scheme fee
A scheme fee is the charge a card scheme such as Visa or Mastercard makes to an acquirer for processing payments across its network. Acquirers pass it on to merchants, usually inside the merchant service charge. Unlike interchange, scheme fees are not capped in the UK.
Scheme fees are the part of a card bill that goes to the network itself rather than to the cardholder's bank or to the acquirer. They cover authorisation, clearing, settlement and a growing list of mandatory services, and they are charged to the acquirer, which passes them through.
They matter because they have been rising. The PSR's 2025 market review found that Mastercard and Visa raised their core scheme and processing fees to acquirers by at least 25% in real terms between 2017 and 2023, that the two schemes face ineffective competitive constraint, and that the fee information acquirers receive is complex and hard to use.
For a platform, scheme fees are a cost line that moves without warning, so a fee set as a fixed percentage above cost needs a pass-through clause. For a business, the watch point is a statement line labelled something like "scheme and processing fees" that was not on last year's bill. Ask the acquirer which scheme charge it maps to; under the PSR's transparency remedies they should be able to tell you.