Merchant Buying Groups: A New Way to Negotiate With Visa
Merchant Buying Groups Could Let Small Businesses Negotiate Interchange Directly
For almost twenty years, the price a small business pays to accept a Visa or Mastercard credit card has been effectively non-negotiable. Interchange rates are set by the card networks on published schedules, and an individual coffee shop or dental practice has had no more ability to negotiate those rates than it has to negotiate the price of electricity. The proposed 2025 settlement in the long-running swipe-fee litigation introduces something that, on paper, changes that: merchant buying groups.
The idea is collective bargaining. Rather than each business accepting whatever rate the networks publish, merchants would be able to band together into not-for-profit buying groups, and the networks would be required to negotiate interchange rates with those groups — a right that, in practice, only the largest national retailers have ever exercised on their own.
That is the promise. The reality is more complicated, the provision is not final, and for most small businesses the practical takeaway is different from what the headline suggests. This post explains what merchant buying groups actually are, where the provision stands, and what a small merchant should do about their rates today rather than waiting on a settlement that may not survive in its current form.
Under the proposed settlement, the purpose of forming a buying group is to negotiate directly with Visa and Mastercard on interchange rates and rate categories, network rules and fees, and other operational practices that affect merchants. It is the collective-bargaining mechanism small merchants have never had — pooling volume so a group has leverage a single small business never could.
The 2025 Settlement That Created the Idea
Merchant buying groups exist only because of a specific provision in the settlement Visa and Mastercard proposed on November 10, 2025 — the networks’ second attempt to resolve litigation that dates back to 2005, after a federal judge rejected an earlier 2024 version. Among the settlement’s components, the networks agreed they must negotiate interchange with merchant buying groups, alongside a reduction in the average effective credit interchange rate of about ten basis points for roughly five years and new flexibility on surcharging.
The buying-group provision is paired with a merchant education program intended to help businesses understand the new rules, including how to form or join a buying group and how to use the settlement’s cost-reduction tools. For the broader picture of everything the settlement changes — interchange caps, the modified honor-all-cards rule, and surcharging — see our full breakdown of what the 2026 Visa-Mastercard settlement means for your rates.
The interchange reductions in the settlement are not permanent. They run for a limited window — roughly three to five years depending on the component — after which fees can return toward their prior levels. Any rate advantage a buying group negotiates would sit on top of a baseline that is only temporarily lowered, not structurally reset.
Why Merchant Buying Groups May Not Arrive as Advertised
The most important fact about merchant buying groups is the one most easily lost in the headlines: the settlement that creates them is not approved. It is a proposed agreement negotiated between the card networks and class-action attorneys, and it is currently moving through judicial review — the same review that killed the 2024 version.
It is also actively opposed by the merchant groups that claim to represent the industry. The National Association of Convenience Stores, the National Retail Federation, and Walmart all filed objections in December 2025, joined by consumer-advocacy groups in January 2026. Their criticism is blunt: they call the deal “smoke and mirrors” and “a drop in the bucket.” A central complaint is that the roughly ten-basis-point reduction is trivial — critics note average interchange rose about nine basis points between 2024 and 2025, meaning the settlement would leave rates close to where they sat in 2023, nearly two decades into the case.
What those groups actually want is the right for merchants to negotiate interchange with individual card issuers, not just collectively with the networks on published schedules. From their perspective, the buying-group provision is a partial answer to a problem they would rather solve at its root. Whether the provision survives judicial review intact, gets modified, or is rejected along with the rest of the settlement is genuinely unknown right now.
Even if the provision is approved exactly as written, forming or joining a buying group is not a near-term lever for a typical small business. The mechanics — organizing a not-for-profit group, reaching negotiating scale, actually sitting across from the networks — favor large coordinated merchants. A single small business waiting on a buying group to lower its rate is waiting on a process it has little ability to start or steer.
The Rate Lever You Actually Control Today
Here is the part that matters for a business owner reading this with a processing statement on the desk: interchange is only one layer of what you pay, and it is the layer you have the least control over — buying group or not. The layer you can change immediately is the processor markup stacked on top of interchange, and that is where most small-business overpayment actually lives.
Interchange is the cost the card networks set and pass to the issuing bank. Your processor adds its own margin above that, and on opaque pricing models — tiered pricing especially — that margin is deliberately hard to see. Moving to a transparent model such as interchange-plus pricing exposes exactly what your processor is charging over interchange, which is the number you can actually negotiate today without waiting on any settlement. To see how the models stack up, compare them side by side in our pricing model comparison.
The honest framing is this: merchant buying groups are a structural reform that may, eventually, shave a small amount off the interchange floor for those positioned to use them. Your processor markup is a cost you can reduce this quarter. The first is a headline; the second is money.
For most small and mid-sized merchants, the gap between what they pay and what they should pay is in processor markup and statement junk fees — not in the interchange the networks set. That gap is visible the moment you read the statement on an interchange-plus basis, and it is fixable now rather than years from now.
Frequently Asked Questions
Merchant buying groups are not-for-profit groups of merchants that, under the proposed 2025 Visa-Mastercard settlement, could band together to negotiate interchange rates and network rules directly with the card networks. The aim is to give smaller merchants the kind of collective bargaining leverage that only the largest national retailers have historically had.
Not yet, and possibly not in a form that helps you. The provision exists only in a settlement that is still under judicial review and is being opposed by major merchant and consumer groups. Even if approved as written, the practical mechanics of forming or joining a buying group favor large, coordinated merchants — it is not a near-term rate lever for a typical small business.
Focus on the layer you control: the processor markup above interchange. Moving to a transparent interchange-plus pricing model exposes exactly what your processor charges over the networks’ interchange, which is the negotiable number. For most small merchants, that markup — not interchange itself — is where overpayment lives, and it can be reduced now rather than waiting on a settlement.
More on the settlement and your pricing options
Don’t Wait on a Settlement. Find the Markup You’re Paying Now.
A merchant buying group, if it ever arrives for businesses your size, might trim the interchange floor by a fraction of a percent years from now. The markup your processor stacks on top of interchange is costing you today — and we can show you exactly how much. Send Brookside your last statement and we’ll read it on an interchange-plus basis, separate the network cost from your processor’s margin, and tell you what’s actually negotiable. Learn more about payment processing consumer protections from the CFPB.
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