A US federal judge has approved a $38 billion settlement between Visa, Mastercard and US merchants over the swipe fees retailers pay to accept card payments, Reuters reported on June 10, 2026. The decision ends one of the longest-running antitrust disputes in American retail and sets new terms for the interchange fees that sit underneath nearly every card transaction in the country.
The fight is old. Merchants have argued for close to two decades that the two networks fixed the fees stores must pay to accept their cards, leaving retailers little room to negotiate or steer customers toward cheaper payment methods. The approved settlement puts a dollar figure and a legal endpoint on that complaint.
The fee at the center of the case
Every time a shopper taps or swipes a Visa or Mastercard, the merchant pays a cut. That cut, interchange, is set by the networks and collected largely on behalf of the bank that issued the card. It usually runs somewhere around 1.5% to 2.5% of the purchase in the US, depending on the card type, with premium rewards cards sitting at the higher end.
Merchants do not get to shop around on that number. A coffee shop accepting Visa pays Visa's published rate. For large retailers processing billions in card volume, fractions of a percent add up to real money, which is why the case has dragged on through multiple proposed deals. An earlier settlement effort was rejected by a court before the parties returned with revised terms.
The $38 billion figure reported by Reuters reflects the scale of the disagreement rather than a one-time payout to any single store. Interchange across the US card system runs into the tens of billions of dollars a year, so even modest changes to the rate structure move large sums over time.
Swipe fees quietly fund your cashback
Crypto cards are not a separate payment network. A Visa-branded crypto card or a Mastercard product clears through the exact same rails, and the merchant on the other side pays the same interchange as they would for a traditional debit or credit card. The crypto part happens before the swipe, when a wallet balance or stablecoin is converted to fiat at the point of sale.
Interchange matters to cardholders because it is the main source of funding for rewards. When a card advertises cashback on every purchase, a large share of that reward is paid out of the interchange the merchant was charged. The issuer keeps part of the fee and hands part of it back to you as an incentive to keep spending. Squeeze interchange, and the rewards budget that sits on top of it gets tighter.
That is the second-order question this settlement raises. In markets where regulators have capped interchange directly, such as the European Union's debit and credit caps, card rewards have historically been thinner than in the US. A US settlement that pressures swipe fees could, over time, nudge American card economics in the same direction. The link is not mechanical or immediate, and the settlement terms govern litigation rather than a hard rate cap, but the direction of travel is worth tracking for anyone choosing a card on its rewards rate.
Who actually pockets the savings
A recurring tension in interchange cases is who ends up better off. Merchants want lower fees. The open question is whether stores pass those savings to shoppers through lower prices or simply keep them. Past interchange reductions in other markets produced mixed evidence on consumer pass-through, so the practical benefit to an individual cardholder from a merchant-side settlement is rarely direct.
For crypto card users, the more concrete effect runs through rewards rather than shelf prices. The disclosed cashback rate on a card is not the whole picture anyway. Network spread, the crypto-to-fiat conversion at checkout, and any FX markup all sit between the headline reward and what you actually keep. A card paying 2% cashback that charges a conversion spread on every purchase can net out closer to break-even than the marketing suggests. Interchange changes feed into that same math on the issuer's side.
This settlement is centered on the United States, so the immediate legal effect is domestic. Cardholders elsewhere are governed by their own regional interchange rules, which in many cases are already capped well below US levels.
Overview
A US judge has approved a $38 billion settlement resolving a roughly two-decade antitrust fight between Visa, Mastercard and US merchants over swipe fees, according to Reuters. Interchange is the fee merchants pay on every card transaction and the main funding source for card rewards, so the deal touches the economics of crypto cards even though it is a traditional payments case. The near-term effect is legal and US-focused; the longer-term question is whether pressure on swipe fees eventually thins the cashback budgets that issuers, including crypto card providers, build on top of interchange. As with any fee story, the headline reward on a card is only part of the cost, and the spreads layered on top often matter more to the final number.
