Judge preliminarily approves Visa and Mastercard’s $38B swipe-fee settlement, but retailers announcement more fights

A U.S. District Judge in Brooklyn has given preliminary approval to a revised $38 billion settlement between Visa, Mastercard, and millions of American merchants over card “swipe” fees, a dispute that has stretched for more than two decades. U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan said the revised accord is “fair, reasonable, and adequate,” according to coverage of the court’s action, while merchant groups that want tighter limits on interchange charges said they plan to continue pushing back.

The settlement is aimed at resolving an antitrust case centered on interchange fees, the charges merchants generally pay to accept card payments. Under the revised deal described in reporting, Visa and Mastercard would reduce interchange fees by about 0.1 percentage points per year over five years, a change intended to translate into lower costs for merchants compared with the networks’ earlier proposal.

The court’s preliminary step follows a prior rejection of a different settlement framework. An earlier version, valued around $30 billion, was rejected by Judge Margo Brodie in June 2024, with the ruling citing that the projected merchant savings were, in the court’s view, “paltry,” according to reporting that recapped the history of the case.

As part of the latest agreement, the parties also revised the so-called “honor all cards” framework. In plain terms, that concept has historically limited merchants’ ability to steer customers away from certain card types or payment options based on the relative processing costs. Reporting on the revised deal says the terms would give merchants more flexibility to route customers toward cheaper payment options, a concession retailers have sought for years.

The timing matters: Judge Cogan’s approval was described as preliminary and was granted on April 27, 2026, setting the stage for a potential final approval later this year. While preliminary approval does not end the case, it can announcement that the court views the revised terms as meeting basic legal requirements, including how the settlement would operate for merchants and consumers.

Neither Visa nor Mastercard’s broader business disclosure was included in the cited reporting, and the companies did not provide additional details in the materials referenced here beyond what was tied to the court action. For example, it remains unclear from the coverage reviewed for this story how exactly the settlement will be implemented across different card programs, merchant categories, or payment rails, and what operational changes merchants will be able to make in practice immediately after final approval.

For Visa, the decision touches core network economics. Interchange fees are a key input into card acceptance costs, and shifting them can affect both merchant behavior and cardholder usage. For merchants, the appeal is straightforward: whether settlement terms meaningfully reduce payment costs and whether they unlock more targeted control over which payment options are offered at the point of sale.

What to watch next is whether merchant groups and other parties press objections through the final approval phase, and whether the court addresses concerns about the adequacy of the fee reductions and the scope of changes to the “honor all cards” concept. Final approval, if granted, would still leave room for lingering disputes, but it would likely move the parties closer to a long-awaited resolution of one of the longest-running credit card antitrust cases in U.S. history.