Mastercard's new NABU fee lands on Canadian statements

Published November 2, 2026 · Event effective October 19, 2026 · CELER Merchants news desk

Mastercard made a quiet but permanent change to how it prices Canadian card authorizations last month. Effective October 19, 2026, Mastercard stopped charging its long-standing Acquirer Clearing Fee in Canada and introduced a new per-authorization fee it calls the Acquirer Network Access and Brand Usage fee, or NABU. The change was flagged to merchants through processor fee-update notices rather than a merchant-facing announcement, which is typical for interchange-adjacent network fees.

NABU is charged on every authorization, with a lower rate for domestic cards and a higher rate for foreign-issued cards, plus smaller rates for authorization reversals. The retired Acquirer Clearing Fee worked differently: it was a flat per-ticket fee that varied by transaction size rather than card origin. Processor notices describe the first appearance of both the new charge and the discontinued one on October 2026 merchant statements.

The amounts are fractions of a cent per transaction, so the net effect depends entirely on a merchant's mix of domestic versus foreign-issued cards and transaction count. A business with mostly domestic cards and a per-ticket size that previously triggered the large-ticket Acquirer Clearing Fee may see a small net saving; a business with more foreign card traffic may see a small net increase. Either way, it is a network fee set by Mastercard, not a processor markup — so it should pass through unchanged regardless of which processor a merchant uses, though how it is labelled on the statement depends on the pricing model.

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