If your portfolio includes online pharmacies, tobacco or vape sellers, subscription nutraceutical brands, crypto on-ramps, adult content sites, or anyone in gambling and skill games, the cost of carrying those merchants on Mastercard changed twice this year. On 1 May 2026 the annual registration fee Mastercard charges acquirers for each registered specialty merchant rose to USD 1,000, and a new USD 50,000 annual High-Risk Acquirer License Fee took effect. On 3 June 2026 two per-transaction charges started accruing on every purchase those merchants run: a Specialty Merchant Transaction Fee of USD 0.02 and a Specialty Merchant Volume Fee of 10 basis points. The first billing ran on 14 June 2026.
The change was announced in a Mastercard pricing bulletin dated 28 October 2025 (AP/LAC/MEA/US 12568.1), a member document that at least one processor has reposted publicly and several others have summarised. The program rules are public: Chapter 9 of Mastercard's Security Rules and Procedures, Merchant Edition, the 4 August 2026 edition of which is on mastercard.com. Everything below is drawn from those two documents, as of September 2026.
The Four Fees, and When Each Started
- Specialty Merchant Registration Program Fee: USD 1,000 per merchant registration, annually. Effective 1 May 2026. Acquirers with merchants already registered saw the increase in their next billing cycle after that date; new acquirers are charged as they register each merchant.
- High-Risk Acquirer License Fee: USD 50,000, annually, per acquirer. Effective 1 May 2026.
- Specialty Merchant Transaction Fee: USD 0.02 per transaction, billed weekly. Effective 3 June 2026.
- Specialty Merchant Volume Fee: 10 basis points of transaction value, billed weekly. Effective 3 June 2026.
The registration fee was previously USD 500 a year, according to a processor pricing page published before the change and to processor notices of the increase. The other three fees did not exist before 2026. The bulletin covers the United States, the Middle East/Africa region, Asia/Pacific excluding Japan and Indonesia, and Latin America and the Caribbean excluding Brazil, Mexico and Colombia. PayPal's fall 2026 release guide lists later effective dates for Canada, Europe and Japan, which are outside this bulletin's scope; we have not seen the underlying announcements and are not quoting those dates.
What the Per-Transaction Fees Attach To
The transaction and volume fees are not keyed to the MCC. They attach to a Transaction Type Identifier that tags purchase transactions from registered specialty merchants: P70 and P76 for cryptocurrency, P71 for high-risk securities, and P72 for every other specialty category. The rules manual says the acquirer must populate P70, P76 or P71 itself on crypto and securities transactions, and that for all other purchase transactions by a specialty merchant, Mastercard will populate P72.
That last sentence is the one to read twice. For the pharmacy, tobacco, adult, negative-option and similar categories, the identifier that triggers the fee is applied by Mastercard on the strength of the registration, not by anything the merchant or gateway codes. Once a merchant is registered, the fees follow its transactions. There is no coding choice that avoids them, and not registering is a different and more expensive problem, covered below.
The bulletin applies the fees to single-message and dual-message purchase transactions where the cardholder transaction type is 00 (purchase), 09 (purchase with cash back), 18 (unique transactions) or 20 (credits). Funding transactions are excluded. Credits being on the list means a refund carries the two cents and ten basis points just as the sale did, so a merchant with a high refund rate pays on both legs.
What It Costs on a Real Ticket
Because one component is flat and one proportional, the blended rate depends on ticket size. Two cents plus ten basis points is 4.5 cents on a USD 25 ticket, or 18 basis points; 7 cents on a USD 50 ticket, or 14 basis points; and 22 cents on a USD 200 ticket, or 11 basis points. Low-ticket subscription and nutraceutical merchants are hit hardest in percentage terms, exactly where trial-offer economics already run thin.
Which Merchants Are in the Program
Chapter 9 of the rules manual lists the categories. An acquirer of any of the following must register each merchant, sponsored merchant or other entity through the Specialty Merchant Registration application in Mastercard Connect:
- Non-face-to-face adult content and services: MCCs 5967 and 7841.
- Non-face-to-face gambling: MCCs 7801, 7802 and 7995.
- Non-face-to-face pharmaceutical sales: MCCs 5122 and 5912.
- Non-face-to-face tobacco products, including e-cigarettes: MCC 5993.
- Government-owned lottery: MCC 7800 in the US and US territories, MCC 9406 elsewhere.
- Skill games, including fantasy sports: MCC 7994.
- High-risk cyberlockers: MCC 4816, where the service meets the manual's criteria.
- Recreational cannabis, Canada only: any MCC.
- High-risk securities, meaning binary options, CFDs, forex options, crypto options and ICOs: MCC 6211.
- Cryptocurrency purchases and exchange platforms: MCC 6051.
