The core capture charge on your merchant statement is a per-transaction Mastercard network fee that your processor has relabeled. “Core capture” is not a name Mastercard uses in its own fee schedule. It is a descriptor processors apply to one of Mastercard’s acquirer assessments, most often the flat per-transaction fee tied to clearing and settling a sale. Knowing which official fee sits behind the label lets you check whether the amount on your statement matches what Mastercard actually charges.
What the Charge Pays For
Every Mastercard sale moves through authorization, clearing, and settlement. The core capture line is tied to the clearing and settlement side, where your batch of approved transactions gets processed and the money lands in your bank account. Mastercard charges acquirers (the banks and processors that serve merchants) network assessment fees to fund the infrastructure behind that movement, including fraud detection, routing, and cross-border standardization. These assessments are separate from interchange, which goes to the bank that issued your customer’s card.
Which Mastercard Fee It Probably Is
Mastercard publishes several acquirer-facing fees, and none of them are called “core capture.” The three most common ones your processor may be relabeling are:
- Acquirer Brand Volume Assessment, a percentage-based fee of roughly 0.13% on Mastercard sales, with a small annual acquirer license component.
- Network Access and Brand Usage (NABU) fee, a flat $0.0195 per transaction, applied to each domestic authorization and again to each settlement-only or refund transaction.
- Digital Enablement Fee, 0.02% (with a $0.20 minimum) on card-not-present transactions, rising to a flat $0.40 on transactions of $1,000 or more.
If your core capture line is a flat per-transaction amount rather than a percentage, NABU is almost certainly what it corresponds to. Some processors roll multiple small Mastercard fees under one descriptor; others split them across several. The labeling is at the processor’s discretion, which is why the phrase appears on some statements and not others.
An earlier version of information circulating about this charge quoted $0.015 per transaction. That figure does not appear in any current Mastercard fee schedule. The closest verifiable per-transaction fee is NABU at $0.0195. If your statement shows a different per-transaction number, your processor may be passing through a combination of micro-fees, applying a markup, or working from an older rate.
Finding and Verifying It on Your Statement
Look for a section labeled “Assessment Fees,” “Network Fees,” or “Card Brand Fees.” The charge may appear as “MC Core Capture,” “MC Network Access,” “NABU,” or “Mastercard Assessment.” Processors are not required to use Mastercard’s official names, so the wording varies from statement to statement.
To check the math, multiply your Mastercard transaction count for the month by the per-transaction rate shown. Two thousand transactions at $0.0195 each should come to $39.00. If the numbers don’t multiply cleanly, your processor is either bundling multiple fees under one label or adding a markup on top of the network rate. Neither is automatically wrong, but you should know which it is.
Whether you can see the charge at all depends on your pricing model:
- Interchange-plus pricing passes network costs through at their actual rates and shows the processor’s markup as a separate line. The core capture charge appears as its own item and can be audited directly.
- Tiered pricing sorts transactions into qualified, mid-qualified, and non-qualified buckets. Network fees are baked into the bucket rates, so there is no separate line to verify.
- Flat-rate pricing from services like Stripe or Square folds everything into a single per-transaction rate. The assessment is in there, but it isn’t broken out.
Interchange-plus is the only model that lets you confirm your processor is passing through the actual Mastercard rate rather than inflating it.
Why Small Tickets Feel It More
The core capture charge is a flat-dollar amount per transaction, not a percentage of the sale. A $5 coffee and a $500 electronics purchase both trigger the same fee, so the effective percentage cost on small sales is much higher. Businesses running a high volume of low-dollar transactions carry a heavier assessment burden per revenue dollar than those processing fewer, larger sales.
Mastercard updates these rates periodically, so the amount on your statement today may not match what you saw a year ago. Your processor should be able to tell you which Mastercard fee each line item maps to. If they can’t, that is worth pressing on.
Which Transactions Trigger It
The fee hits transactions that complete the full path from authorization through settlement. A sale that is authorized and then voided before the batch settles generally does not incur the clearing-stage fee, because the transaction never enters the settlement system. Voiding early saves the charge and keeps reconciliation cleaner than refunding after settlement.
Both card-present transactions (tap, chip, swipe) and card-not-present transactions (online, phone) are subject to the fee. Mastercard does not exempt merchants from network assessments based on industry, size, or nonprofit status. Refunds that have already settled generate their own clearing activity and can trigger a separate settlement-side NABU charge. The practical rule: void mistakes quickly rather than letting them settle and refunding later.
Can You Lower It?
Network assessment fees are set by Mastercard and are not negotiable. Your processor cannot reduce what Mastercard charges, and switching processors won’t change the network rate either. Every processor that handles Mastercard pays the same assessments.
What you can negotiate is the processor’s markup on top of the network cost. If your per-transaction fee runs noticeably above the published NABU rate, the difference is processor margin, and that portion is fair game. Moving to an interchange-plus processor will not lower the network fee itself, but it will let you see exactly what you are paying and confirm nothing extra has been tacked on.
The one operational way to shrink your total assessment cost is to void transactions before they settle. A voided sale that never enters the clearing system avoids the settlement-stage fee entirely. The savings per transaction are small, but they add up for merchants with any meaningful rate of cancellations or corrections.