Visa Dropped the Level 2 Rate for Commercial Cards in April. Enhanced Data Now Pays Only Through CEDP, and on Business Cards It Pays Less.

For years, a B2B merchant could cut the interchange on a Visa commercial card by sending a little extra data with the sale. A sales-tax indicator and amount earned the Level 2 rate on most commercial cards. Line-item detail earned Level 3. Some gateways filled those fields with default values, and for a long time that was enough.

That arrangement is gone. Visa's interchange schedule effective 18 April 2026 no longer lists a Level 2 rate for corporate, purchasing or business credit cards, except for fleet fuel. The only remaining enhanced-data rate is Product 3, which a merchant earns through Visa's Commercial Enhanced Data Program, known as CEDP. Visa has also raised the Product 3 rate for small-business cards. This piece works from Visa's published US interchange tables for October 2024, October 2025 and April 2026, and from what processors have told their merchants about how the program works.

What Visa's Rate Tables Show

Visa publishes its US interchange reimbursement fees twice a year. Three editions tell the story.

In the October 2024 edition, a purchasing or corporate card had a Commercial Level III rate of 1.90% + $0.10 and a Commercial Level II rate of 2.50% + $0.10. The card-not-present rate without that data was 2.70% + $0.10. Business cards had a Business Level II rate, tiered by the cardholder's annual spend, of 1.90% to 2.25% + $0.10. There was no Level III rate for business cards.

In the October 2025 edition, effective 18 October 2025, Level III was replaced. Purchasing and corporate cards got a Product 3 rate of 1.75% + $0.10, 15 basis points below the old Level III rate. Business cards got a Product 3 rate for the first time, from 1.75% + $0.10 in Tier I to 2.10% + $0.10 in Tier V. Commercial Product Large Ticket fell from 1.45% + $35.00 to 1.30% + $35.00. Both Level II rates were still listed.

In the April 2026 edition, effective 18 April 2026, both Level II rows are gone. The only Level II row left is Commercial Level II – Fuel, at 2.20% + $0.10. Purchasing and corporate Product 3 is unchanged at 1.75% + $0.10. Business Product 3 now runs from 2.40% + $0.10 in Tier I to 2.75% + $0.10 in Tier V, 65 basis points higher in every tier than in October 2025.

That increase does not appear in either semi-annual edition. Payment-data consultancy Redbridge and PayPal's merchant guide both date it to January 2026, and Redbridge gives the date as 24 January. Redbridge also reports that Visa raised the small-business Level II rate by 75 basis points at the same time, to 2.65% + $0.10 in Tier I, the same rate as a business card-not-present sale with no enhanced data, and more once CEDP's 0.05% fee is added. That was three months before Level II was withdrawn.

What a Commercial Card Transaction Falls Back To

A transaction that does not earn Product 3 now lands in the ordinary rate for its card type and channel. On the April 2026 tables:

Purchasing and corporate cards: 2.50% + $0.10 card present, and 2.70% + $0.10 card not present. A card-not-present sale that used to earn Level II at 2.50% now costs 20 basis points more. Card-present Level II and card-present standard were already the same rate.
Business credit cards: Business Product 1, which industry rate guides describe as the card-not-present category, runs from 2.65% to 3.00% + $0.10. Business Product 2, described as the retail or card-present category, runs from 1.90% to 2.25% + $0.10. Both rates are the same as in October 2025.
Large Ticket: 1.30% + $35.00 for purchasing and corporate cards. PayPal's guide says the CEDP flag is required for Large Ticket as well as Product 3.

Put side by side, the incentive for enhanced data now depends heavily on the card. On a card-not-present purchasing-card sale, Product 3 is 95 basis points below the standard rate. On a Tier I business card, the gap is 25 basis points, down from 90 in October 2025. On a card-present business-card sale, the published retail rate of 1.90% is now lower than Product 3. If your B2B merchants take business cards in person, ask the processor which category those transactions actually clear in when they carry enhanced data.

