Where these numbers come from, and why none of them come from a processor

One desk, no contributors, and a byline that says the settlements desk because a name would add nothing you could verify.

Payments writing has a particular problem: almost all of it is produced by companies that sell payments. The rule here is that a rate is only quoted if it comes from a published price list, a regulator's data collection or arithmetic you can repeat on your own statement. Where a figure came from one merchant's private numbers, it has been removed, because nobody outside the room can check it.

The sources that do most of the work are the Federal Reserve's interchange data, the card networks' monitoring thresholds as published by processors in their own documentation, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's complaint database. All three are free and all three are linked in the pieces that use them.

No processor, gateway or acquirer has paid to appear here, there are no referral links, and there is no commission on any switch this site might persuade you to make.

None of this is advice about your own contract. Terms differ by acquirer and by month, and the useful version of everything here is the version you compute from your own statements.