Free Tool
VAMP Ratio Calculator
Check whether your chargeback and fraud ratios exceed Visa's VAMP thresholds — and estimate your monthly penalty exposure.
1Your business details
Fraud-coded chargebacks (Visa 10.4, MC 4840)
Your dispute ratio is within safe limits. Keep monitoring monthly.
2VAMP metrics
Dispute Ratio
chargebacks ÷ transactions
Threshold: 0.9%
Fraud Ratio
TC40 disputes ÷ transactions
Threshold: 0.9%
Total Chargeback Liability
chargebacks × (AOV $85 + $15 fee)
Per-chargeback cost estimate
Est. Monthly VAMP Penalty
Based on current ratio tier
$0/mo
VAMP Thresholds — US / CA
Safe
High Risk (0.65%+)
VAMP Standard (0.9%+)
VAMP Excessive (1.8%+)
VAMP Critical (2.0%+)
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What is VAMP?
Visa Acquirer Monitoring Programme — replaced VDMP and VFMP in October 2025. Monitors dispute and fraud rates monthly.
Full VAMP guide →How to exit VAMP
Win existing disputes, enable 3DS2, fix your billing descriptor, and proactively refund before chargebacks are filed.
Prevention strategies →Chargeback ratio guide
Understand how ratio is calculated, what buffers to maintain, and how to track it in real time.
Ratio guide →What Is the Visa VAMP Program?
The Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program (VAMP) launched in June 2025, replacing two older Visa monitoring programs: the Visa Dispute Monitoring Program (VDMP), which tracked formal dispute ratios, and the Visa Fraud Monitoring Program (VFMP), which tracked fraud rates separately. Under the old structure, a merchant could technically manage one ratio down while the other climbed. VAMP closes that gap by combining both signals into a single, unified ratio.
The core change is that VAMP counts TC40 fraud reports alongside TC15 dispute transactions. TC40s are fraud reports filed by issuing banks — they are not chargebacks in the traditional sense, and most merchants have no direct visibility into them. Under VDMP, those reports were invisible to your monitoring status. Under VAMP, they count toward your ratio just as much as a formal chargeback does.
This is the single most important thing merchants need to understand about VAMP: you can have a formally low chargeback rate — one that would have been fine under VDMP — and still be in the Excessive tier under VAMP if your issuing banks are filing a large number of TC40 fraud reports against your transactions. The combined ratio is what matters.
The program applies to card-absent (CNP) transactions only — primarily e-commerce, phone orders, and recurring billing. Card-present terminals are excluded from the ratio denominator. If your business processes both, the VAMP ratio may look more alarming than your overall dispute rate because the denominator is smaller.
How the VAMP Ratio Is Calculated
The VAMP ratio formula is:
Understanding each component is critical:
TC40 — Fraud Reports
TC40s are filed by the issuing bank when it suspects a fraudulent transaction on a card. They are not chargebacks — the cardholder does not necessarily file a dispute, and the merchant may never receive a notification. These reports have always existed, but they now count directly in your VAMP ratio. Merchants who rely on chargeback notification services to track their exposure are likely missing TC40 volume entirely.
TC15 — Dispute Transactions
TC15s include all dispute transactions filed by cardholders through their issuing bank. This includes disputes that may be resolved before becoming formal chargebacks. If a cardholder calls their bank and the bank opens a dispute code, that TC15 is counted — even if the merchant is never notified and the dispute is later closed without a representment.
Settled Card-Absent Transactions (Denominator)
Only CNP transactions count in the denominator. This is why merchants with mixed-channel businesses should calculate VAMP separately from their overall chargeback rate — the denominator is smaller, making the ratio appear higher.
Minimum Volume Threshold
A merchant must have at least 1,000 card-absent disputes per month to be subject to VAMP monitoring. Below that volume, even a high ratio does not trigger program entry. This threshold does not mean low-volume merchants are risk-free — it means Visa's monitoring focus is on merchants with meaningful CNP dispute volume.
VAMP Thresholds (Effective April 2026)
On April 1, 2026, Visa lowered the merchant “Excessive” threshold from 2.2% to 1.5%. Merchants who were operating comfortably below 2.2% may now be in the Excessive tier without realizing it. This is one of the most significant threshold changes Visa has made in years, and it catches many merchants off guard.
| Level | Merchant Threshold | Acquirer Threshold | Action |
|---|---|---|---|
| Early Warning | 0.4%–0.5% | < 0.5% | Notification sent to acquirer; no fine |
| Excessive | ≥ 1.5% (from Apr 1, 2026) | ≥ 0.5%–0.7% | Monitoring begins; fines levied to acquirer |
Note that the Early Warning level generates a notification to the acquirer but carries no direct fine. However, acquirers who receive repeated Early Warning notifications may proactively contact the merchant or impose their own risk conditions, such as increased reserves or transaction velocity limits. Reaching Early Warning is a signal to take preventive action before the Excessive tier becomes an issue.
