Glossary
Merchant category code (MCC)
A merchant category code, MCC, is a four-digit code from ISO 18245 that the acquirer assigns to a merchant to describe its business: 5411 for grocery stores, 5812 for restaurants, 7995 for gambling, 6051 for crypto and quasi-cash, 5968 for subscriptions sold by direct marketing. It travels in every authorisation and clearing record and decides the interchange rate, how issuers treat the payment, whether the scheme requires registration and whether the merchant is high-risk for the acquirer.
What the code decides
Interchange, since some categories have their own rates; issuer behaviour, since many banks block or challenge categories such as gambling or crypto; the schemes’ registration and monitoring programmes for high-risk codes, with fees and stricter chargeback thresholds; tax and regulatory treatment in some countries; and which acquirers will take the merchant at all.
Getting it right
The acquirer assigns the code from the merchant’s real activity at onboarding; a code chosen to look safer is miscoding, which the schemes fine and acquirers terminate. Merchants with several activities may need several merchant accounts; marketplaces pass the seller’s category where the scheme requires it.
On the platform
In Tranzify the category is recorded at the merchant’s onboarding, and terminals are assigned per merchant, so a high-risk merchant’s traffic goes only to the acquirers whose contracts allow its category; the reports per merchant and terminal show how that traffic performs.
Updated: 2026-11-08