Visa Gives an Acquirer 30 Days to Answer a Dispute and Mastercard Gives 45. Your Merchant Gets Less. The Dispute Clocks a Merchant-Services Team Has to Run.

A chargeback can be lost on the evidence, and it can be lost on the calendar. The second kind is the more avoidable. Both Visa and Mastercard treat silence as acceptance: a party that does not act within the time limit for its stage of a dispute takes the loss, whatever the merits.

The time limits themselves are in the networks' published rules, and they are not the same at the two networks. This piece sets them out from the Visa Core Rules and Visa Product and Service Rules dated 18 April 2026 and the Mastercard Chargeback Guide, Merchant Edition, dated 19 May 2026, for ordinary card transactions. Both documents carry country-specific exceptions, and ATM and Maestro disputes run on different terms, so treat the figures here as the default case and check the exceptions for the markets you serve.

How Long the Cardholder's Bank Has to Raise a Dispute

The first clock belongs to the issuer, and it is long. On both networks the standard window is 120 days for fraud claims and for most consumer disputes.

• Visa counts 120 calendar days from the Transaction Processing Date for its fraud conditions (10.1 to 10.4), for cancelled recurring transactions (13.2), and for most processing errors.
• Visa's authorization conditions are shorter. Declined Authorization (11.2) and No Authorization or Late Presentment (11.3) both allow 75 calendar days from the Transaction Processing Date, as does the Invalid Data processing error (12.7).
• Mastercard allows 120 calendar days from the transaction for No Cardholder Authorization (4837) and 90 days for authorization-related chargebacks (4808).

For goods and services that were not received or not as described, both networks move the start of the clock. Visa lets the issuer count 120 days from the last date the cardholder expected to receive the merchandise or services (13.1), or from the date the cardholder received them (13.3), but never more than 540 days after the Transaction Processing Date. Mastercard's cardholder dispute chargebacks also count from the delivery, cancellation or expected date where one applies, and allow up to 540 days from the transaction for interrupted ongoing services.

There are also minimum waits. Before disputing a not-received, not-as-described, cancelled or credit-not-processed claim, a Visa issuer must usually wait 15 calendar days, counted from the return, the cancellation or the date on the credit receipt, depending on the condition. Visa drops the wait if it would push the dispute past its time limit. For goods or services not provided with no delivery date given, Mastercard makes the issuer wait 30 days from the transaction, unless it learns the merchant will not deliver.

For a support team, the practical consequence is that a merchant can receive a dispute on a sale from four months ago, and on a pre-sold service or a delayed delivery from well over a year ago. Records retention has to cover that.

Visa: 30 Days at Each Step, and Two Different Paths

Visa splits disputes into two tracks, and the steps are different.

For fraud (category 10) and authorization (category 11) disputes, there is no ordinary dispute response. The acquirer's only way to contest the dispute is a pre-arbitration attempt, which it must make within 30 calendar days of the Dispute Processing Date. The issuer then has 30 calendar days to accept or decline, and if it declines, the acquirer has 10 calendar days to file for arbitration with Visa.

For processing errors (category 12) and consumer disputes (category 13), the acquirer has 30 calendar days from the Dispute Processing Date to submit a dispute response. The issuer may then make a pre-arbitration attempt within 30 days, the acquirer has 30 days to accept or decline it, and the issuer has 10 days from the acquirer's response to file for arbitration.

Visa counts every one of these periods without the processing date of the preceding event. Its rules are explicit about what happens at the end of each one: if a member does not respond through Visa Resolve Online within the timeframe, or accepts responsibility, the dispute cycle closes and that member is liable for the last amount the other side received. An acquirer may respond only once to the original dispute, so a late second attempt with better evidence is not available.

Mastercard: 45 Days to Second Present, Then 30 and 15

Mastercard's first response window is longer. An acquirer has 45 calendar days from the Settlement Date or Central Site Business Date of the chargeback to submit a second presentment, for most reason codes and remedies. Mastercard counts that date as day zero.

The supporting documents run on a separate, shorter clock. They must be in Mastercom within eight calendar days of generating a second presentment that requires them. Missing that deadline lets the issuer hold the acquirer liable for failing to provide documentation, however good the documents would have been. A team that treats the 45 days as the deadline for the whole package can lose a winnable case this way.

After the second presentment, the path depends on the reason code:

• For cardholder disputes (4853) and No Cardholder Authorization (4837), outside ATM and Maestro, pre-arbitration is required. The issuer files it within 30 days of the second presentment, the acquirer has 30 days to accept or reject it, and the issuer then has 15 days from the rejection to escalate to arbitration.
• For authorization-related chargebacks (4808), pre-arbitration is optional, and the issuer must file any arbitration case within 45 days of the second presentment.

Mastercom handles silence the same way Visa does. If the acquirer takes no action on a pre-arbitration case, Mastercom accepts it on the acquirer's behalf after 30 calendar days. The acquirer can also accept an arbitration case at any point before Mastercard rules.

Why the Merchant's Deadline Is Shorter Than the Network's

None of these windows belongs to the merchant. They are the time the acquirer has to act, and the acquirer, or the processor working for it, needs part of that time to receive the merchant's evidence, check it, format it and submit it. So processors give merchants a shorter internal deadline.

Stripe is a public example. Its documentation tells businesses they usually have 7 to 21 days to respond, depending on the card network, that missing the deadline loses the dispute automatically, and that a business gets one submission that cannot be edited or added to afterwards. Other processors set their own deadlines, and where an ISO or payment facilitator sits between the merchant and the processor, it may set an earlier one of its own.

It is worth separating this from consumer credit law. Under Regulation Z, a credit cardholder's billing-error notice must reach the card issuer within 60 days after the first statement showing the error was sent. That rule governs the cardholder and the issuer. It does not set the network time frames above, which run from the transaction or delivery date and are longer.

What Changes on 24 October

Visa's April 2026 rules retire Dispute Condition 11.1, Card Recovery Bulletin, for disputes processed on or after 24 October 2026, and the related merchant rules on the bulletin end on the same date. The condition covered only sales below the merchant's floor limit that were not authorized, on a card listed in the bulletin, so a portfolio whose merchants authorize every transaction should see no difference.

The same release expands Compelling Evidence 3.0 for card-absent fraud disputes from the same date. It does not change any time limit. It changes what evidence can defeat a card-absent fraud dispute, and our earlier piece on the CE3.0 change covers it in detail.

What a Merchant-Services Team Should Set Up

1. Store the network date, not just the date you were told. Record the Dispute Processing Date for Visa and the chargeback Settlement Date or Central Site Business Date for Mastercard on every case, and calculate every downstream deadline from it.
2. Run separate clocks for separate tracks. A Visa fraud dispute goes straight to pre-arbitration, a Visa consumer dispute starts with a dispute response, and a Mastercard case needs its documents in eight days. One generic "respond within X days" rule will be wrong for some of them.
3. Give merchants a deadline with a margin, in writing. Whatever your processor allows, tell merchants a date that leaves time for your own review, and say plainly that a late or incomplete response cannot be fixed afterwards.
4. Track the later stages, not just the first response. Pre-arbitration and arbitration deadlines are where cases quietly lapse, because the merchant has stopped thinking about the dispute by then.
5. Keep records for the full window. On both networks a dispute can arrive up to 540 days after the sale for services that were paid for but not delivered, so receipts, delivery proof and customer correspondence need to last at least that long.

None of this needs a new system for most teams. It needs the right date on each case and someone who owns the clock. Disputes lost on the evidence are hard to prevent. Disputes lost because nobody answered in time are not.