Fines under VAMP are not published in the same explicit schedule as VDMP had. Visa assesses fines to the acquiring bank, which may pass them through to the merchant. The acquirer is ultimately responsible for their portfolio's VAMP performance — which means merchants whose ratios push their acquirer above the acquirer-level threshold (0.5%–0.7%) are at risk of the acquirer taking unilateral action, including terminating the merchant relationship entirely.
How to Reduce Your VAMP Ratio
1. Reduce Fraud Reports (TC40s) at the Source
Since TC40s are the less visible component of VAMP, reducing them has a disproportionate impact. The primary tool is Visa's Compelling Evidence 3.0 (CE3.0) framework, which lets you proactively demonstrate a history of legitimate transactions with the same device and cardholder attributes, shifting liability back to the issuer. Implementing 3D Secure 2 (3DS2) is equally important — when a transaction is authenticated through 3DS, the fraud liability shifts from merchant to issuer, reducing the issuer's motivation to file a TC40. Strong AVS (Address Verification Service) and CVV matching also reduce fraud approval rates, which lowers the pool of transactions that generate fraud reports.
2. Use Visa's Rapid Dispute Resolution (RDR) and Verifi Alerts
Verifi (a Visa-owned company) operates an Order Insight and RDR platform that intercepts disputes before they become formal TC15s. When a cardholder calls their bank to dispute a transaction, the bank can query Order Insight for transaction details — if the merchant provides compelling order information, many cardholders drop the dispute on the spot. RDR goes further: it can automatically issue a refund the moment a dispute is filed, preventing the TC15 from ever being recorded. For merchants with high dispute volume, RDR enrollment is one of the fastest ways to reduce VAMP exposure.
3. Monitor Your TC40 Activity
Most merchants have no visibility into their TC40 volume because TC40s are not routed to merchants — they go from issuer to Visa to acquirer. Ask your acquirer explicitly for TC40 reporting. Some acquirers provide this through their risk portal; others may need to pull it manually. If you are using a fraud intelligence service (such as Ethoca or Verifi's fraud alerts), you may be receiving early signals of TC40 activity that can be used to identify compromised customers or product lines. Merchants who don't monitor TC40s are effectively flying blind on half their VAMP ratio.
4. Fight Chargebacks You Can Win
While winning a representment does not retroactively remove the TC15 from your VAMP count in the same billing cycle it was filed, consistent win rates signal to issuers that your customers' disputes are not being ignored — which can reduce issuer propensity to file TC40s for similar transactions in the future. More practically, every won representment prevents a chargeback loss from accumulating as a financial cost, freeing resources to invest in prevention. Unanswered disputes are automatic losses and contribute to ratio degradation — responding to every dispute with solid evidence is baseline hygiene for any merchant concerned about VAMP.
5. Use Velocity Controls to Block Repeat Fraud Patterns
TC40s tend to cluster around specific card ranges, device fingerprints, or fulfillment patterns that have been compromised. Velocity controls at the gateway or fraud platform level can detect and block repeat fraud attempts before the transaction settles — preventing both the TC40 (since the fraudulent charge never occurs) and any downstream dispute. Rules to consider: limits on card retry frequency, BIN-level velocity caps during fraud spikes, device fingerprint blocking for known fraud devices, and IP/geolocation anomaly alerts. These are imperfect, but combined with 3DS, they meaningfully reduce the fraud transaction volume that generates TC40 reports.
How to Exit the VAMP Program
To exit VAMP monitoring, a merchant must maintain a ratio below the Excessive threshold for three consecutive months. There is no partial credit — a single month above threshold resets the clock. The process is acquirer-led: your acquirer submits a remediation plan to Visa, which outlines the root causes of the elevated ratio and the specific actions being taken to address them. Visa monitors the ratio for the three-month period and, if it remains below threshold, formally exits the account from monitoring status.
If the ratio does not improve after monitoring begins, Visa's enforcement escalates through the acquirer. The acquirer may be required to reduce the merchant's processing volume, increase reserves, or terminate the merchant relationship entirely. A terminated merchant account can be reported to the Terminated Merchant File (TMF), making it difficult or impossible to obtain another Visa-accepting merchant account.
The key insight about the three-month exit requirement is that it takes time for preventive measures to show up in the ratio. If you implement 3DS and Verifi RDR today, the ratio impact may not fully appear for 4–6 weeks. Starting remediation immediately, and maintaining it consistently, is the only reliable path to the three clean months needed to exit. Waiting to “see if things improve on their own” almost always costs more months in monitoring and more accumulated fines.