Visa retired Level 2 in April. Most B2B merchants have not noticed.

If you sell to other businesses and take Visa commercial cards, the way you earn cheaper interchange changed on 18 April 2026. Visa retired its Level 2 programme and moved enhanced-data savings into the Commercial Enhanced Data Program, where the categories are called Product 3.

Mastercard still runs Level 2 and Level 3 exactly as before. American Express still supports Level 2 only. Discover still has neither. So this is not “enhanced data is over” — it is one network changing the deal, and it happens to be the biggest one.

Why nobody notices

There is no line on a statement that says Level 2 discontinued. The transactions simply stop landing in the cheaper category and start landing in Commercial Card Not Present instead. The effective rate drifts up by a fraction of a point and everything else looks normal.

That is the whole problem with interchange: the expensive outcome and the cheap one are the same transaction, described differently.

Which cards it pays on matters more than the headline

The size of the prize depends on which commercial card your customer presents, and this is the part that is usually stated wrong.

Visa prices these on two separate tables. Purchasing and corporate cards get the large enhanced-data discount — the biggest single interchange saving available to most small businesses. Business credit cards, the small-business plastic most of your customers actually carry, sit on their own table with five spend tiers, and the gap between the enhanced-data category and the standard one is several times smaller there.

Same configuration work either way. Very different return. Anyone quoting you a headline saving without first asking which cards your customers present is guessing.

We are not going to reprint the rates here. Interchange changes every April and October, and a number copied into an article is wrong within months — which is exactly how the advice this note corrects came to be wrong in the first place. Visa publishes the current schedule itself, and it is linked at the end of this note. Read it there, where it is right.

Two details that get left out

Visa checks the data now. Since 17 October 2025 submissions are validated rather than merely accepted, and placeholder or templated line items are reported not to qualify. A gateway can be configured, appear to be working, send Item × 1 on every line, and earn nothing. Configured and qualifying are different states, and only one of them shows up on a qualification report.

There is a participation fee. CEDP carries a participation fee on eligible commercial card transactions. It barely dents the saving on purchasing and corporate cards and matters a good deal more on small-business ones. Any figure quoted to you without netting it out is overstated.

What to check

1. Pull an interchange qualification report and split it by network. The answer is different for Visa and Mastercard now, and a blended view hides it.
2. On Visa, look for Commercial Product 3 or Business Product 3. Volume sitting in the standard commercial card-not-present category, or in non-qualified, is enhanced data that did not qualify.
3. On Mastercard, look for Data Rate II and Data Rate III as before.
4. Run a test transaction and have someone read the line items that actually arrived. Not whether the fields are switched on — what is in them.

If you are on tiered pricing, note that none of this may reach you. The qualification improvement lands inside a bucket your processor prices, and the saving can be absorbed before it gets to your statement. That is worth establishing before you pay anyone to do the integration work.

Our read

This is the least glamorous kind of saving and one of the most reliable, because it does not depend on negotiating with anyone. It is a data problem with a published price list attached.

It is also the kind of thing that quietly stops working and never announces itself. If nobody has looked at your commercial card qualification since April, that is the thing to look at.