Chargeback Time Limits by Card Scheme

A chargeback time limit is the deadline the card scheme sets for a dispute. There are two of them on every case, and they belong to different parties. The first is how long the cardholder has to raise the dispute with their issuing bank. The second is how long the merchant and its acquirer have to answer that dispute with evidence, a step the schemes call representment or second presentment. Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover each publish their own windows, and they are not the same length.

Chargeback time limit by card scheme

The table below shows the standard windows published by the four major schemes. Read it as the common case, not as the only case: the exact deadline on a given dispute depends on the reason code, and a few codes run considerably longer than the standard window.

The deadline that binds you is your processor's, not the scheme's. Acquirers and payment providers subtract their own handling time from the scheme window before passing it on, so the working deadline is routinely 5–10 days. Since July 2025 several large processors set the Visa representment window at 9 days in the US and Canada and 18 days elsewhere. Plan against the number in your provider's portal, not against the number in the scheme rulebook.

Two practical readings of this table. First, the cardholder window is broadly similar across schemes, so a merchant cannot assume a payment is final after a month. Second, the response window is where schemes genuinely differ, and it is short: 20 days on American Express and Discover is less than three weeks to find the order, the delivery proof and the authentication record — and your processor may give you half of that.

When the dispute clock starts

The count rarely starts on the day the customer clicks pay. For goods and services that are delivered later, the schemes generally start the clock at the expected delivery or service date, which is why a pre-order taken in January can still be disputed in September. For a subscription, each billing event usually carries its own window.

This matters for how long you keep evidence. If the clock can start at delivery and run 120 days from there, then order records, delivery confirmation, the customer's IP and device data, and the 3-D Secure authentication result need to survive well beyond the payment itself. A merchant who archives evidence on a 90-day cycle will lose winnable cases purely on retention.

Visa dispute time limit in practice

Under Visa Claims Resolution, most disputes fall into two tracks. Fraud and authorisation cases are allocated: Visa decides liability from data it already holds, and the merchant's route is a pre-arbitration challenge rather than a classic defence. Consumer disputes such as goods not received or not as described are collaborative: the merchant answers with evidence inside the response window.

The Visa dispute time limit a merchant feels day to day is not the cardholder's 120 days and not even the scheme's own response window. It is whatever the acquirer or payment provider puts in the portal: since July 2025 several large processors set it at 9 days in the US and Canada and 18 days elsewhere, and many acquirers were already binding merchants to 5–10 days before that. Treat the scheme number as the outer edge and your provider's number as the real one.

Mastercard chargeback timeframe in practice

Mastercard runs its disputes under the Mastercard Dispute Resolution Initiative. The Mastercard chargeback timeframe gives the merchant 45 days for the second presentment, which is the answer to the first chargeback. That is fifteen days more than Visa, and the extra time is often the difference between a documented defence and an unanswered case.

The longer window does not mean a slower process is safe. Mastercard also applies pre-arbitration and arbitration stages after the second presentment, each with its own deadline and its own fees. A case that is answered late tends to become a case that is escalated, and escalation costs more than the disputed amount on small tickets.

How to keep the deadline from deciding the case

Most lost disputes are not lost on the merits. They are lost because nobody answered in time, or answered with evidence that did not match what the scheme asked for. Three habits close that gap:

1. Route the alert, not the email. A dispute notification that lands in a shared mailbox loses days. It should arrive in the same system that holds the transaction, attached to the order it disputes.
2. Assemble evidence once, at the time of payment. The authentication result, the device and IP data, the delivery confirmation and the refund policy shown at checkout are all available on the day of the sale and expensive to reconstruct four months later.
3. Track the response window per scheme. Twenty days on American Express and forty-five on Mastercard are not the same operational task, and a single internal SLA of 'respond within a month' silently fails one of them.

This is where the payment platform matters more than the dispute policy. When authorisation, authentication and settlement data sit in one place, the evidence package is assembled from records you already have rather than from four separate exports.