The Participation Fee

CEDP carries a network fee of its own. Processors including PayPal, Nuvei and BlueSnap describe it as 0.05% of the transaction, in place since April 2025. Nuvei dates it to 12 April 2025. Because it is a Visa network fee rather than interchange, it does not appear in Visa's public interchange tables.

PayPal's guide says the fee is charged when the CEDP flag is present and Visa reviews the transaction, and that it is also charged on transactions carrying Level 2 tax data. On that description, a merchant pays it on flagged transactions whether or not they go on to earn Product 3. Netting the fee against the rates above, a Tier I business card-not-present sale that earns Product 3 saves about 20 basis points over Business Product 1. A purchasing card-not-present sale saves about 90.

On a $10,000 card-not-present purchasing-card invoice, that is roughly $180 at Product 3 including the fee, against $270 at the standard rate. On the same invoice paid with a Tier I business card, it is roughly $245 against $265.

How Qualification Works

Visa's CEDP validation rules are not public, and processors describe them in slightly different terms. What they agree on is the outline.

Merchants have a status. BlueSnap's developer documentation says merchants are assigned a status of Verified or Not Verified based on the quality of their data, and that only Verified merchants receive the reduced rates. Stax says every merchant starts out unverified.
Data is checked after the sale. PayPal says Visa reviews a transaction 10 to 15 days after it settles, and applies the Product 3 rate if the transaction passes CEDP checks.
Status can be lost. Payroc tells its merchants that Visa keeps monitoring data quality after verification, can revoke verified status after notice, and may apply retroactive interchange if data standards are not met.
Placeholder data fails. Payroc and Stax make the same point: generic, placeholder or default values no longer qualify, and Stax names vague descriptions such as "misc item". Payroc lists twelve fields for Product 3, including item descriptor, product code, quantity, unit of measure, unit cost and line total, alongside the sales-tax indicator and amount.

This is the part of the change that catches merchants out. A gateway that has always filled the Level 3 fields with a single generic line item, or the same product code on every sale, may have earned the lower rate before October 2025 and will not earn it now. Optimized Payments describes a merchant whose qualification rate dropped right after 17 October 2025 and recovered only after it fixed errors in the data it was sending.

Where This Lands for Acquirers and ISOs

None of this changes who a merchant can accept cards from. It changes what a B2B merchant pays, and it falls on the people who price, support and pay residuals on those merchants.

Pricing. On interchange-plus, the changes show up in the merchant's pass-through costs automatically. On tiered or flat-rate pricing, the lost Level II rate and the January business-card increase may be sitting in your margin rather than the merchant's statement.
Residuals. If your B2B merchants were priced on the assumption that most commercial-card volume would qualify for Level II, that assumption no longer holds. Check whether residual reports for those merchants moved after October 2025, January 2026 and April 2026.
Support. Merchants who see the change on a statement will ask why. The answer is often a category change from Level II to card-not-present, or a new 0.05% line, not an error.
Integrations. The data comes from the merchant's gateway, ERP or invoicing system. A CEDP problem is usually a data-mapping problem, and it is fixed in the integration, not in the merchant agreement.

What to Do Now

Pull a qualification report for each B2B merchant, by card type and interchange category, for a month before October 2025 and a month after April 2026. Merchants whose commercial volume moved from Level II to standard card-not-present rates are the ones to call first.
Ask each processor how it reports CEDP status: whether you can see a merchant's Verified or Not Verified status, the CEDP fee, and transactions that failed review.
Look at what the gateway actually sends. Generic item descriptions, a repeated product code, zero tax or a single line item covering the whole invoice will not pass.
For merchants on business cards, work out whether Product 3 is worth the integration effort. At about 20 basis points net in Tier I, it may not be for a low-volume merchant. For purchasing and corporate cards at about 90 net, it usually is.
Re-check pricing on non-pass-through B2B accounts, where the cost of all three changes may have been absorbed without anyone deciding to absorb it.

Visa's published interchange tables are the only primary record of the rates, and the next edition is worth checking when it appears. The validation rules sit in documentation that only acquirers and processors see, so for those, your processor is the source to ask.