Visa chargeback rules in 2026: what merchants need to know
Payments 101
Updated 22 Jun 2026
5 min
Andrii Romanyshyn
Head of Chargeback Prevention, Solidgate
Chargebacks, particularly friendly fraud, can cause significant financial and reputational damage to merchants. This article explores Visa’s latest chargeback rules, including the new Compelling Evidence 3.0 mandate, and how merchants can navigate these regulations.
Chargebacks – especially friendly fraud – can cost you revenue, your processing volume, and your standing with acquirers. Visa has reshaped its dispute program over the last few years, and the rules that took effect in 2025 and 2026 change how much room you have to get things wrong. This article walks through Visa's current chargeback rules, the new Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program (VAMP), and what you can do to push back on disputes you shouldn't be losing.
Friendly fraud – when a real cardholder disputes a purchase they actually made – is now the largest and fastest-growing share of disputes most merchants see. When it gets out of hand, the risks stack up fast:
- Lost revenue from disputes you don't fight, or fight badly
- Higher dispute and fraud ratios, which can push you into a Visa monitoring program
- Per-transaction fines once you cross a threshold
- A frozen or terminated merchant account from your acquirer
- Reputational damage that follows the company and its directors
Visa's current rules are a direct response to this. Here's what they mean for you.
First, a quick reset on terminology.
What is a chargeback?
A is a forced refund that reverses a card transaction without the merchant's sign-off. The money moves back from your account to the cardholder's bank, line of credit, or card – and you don't get a vote.
Chargebacks exist to protect consumers from bad business practices. When a customer disputes a charge with their bank, kicks off and the disputed funds are held until it's resolved.
Common reasons include damaged or defective goods, items that never showed up, billing confusion, and criminal fraud. The mechanism traces back to the 1974 in the US, which gave cardholders the right to dispute charges they didn't recognize. It causes plenty of headaches for businesses, but it's a core part of how card payments earn consumer trust.
What is a Visa chargeback?
A Visa chargeback is the process a Visa cardholder uses to dispute a transaction and claim a refund through their issuing bank.
Every card network runs its own version. Visa, , and the rest each have their own reason codes, evidence requirements, and timelines. If you sell across networks, you need to handle each one on its own terms.
Visa's standard chargeback rules
Visa expects merchants to meet a baseline set of obligations:
- Publish a clear, easy-to-find refund policy on your site.
- Have a process to handle disputes and chargebacks on time.
- Keep proper records and documentation so you can defend a dispute.
- Take liability for chargebacks tied to fraud or other illegal activity.
- Expect chargeback fees – and know that excessive volume can trigger fines or loss of your merchant account.
Top Visa dispute reason codes
Visa groups disputes into four categories: Fraud (10.x), Authorization (11.x), Processing Errors (12.x), and Consumer Disputes (13.x). These are the ones that hit card-not-present merchants most often:
- 10.4 – Other Fraud: Card-Absent Environment. The classic friendly-fraud code. The cardholder says they didn't authorize a card-not-present transaction, often because they don't recognize it on their statement.
- 13.1 – Merchandise/Services Not Received. The customer says they paid but never got what they ordered.
- 12.6.1 – Duplicate Processing. The cardholder claims a single purchase was charged twice.
- 13.3 – Not as Described or Defective Merchandise/Services. What arrived didn't match the listing, or showed up broken.
Reason code 10.4 matters most here, because it's the one Compelling Evidence 3.0 was built to address.
Compelling Evidence 3.0
Visa rolled out Compelling Evidence 3.0 (CE3.0) on April 15, 2023, and it's been in force ever since. The goal: give merchants a fair shot at proving a disputed card-not-present transaction was legitimate.
Compelling evidence, in Visa's words, is "proof that the cardholder participated in the transaction, received the goods or services, or benefitted from the transaction." CE3.0 applies specifically to disputes filed under reason code 10.4.
Here's how it works. If a cardholder claims a transaction was fraud, you can submit two prior undisputed transactions from the same cardholder as proof of a purchasing history. To qualify, those transactions have to:
- Be more than 120 days but fewer than 365 days before the disputed one
- Have never been reported as fraud
- Share at least two data points – IP address, email, physical address, or phone number – with the transaction in dispute
Match those conditions and Visa treats the dispute as a legitimate purchase, which can stop it before it becomes a chargeback. That keeps qualifying fraud reports out of your monitoring ratios too – which matters more than ever under VAMP. We get into the full evidence requirements in our .
VAMP: the new monitoring program
This is the biggest change since the last version of this article. On April 1, 2025, Visa folded its two old monitoring programs – the Visa Dispute Monitoring Program (VDMP) and the Visa Fraud Monitoring Program (VFMP) – into a single framework: the Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program (VAMP).
Instead of tracking fraud and disputes separately, VAMP combines them into one number. The VAMP ratio is:
(TC40 fraud reports + TC15 disputes) ÷ total settled card-not-present transactions
Two things make this harder than the old setup. First, friendly fraud can count against you twice – once as a TC40 fraud report and once as a dispute — so a single bad chargeback inflates your ratio more than it used to. Second, the threshold keeps dropping. Visa cut the merchant threshold from 2.2% to 1.5% on April 1, 2026 – roughly a third less room than you had a year earlier. Monitoring kicks in once a merchant passes 1,500 disputes, and merchants in the program can be charged around $8 per disputed or fraudulent transaction.
The takeaway: with fraud and disputes in one ratio and the bar moving down, prevention and well-fought representment aren't optional anymore. Every dispute you stop or win keeps you further from the threshold.
How to manage Visa chargebacks with Solidgate
Staying under VAMP comes down to two jobs: stop disputes before they post, and win the ones worth fighting. Solidgate's payment orchestration platform handles both as part of its chargeback prevention and management services.
catch disputes early. When a cardholder flags a transaction, you get a real-time alert and a short window to refund it before it turns into a chargeback – so it never lands in your VAMP ratio. That's the cleanest way to keep both your fraud and dispute counts down.
takes over the disputes that do come through. We assemble the evidence, apply CE3.0 where it qualifies, and submit representment on your behalf – so your team isn't building cases by hand and you recover revenue you'd otherwise write off.
Pair the two with at checkout and you've got coverage from the first authorization through to a won dispute – without adding headcount or stitching together separate tools. If Visa's tightening rules are starting to bite, that's the layer worth getting in place now.
