The average chargeback rate across all industries is a small slice of transactions, the benchmark the next section sources and breaks down. The number that matters more is the network's own threshold.
I've lowered my own chargeback rate before I ever touched a dispute, by fixing the billing descriptor and turning on alerts. That experience is the lens this benchmark comes through. A rate only matters in relation to what a network will do about it.
Here's where your rate sits, and how much room you have before a network acts on it.
Key takeaways
- Expect an all-industry average near 0.26%, up 24% in a year.
- Compare your rate to your vertical, which runs 0.12% to 1.02%.
- Watch the VAMP threshold drop to 1.5% in April 2026.
- Cross 100 monthly chargebacks or 1.5% and the ECM program flags you.
- Read the granular reason codes, since most alerts carry only a generic label.
What is the average chargeback rate?
The average chargeback rate across all industries is 0.26% of transactions as of Q3 2025, up 24% year over year from 0.21%. That's per Sift's Q3 2025 benchmark data.
The rate is the share of your transactions that become chargebacks, and this benchmark pools every kind of merchant at once.
The average pools together verticals with wildly different risk. So it understates the number for a high-dispute merchant and overstates it for a low-dispute one.
A restaurant and an online course have almost nothing in common at the checkout, yet both feed the same 0.26% Sift benchmark.
The rate also moves for reasons outside any one merchant's control. Dispute volume across the whole network keeps climbing, because filing a dispute has gotten easier and friendly fraud more common.
Sift's data puts the jump from 0.21% to 0.26% at 24% in a single year, and it was industry-wide.
So your rate can drift up year over year on its own. Budget for that drift when you set an internal cap. A rate that felt safe last year sits closer to the network's line this year. A single global average still tells you nothing about whether a network will flag you, which the threshold section below settles.
Our guide to what a chargeback rate measures has the full definition.
Average chargeback rate by industry
Chargeback rates range from about 0.12% for restaurants to 1.02% for education and training, depending on the vertical. Swipesum's benchmark set breaks the spread down by industry:
The gap between industries comes down to how easy the purchase is to dispute.
Recurring and high-consideration categories see more cancelled-subscription and buyer's-remorse disputes than one-time, lower-ticket buys. Education and travel top the list because the purchases are large, the delivery is delayed, and buyers change their minds.
A coffee at a restaurant rarely gets disputed. A year of online coursework often does.
Your own rate reflects your product, price point, and fraud controls more than your industry code alone. Two SaaS companies can sit on opposite sides of the 0.66% figure in Swipesum's benchmark set.
What splits them is how clear their billing is, how fast they refund, and whether their statement descriptor is one a customer recognizes.
A confusing descriptor alone pushes disputes up, whatever the vertical. So treat the industry figure as a reference point and judge your own rate on its own terms.
Comparing your rate to your vertical answers only half the question. A SaaS merchant at 0.9% sits well above the 0.66% software average, which is worth a look. It doesn't yet say whether a card network cares. That second comparison, your rate against the network's own line, is the one with real consequences, and it comes next.
How our alert data breaks down by network and reason
In our dataset, Ethoca sends about 42% of alerts, and Visa's RDR and CDRN networks send the remaining 58%. These figures cover alerts our platform processed, so read them as our merchant base rather than the payments industry.
Here is how the alerts split by network:
| Alert network | Share of alerts |
|---|
| Ethoca (Mastercard) | 42.1% |
| RDR (Visa) | 30.6% |
| CDRN (Visa) | 27.3% |
In our dataset, the two Visa-side alert types together edge out Ethoca's single 42% share. Lean on Mastercard-side alerts alone and you miss more than half the volume our platform sees. So chargeback alerts only help when they pull from every network.
The reason-code breakdown is more useful, and it corrects an assumption most merchants make. Most alerts get filed under a broad "consumer dispute" label that names no specific reason, so raw data makes disputes look murkier than they are.
Read the granular codes instead. In our dataset, fraud on card-absent transactions leads at about 11%, and the top three all point the same way:
| Top reason code | Share of alerts |
|---|
| Visa 10.4 (fraud, card-absent) | 11.1% |
| Visa 13.2 (cancelled recurring) | 8.5% |
| Visa 13.7 (cancelled merchandise) | 8.2% |
These are friendly-fraud and subscription-cancellation patterns, the kind most merchants underestimate because "fraud" makes them picture an outsider. If your cancelled-recurring disputes are climbing, check your cancel and billing flow before your fraud filters.
