Visa Excessive Reattempts Rule & Fees

Visa has implemented rules and penalties to prevent merchants from reattempting declined transactions using incorrect data or accounts that will never be approved (for example a closed account). As of April 2022, Visa assess fees on decline reattempts under its Visa Excessive Reattempts Rule. An excessive reattempt is defined as one of either of the following:

• Any reattempt transaction that returned a Decline Category Code of 1 (never retry).
• Each reattempt after the 15^th in a 30 day period for a transaction that returned a Decline Category Code of 2 (wait and retry) or 3 (correct and retry).

For each transaction that meets one of these criteria, the merchant is subject to an excessive reattempt fee. The $0.10 charge per re-attempts over 15 will display on your statement with a “VS RAF Excessive Reattempts Domestic*” description. An additional $0.05 per transaction will apply for cross-border transactions and show on statements as “VS RAF Excessive Reattempts Cross-Border.”

What is a bank response code?

A bank response code is another name for a credit card authorization code, a two-digit numeric code which indicates whether the transaction was approved or declined. If the transaction is declined, the response code provides some basic information about why.

Understanding credit card response codes and how to react to them is an important part of chargeback defense. Decline response codes can provide you with an early notice that something is amiss with a card or customer and that continuing the transaction may result in a dispute down the road. Unauthorized charges are always vulnerable to chargebacks.