How to Exit the Visa VAMP Program: Requirements and Timeline

What Is the Visa VAMP Program?

The Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program - VAMP - is Visa's primary mechanism for identifying and penalising merchants who generate disproportionately high volumes of chargebacks and fraud. Visa launched VAMP in 2025 as a replacement for two legacy programs: the Visa Dispute Monitoring Program (VDMP) and the Visa Fraud Monitoring Program (VFMP). Instead of tracking disputes and fraud separately, VAMP adds them together into one ratio.

VAMP operates through your acquiring bank. When Visa flags your account, it notifies your acquirer, who is then required to take action on Visa's behalf. You will typically receive a formal notification letter from your acquirer - not directly from Visa - informing you that you have been enrolled in VAMP and specifying your current tier.

Why does it matter? Because VAMP carries real financial consequences. Merchants in Excessive status pay a fee on every fraud report and dispute for as long as they stay above the threshold. At the most severe tier, the risk of having Visa acceptance rights permanently terminated - and placement on the MATCH list - can make it impossible to process card payments with any major network.

VAMP uses one metric. The VAMP ratio is TC40 fraud reports plus TC15 disputes in a month, divided by settled card-not-present transactions. A transaction reported as fraud that also becomes a dispute counts once. Refunding an order after a fraud report does not remove the TC40, and winning a dispute does not remove it from the count.

VAMP Thresholds

Merchants have a single VAMP status: Excessive. On 1 April 2026 Visa lowered the merchant threshold from 2.2% to 1.5% in the US, Canada, Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America; CEMEA stays at 2.2%. Acquirers are measured separately on their whole portfolio.

A merchant below 1,500 fraud reports and disputes a month is not identified by Visa even if its ratio is above 1.5% - but that ratio still feeds the acquirer's portfolio ratio, and acquirers watch it closely.

Exit Requirements

To exit Excessive status, a merchant must stay below the threshold - a VAMP ratio under 1.5% (2.2% in CEMEA), or fewer than 1,500 fraud reports and disputes - for three consecutive calendar months. Slipping back above it in the third month resets the clock.

There is no automatic release mechanism. Your acquirer will notify you when Visa confirms that the consecutive-month requirement has been met and that you are being removed from the program.

Until then, per-event fees continue for every fraud report and dispute. They are typically passed through by your acquirer as a line item on your processing statement, and acquirers may also hold more reserve funds or cap your monthly processing volume.

When Your Acquirer Sets the Bar

Acquirers are measured on their whole portfolio: Above Standard at 0.5% and Excessive at 0.7%. An acquirer near those levels has every reason to push merchants well below 1.5%, and may ask for a remediation plan, extra reserves or a lower ratio than Visa requires before it will keep processing for you.

If a merchant stays Excessive without measurable improvement, the acquirer may terminate the relationship. The merchant may then be placed on the MATCH list, making it extremely difficult to obtain a new merchant account with any acquirer.

How Long Does It Take to Exit VAMP?

The minimum time to exit VAMP is three consecutive calendar months of compliant ratios. In practice, most merchants need four to five months from the date they implement corrective measures to achieve an official exit. The gap exists because of data lags built into the way Visa counts the ratio.

Here is why: when you implement changes in Month 1, those changes affect the chargebacks that will be filed in future months - not the chargebacks that were already filed in Month 1. Since fraud reports and disputes arrive weeks after the original transaction, the full benefit of Month 1 improvements does not appear in your ratio until Month 2 or Month 3. The timeline below illustrates a realistic scenario:

This timeline assumes that the corrective measures implemented in Month 1 are effective and reduce the ratio to below 1.5% starting in Month 2. If the ratio takes longer to improve - perhaps because some legacy chargebacks are still working through the system - the timeline extends accordingly.

One important nuance: you do not need to wait until the official exit to stop accruing fines. Fees are assessed on your monthly ratio. If your ratio drops below the threshold, fees stop even while you are still completing the three-month compliance window.

6 Strategies to Reduce Your Dispute Ratio Fast

When you are in a VAMP program, speed matters. Every month of non-compliance adds fines and risk. Here are the highest-impact actions to take immediately.

Of these six strategies, the ones with the fastest impact on your ratio are typically (2) Verifi enrollment and (3) 3DS2 implementation. Both can reduce new chargebacks from being filed within days of activation. The others - root cause analysis, billing descriptors, proactive refunds - have cumulative effects that build over several months.

For merchants far above the threshold, no single measure will be sufficient. Typically, it requires implementing all of the above simultaneously and working with your acquirer to ensure that any systemic fraud issues (such as a compromised card-on-file dataset) are resolved at the source.

Check Your VAMP Ratio

Before you can exit VAMP, you need to know exactly where you stand. Use our free VAMP calculator to compute your current dispute ratio and forecast how many months it will take to exit based on your projected chargeback trajectory.

The calculator uses the same formula Visa uses: TC40 fraud reports plus TC15 disputes, divided by card-not-present transactions. It shows whether you are over the 1.5% threshold and the 1,500-event minimum, and estimates your monthly fee exposure.

If your business also processes Mastercard, be aware that Mastercard uses a different calculation method and has its own monitoring program with separate thresholds. Use our Mastercard fines calculator to check your exposure on that network as well. For merchants who need help managing their VAMP remediation plan end-to-end, our managed outsourcing service can handle the full dispute response process while you focus on root-cause fixes.