Chargeback ratio calculator

The card network monitoring programs

Visa and Mastercard each run merchant monitoring programs that identify businesses generating disputes above a published level and put them on a remediation timetable, usually with monthly fees and escalating consequences that are passed to the merchant through the acquirer. These are published network programs, not something an individual processor invents, and they apply the same way wherever you process.

Mastercard: the Excessive Chargeback Program

As published in Mastercard's Chargeback Guide, the program works on two conditions that must both be satisfied in the same month:

Conditions as published in Mastercard's Chargeback Guide and as cited here in October 2026. Both networks revise these rules periodically, so confirm the current edition with your acquirer before you build a policy on a number.

The denominator is the previous month's transaction count. That detail catches people out: if your sales fall and your disputes stay flat, your ratio rises without anything about your dispute performance changing. Seasonal businesses run into this in the month after their peak.

The count condition cuts both ways. A merchant doing 2,000 transactions a month would need 100 chargebacks to meet the count condition, which is a 5% ratio, so the ratio condition is not what would catch them. A merchant doing 20,000 transactions meets the count condition at 100 chargebacks, which is only 0.5%, so for them the ratio condition at 1.5% is the binding one. The calculator above checks both conditions separately for exactly this reason.

Visa: dispute and fraud monitoring

Visa historically ran separate programs for disputes and for fraud. The dispute program engaged at a 0.9% dispute ratio together with at least 100 disputes in a month, which is where the widely repeated rule of thumb about 0.9% comes from. Visa has since consolidated dispute and fraud monitoring into the Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program, which measures fraud and non-fraud dispute counts together against settled transaction counts, and reports at the acquirer level as well as identifying merchants within an acquirer's portfolio.

The merchant-level threshold under the newer program has been revised more than once since it was announced, and we are not going to print a figure on a public page that we cannot stand behind. The mechanism is the part worth understanding: it is a count-based ratio, it combines fraud reports with disputes rather than treating them separately, and it is assessed monthly. Ask your acquirer which number currently applies to your account and get the answer in writing. If they cannot tell you, that is itself informative.

And your acquirer's own limit

Separately from the networks, the acquirer carries the loss if you cannot cover your own chargebacks, so acquirers commonly set their own thresholds, and they are often tighter than the network programmes. This is the limit that actually gets accounts repriced, reserved or closed, and it is the one that is never published. It is a fair question to ask before you sign rather than after.

Why count and dollars give different answers

If your disputes skew towards your larger orders, your dollar ratio will be higher than your count ratio. If they cluster on small transactions, the reverse. Both numbers are worth watching, for different reasons:

• The count ratio determines whether a monitoring program applies to you. It is the compliance number.
• The dollar ratio determines what disputes are costing you. It is the finance number, and it is the one to use when you are deciding how much prevention is worth paying for.

Add the per-dispute chargeback fee on top of the lost sale. At the kind of fee most acquirers charge, a business running a few dozen disputes a month is spending real money on fees alone, independently of the goods.

What actually lowers a ratio

1. Fix the billing descriptor first. A meaningful share of disputes are customers who did not recognise a line on a statement. If your descriptor is a holding company name nobody has heard of, you are generating disputes out of nothing.
2. Refund faster than you argue. A refund costs you the sale. A chargeback costs you the sale, the fee, and a point on the ratio that you cannot win back.
3. Answer support before the bank does. A great many disputes start with a customer who could not reach you. Response time is dispute prevention.
4. Make recurring billing unmistakable. Renewal dates, amounts, and an easy cancellation. Subscription disputes are usually about surprise rather than fraud: a renewal the customer had forgotten, at an amount they did not expect.
5. Keep the evidence from the start. Delivery confirmation, authorisation records, IP and device data, the terms the customer accepted and when. Assembling this after a dispute arrives is too late.
6. Use the networks' prevention and alert services. They let a would-be dispute reach you as a refund request first, which keeps it out of the numerator entirely.

Why we care how you are measured

A rising ratio is one of the most common reasons an account gets repriced, reserved or closed, and the usual way merchants discover there was a threshold is that they crossed it. The arithmetic above is not secret, and there is no good reason for it to be something you only see on a notice.

Flux gives each merchant their own merchant account and a human underwriting review, so when a ratio starts climbing the question comes from a person who already knows your business, early enough to do something about it. We are not going to promise that a dispute problem never has consequences, because Flux has card network and acquirer obligations and some consequences are not ours to waive. What we can say is that you will hear about it from someone you can call, before it becomes a decision rather than a conversation.

If a reserve is already on the table for you, the reserve impact calculator will show you what it would hold.

This page is the arithmetic and the bands. For the wider picture — when a dispute counts, what enrolment in a monitoring program actually brings, and the operational fixes that move a ratio — read the chargebacks hub, or the guide on how chargeback ratios work.