Alert coverage is partial by card brand. It's low for American Express, JCB in the US, and Discover, and non-existent for other payment methods. So any brand-level share here understates non-Visa and non-Mastercard volume.
When your rate crosses a network threshold
Visa's Acquirer Monitoring Program flags a US merchant as Excessive at a 2.2% dispute-and-fraud ratio today, dropping to 1.5% on April 1, 2026. That's according to Visa's own fact sheet. Mastercard triggers its program on a raw monthly chargeback count as well as a ratio.
So a low-volume merchant can cross it on count alone. Both networks' tiers:
| Program | Enters monitoring at | Higher tier at |
|---|
| Visa VAMP (Excessive) | 2.2% today, 1.5% from Apr 1, 2026 | region-specific escalation |
| Mastercard ECM | 100 chargebacks or 1.5% | 300 chargebacks or 3% (HECM) |
Each threshold enrolls you in a monitoring tier rather than fining you outright. Cross one and monthly assessments start, growing the longer you stay above it. So consecutive months matter as much as the rate.
Say you run a 0.9% rate. You sit under Visa's line today, but you'd clear its 1.5% April 2026 threshold, and trigger Mastercard's ECM tier at 100 chargebacks that month.
Same rate, and the line has moved under it.
A stale article gets one thing wrong here. VAMP replaced Visa's older VDMP and VFMP programs on June 1, 2025. Any article still calling VDMP or VFMP current is out of date. Our guide to Visa's Acquirer Monitoring Program tracks the live tiers.
Mastercard runs its own escalation path. Our guide to Mastercard's chargeback monitoring program covers the ECM and High-ECM levels.
The cheapest way to stay under either threshold is to keep disputes from counting at all. You can set up alerts that catch disputes before they hit your rate.
How to calculate your own chargeback rate
Chargeback rate is your chargebacks divided by total transactions in a period, but the chargeback count changes depending on whether RDR-resolved disputes are included. The formula is simple. The numerator is where merchants trip up.
When I first checked my own store's rate, the math took a minute. Knowing which disputes to count took longer.
Shopify's own monitoring math splits a "standard" rate from a rate "including RDR." The standard rate leaves out RDR-resolved disputes. The including-RDR rate counts them.
Imagine you have 40,000 transactions and 250 chargebacks in a month. Your standard rate is 0.625%. If 60 of those disputes were RDR-resolved, the including-RDR rate rises to about 0.775%. Same merchant, same month, two rates.
The gap matters because the network decides which count it watches. A rate that looks safe on your standard math can still enroll you, if the processor reports the higher figure. Check which number it sends before you assume you have room.
You can estimate your own prevention cost once you know which count you're working from.
Subscription merchants have a second trap. Use the transaction count from the chargebacks' own period, not the subscriber count. Measure 250 chargebacks against a full year and the rate looks artificially low, until a monthly program measures it honestly.
Stripe reports the count differently. Our guide to your chargeback rate on Stripe has the details.
How we sourced our data
The alert-network figures in this article come from anonymized, aggregated alert data across the merchants enrolled on the Chargeback.io platform. The Sift and Swipesum benchmarks and the Visa and Mastercard thresholds are third-party sources, cited in their own sections.
We measured total alerts within each category, by network and by reason code, and report them as shares of the total. Each percentage uses the labeled subset of records for that category. So a share covers only the alerts that had that field recorded.
We publish the shares rather than raw counts, since the counts reveal our volume without changing what the percentages tell you. The dataset also skews toward the processors and card brands our merchants use. That's why the network split above isn't an industry-wide figure. The numbers reflect what our own platform processed across enrolled merchants.
FAQ
Is chargeback rate the same as win rate?
No, chargeback rate counts how often disputes happen, and win rate counts how often you beat them. A low rate says nothing about whether you win the fights you take.
What is a typical chargeback fee?
A chargeback fee is a flat, per-dispute charge your processor bills when a chargeback is filed, separate from the rate. The amount varies by processor, and it stays charged even if you win the dispute.
Can one big spike hurt a low average?
Yes, because monitoring programs measure your rate month by month. One bad month from a fraud run or a botched launch can enroll you even when your yearly average looks healthy.
Do refunds lower my chargeback rate?
A refund issued before a dispute is filed keeps that transaction out of your chargeback count, so it can help. It also costs the full sale every time, so blanket refunding is an expensive way to manage a rate.
