“High-Risk” Chargeback FeesThe Compounding Cost of Being “High-Risk”
Why “High-Risk” Merchants May Pay Higher Chargeback Fees
If regular chargeback fees are a headache, “high-risk” chargeback fees are a full-blown migraine.
Once your business is labeled as high-risk by processors, the rules of the game change entirely. In addition to standard chargeback fees, you could face additional surcharges and penalties for every single dispute. Think about it like the equivalent of your car insurance premium going up after you get into an accident.
In this article, we’ll explain what gets you slapped with the dreaded “high-risk” label and how these inflated fees can threaten your bottom line.
Chargeback Fees
Why do processors apply chargeback fees? How much do chargeback fees cost? And crucially, how can you avoid them? In this guide, we take a closer look at how these dispute fees work and what you can do to insulate your business from unnecessary losses.
“High-Risk” Chargeback Fees
Credit card networks have a lot of influence regarding fees for elevated chargeback risk. They set certain limits for a business’ chargeback ratio and the total number of chargebacks received. If the merchant exceeds those limits, they may end up in a chargeback monitoring program.
This is extremely bad news. Banks and processors assess fees on a per-chargeback basis.
Take the Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program (VAMP), for instance. In April 2025, the card network consolidated its preexisting Visa Fraud Monitoring Program and Visa Dispute Monitoring Program under a single, unified umbrella.
Merchants who receive more than 1,500 fraud and dispute incidents per month, and whose chargeback ratios exceed 2.2% (or 1.5% in the Latin American market) or more, are automatically enrolled in the VAMP.
The penalty for merchants is a flat $10 per TC40 (fraud-related) or TC15 (non-fraud-related) chargeback.
Learn more about VAMP fees
The consequences of being enrolled in a merchant monitoring program don’t end with surcharges and penalties. If you’re deemed to be too high-risk, your acquirer may close your merchant account or even put you on the MATCH list, which is effectively a five-year, industry-wide blacklist.
The Mastercard Excessive Chargeback Merchant program, or ECM, is very similar. The longer the merchant remains in a monitoring program without substantial improvement, the more likely the card network will simply revoke card processing privileges altogether.
Learn more about Mastercard ECM feesIt’s important to note that the thresholds imposed by the card network are a baseline. Your processor or acquirer may not be so forgiving. They may close your account as a risk-aversion measure before the card network ever gets involved.
The chargeback fees and fines you’ll encounter if you’re enrolled in a merchant monitoring program like VAMP or Mastercard’s ECM are distinct from arbitration fees, which we’ll cover in the next section. If a chargeback reaches arbitration while you’re enrolled in a dispute monitoring program, you’ll be hit with program fees plus an arbitration fee.