- Negative option billing merchants selling physical products: MCC 5968.
Two things on that list deserve attention. The first is that sponsored merchants count: a payment facilitator's sub-merchants in these categories are registered individually, and the fee is per registration. The second is the last entry. Negative option billing covers the free-trial-then-subscription model for physical goods such as cosmetics, health-care products and vitamins, and the manual extends it to magazine and newspaper subscriptions. The trial offer is how these arrangements usually start, but the definition turns on the automatic recurring shipment of a physical product, not on the trial. A merchant that never thought of itself as high-risk is a specialty merchant the moment its checkout sells one.
The Licence Is a Rule, Not Just a Fee
The USD 50,000 line has a rules-manual counterpart. Section 9.1.1 provides that, effective 1 May 2026, a customer must not engage in specialty merchant acquiring without Mastercard's express prior written consent, which Mastercard may refuse or withdraw at any time without notice. An acquirer already acquiring for registered specialty merchants before 1 May 2026 is deemed to have consent; the bulletin says those acquirers receive a supplemental licence automatically and are billed for it regardless. A new entrant must submit the High-Risk License Addendum, Form 637, and obtain Mastercard's approval before it can acquire for specialty merchants at all. For most of the Europe region the consent rule takes effect on 1 October 2026; a listed set of countries takes the earlier date.
The bulletin is also explicit about the exit: an acquirer that stops paying the licence must unregister and terminate every specialty merchant in its portfolio. There is no partial position. For a smaller acquirer or sponsor bank with a handful of registered merchants, USD 50,000 a year is now a fixed cost the specialty book has to justify on its own.
What Registration Requires, and What Skipping It Costs
Registration is not a form with a fee attached. For each merchant the acquirer supplies legal and DBA names and address, every website URL from which transactions may arise, the names, addresses and tax identification numbers of the principal owners, a description of the products and of processing procedures and cardholder disclosures, the principal owners' previous business relationships, and a certification from the responsible acquirer officer that a diligent, good-faith investigation supports the registration.
Several categories add to that. US gambling, lottery and skill-games registrations need an acquirer intake form, evidence of licensing, a merchant attestation or a reasoned legal opinion depending on the MCC, an independent third-party certification of age and location controls, and Mastercard's approval before the first transaction. Pharmaceutical, tobacco, cyberlocker and cryptocurrency registrations require verified legal compliance, re-confirmed at least every twelve months. Every registered merchant must run real-time and batch monitoring for multiple or consecutive attempts on the same account number.
Acquiring for any of these merchant types without registering first carries an assessment of up to USD 10,000 per violation. If Mastercard gives notice and the merchant is still unregistered after 10 days, the assessments become USD 5,000 a month for up to three months and USD 25,000 a month after that. Mastercard may also treat the merchant as violating its illegal or brand-damaging transactions rule. Against that schedule, USD 1,000 a year is not the expensive option.
What This Changes for Your Team
Underwriting
Category assignment now carries a direct, network-billed cost, so the question at application is no longer only whether a merchant is acceptable but whether its pricing covers a fixed USD 1,000 a year plus 11 to 18 basis points before any margin. Subscription physical-goods merchants are the ones most likely to arrive without anyone flagging them as a registered category; a checkout review that looks for an automatic recurring shipment, with or without a trial offer, will catch what the stated business description does not.
Pricing and residuals
Where the fees are passed through, pass them through as what they are: a network fee with a per-item and a percentage component, itemised on the statement rather than folded into a rounder risk uplift. Residual reports that net network fees out before the split will show the June change as a drop in margin on specialty merchants; annotate the June 2026 line so next year's comparison does not read as a mystery.
Portfolio review
Reconcile the merchants Mastercard is billing you for against your own list of who you believe is registered. A merchant billed at USD 1,000 that your records show as standard retail has been registered or re-coded by someone; a merchant in a listed MCC with no registration line is the expensive kind of discrepancy. If your sponsor is a smaller acquirer, ask directly whether it intends to keep its High-Risk Acquirer Licence, because the exit rule means the answer decides whether your specialty merchants have a home.
Visa runs a parallel program for the same kinds of merchants, the Visa Integrity Risk Program, with its own registration and fee structure that is not published in the same way, so we are not quoting figures from it. If you carry these merchants on both networks, treat the numbers above as half of the answer and get the Visa half from your acquirer in writing.
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About the author
Kyle Hall
Founder
Kyle Hall is a fintech entrepreneur, software engineer, and marketing strategist with over a decade of experience in high-risk payment processing and SaaS development. He is the CEO of PayKings, a leader in high-risk merchant services, and the founder of PulseCRM, a purpose-built CRM platform for the payments industry. Kyle specializes in building custom payment processing systems and growth strategies that empower merchant services providers to scale and succeed in the digital marketplace.