Visa and Mastercard agreed in late 2024 to pay $199.5 million to settle a nine-year merchant lawsuit over rejected-transaction liability, with American Express and Discover settling separately for $32.2 million. As of April 2026, the deal has cleared final court approval, payments to the merchant class have begun, and the rewards-side impact on consumers has played out exactly as the networks said it would: nothing visible at the cardholder level.
The case, B & R Supermarket and Grove Liquors v. Visa et al., was filed in 2016 by a group of Florida retailers who alleged the four networks conspired to push billions in fraud-and-chargeback liability onto merchants without an appeal mechanism. The settlement closed an antitrust complaint that had survived summary judgment and was on track for trial.
What the merchants alleged, and what got resolved
The retailers argued the networks' rejection-and-chargeback rules amounted to an antitrust violation. When a transaction was declined, disputed, or charged back, the merchant absorbed the cost, even when the cause was on the issuing-bank or network side rather than at the point of sale. American Express and Discover settled first, for $32.2 million combined. Visa and Mastercard held out, then settled in late 2024 at $199.5 million. Total class recovery: $231.7 million, neither network admitting wrongdoing.
The court granted final approval in early 2025, and the claims administrator began distributing payments to the merchant class in mid-2025. The settlement closed the case. It did not change the underlying network rules on chargebacks or fraud liability, which still operate the way they did before the suit was filed.
What's actually changed in the 14 months since
For consumers, the answer remains: not much. The networks' interchange-fee structures, rewards funding, and acceptance footprints are unchanged. Visa and Mastercard each processed record transaction volume in 2025, according to their respective Q4 2025 earnings releases, and both reaffirmed reward-program economics in investor calls.
Where there has been movement is on adjacent merchant-network tension. The much larger Visa-Mastercard interchange-fee class settlement, the long-running case unrelated to B & R Supermarket, received renewed scrutiny in 2025 after a federal judge rejected the proposed terms a second time. That case, which actually does touch interchange rates and could meaningfully affect merchant economics, is the one to watch in 2026, not the rejected-transaction settlement that just closed.
Why the settlement is small in network terms
Visa processed roughly $15 trillion in payment volume in fiscal 2025, per its annual report. Mastercard processed about $10 trillion. A $199.5 million settlement against that base is a rounding error, which is why the networks settled rather than continued litigation costs. Merchants got a real recovery and a closed case. The networks got the dispute off the docket and a no-admission resolution. Cardholders got nothing because cardholders were never the issue.
The Durbin Amendment, which capped debit interchange in 2011, remains the only consumer-adjacent regulatory change to materially affect U.S. card economics in the last 15 years. Credit-card interchange caps remain unlegislated, and the Credit Card Competition Act, reintroduced in the 119th Congress, has not advanced as of April 2026.
What this actually means for your card strategy in 2026
If you collect points through a Chase, Citi, Amex, or Capital One card, the 14 months since the settlement haven't given you anything to act on. Acceptance is unchanged. Rewards multipliers are unchanged. Network-level transaction processing is unchanged. The settlement was a merchant-versus-network dispute about who eats the cost of declined transactions, not a cardholder-facing event.
What is worth tracking in 2026 is the bigger picture this settlement is one piece of: an active legal and regulatory environment around card-network economics. The interchange class action, periodic CFPB rulemaking, and the slow Credit Card Competition Act lobbying fight are all happening simultaneously. Any of those, if they move, could affect interchange revenue, which is what funds the rewards programs you actually care about.
For now, none of those have moved enough to change card strategy. The Chase Sapphire Preferred, Citi Strata Premier, Capital One Venture X, and the rest of the major rewards stack are earning what they were earning a year ago.
What to watch through the rest of 2026
Three things to keep on your radar, in order of how much they'd matter to a points collector:
The interchange-fee class action. If the court approves a revised settlement that lowers credit-card interchange rates, issuer-funded rewards budgets are the obvious place that pressure shows up.
The Credit Card Competition Act. Routing-mandate legislation that would force a non-Visa, non-Mastercard option on the back of every credit card. Bank lobbyists have killed it twice. If it moves in 2026, expect issuers to telegraph rewards changes.
CFPB enforcement on late fees and rewards disclosures. The agency's 2024 late-fee rule was vacated, but disclosure-side rulemaking on rewards-program changes has been quietly active. None of this affects the rewards math today, but it's where future changes would show up first.
The B & R Supermarket settlement is closed. The check has cleared. The cards in your wallet still work the way they did before, and the strategy that was working in late 2024 is still working in April 2026.
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