesale cost we absorb, not on your invoice. Your invoice is flat.
| Effective | Change | Market | Direction |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 1, 2026 | RBA caps domestic interchange at 0.30% consumer credit, 0.80% commercial | Australia | Lower |
| Oct 19, 2026 | Mastercard adds a per-authorization fee covering approvals, declines and reversals | Canada | Higher |
| Oct 23, 2026 | Visa raises its small business threshold from CAD 300,000 to CAD 750,000 | Canada | Lower |
| Oct 23, 2026 | Visa cuts domestic consumer credit rates, deepest on small business plans | Canada | Lower |
| Oct 23, 2026 | Visa launches DCAP, a cheaper rate for sending richer authentication data | Canada | Lower |
| Oct 23, 2026 | Visa reclassifies three issuer responses to the generic "Do not honor" | Global | Behavioural |
| Oct 25, 2026 | Visa moves response code 57 to its never-retry category | Global | Behavioural |
| Nov 1, 2026 | Interac switch fee rises from $0.013985 to $0.014438 per transaction | Canada | Higher |
| Feb 1, 2027 | Mastercard charges retries that drop a security code the first attempt carried | United States | Behavioural |
| Apr 1, 2027 | Visa fixes cross border interchange at 1.00% for non-Australian cards | Australia | Higher |
From October 23, Visa collapses several specific issuer responses into the catch-all "Do not honor". A card that would have told you "transaction not permitted" will now just say declined. Nothing is broken. Ask for a second card as usual, and expect our decline messaging to carry less detail than it does today.
Visa is now charging for every retry after one particular decline, and advising everyone to stop attempting it. From October 25 our automatic retries on saved cards (balance collection, damage deposits, membership renewals) halt on that response instead of reattempting. A failed charge may surface for manual follow-up sooner than it used to.
The networks are issuing a batch of new products this quarter, including Visa's installment credential in the United States and new premium debit tiers in Australia and the US. They run on existing rails at existing rates. If a card you have never seen turns up at your terminal, take it.
The busiest market this quarter, and on balance the most improved. Visa's small business threshold and its consumer credit cuts on October 23 outweigh Mastercard's new per-authorization fee and the Interac increase. Nothing here requires anything of you. The qualification happens on Visa's side.
The quietest of the three. No interchange change reaches a US watersports or tour operator this cycle. The only US item is the February 2027 retry fee, and network tokens (which is how we store cards on file) already exempt us from it.
The Reserve Bank's caps take effect October 1, with cross border rates following in April 2027. Separately, card surcharging becomes prohibited in Australia under the same reform. If you accept cards outside RentalTide, your other providers may contact you about surcharging or pricing tied to it. Ours are unchanged.
Three pieces of engineering work land before October 23. We are wiring the additional authentication data through the Canadian checkout path so those transactions qualify for Visa's new lower cost programs. We are rewriting the retry rules on saved cards to respect the never-retry response instead of reattempting into a fee. And we are reviewing how often a deposit hold is authorized and released in Canada, now that both halves of that round trip carry a charge.
None of that changes what you are billed today. We are telling you because you would rather hear it from us than notice a decline behaving differently on a Saturday in October.
Your rate does not rise because a network raised a fee. Your rate on January 1, 2027 is the rate on your agreement today.
What it can do is fall. In the first quarter of 2027, with a full quarter of settled post-change costs on the books, we review our blend across every market we operate in. Where our underlying cost has genuinely come down, that reduction goes to the merchants whose transactions produced it.
We will write to you with the outcome either way, including if the answer is that nothing moved. That review is on our calendar, not contingent on anyone asking for it.
Questions about your rate or anything in this notice: support@rentaltide.com.
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