Credit Card Competition Act of 2026

Key Points

• The bill requires the Federal Reserve to write rules forcing the biggest card-issuing banks to offer more than one payment network on their credit cards, instead of letting one network control all the routing.
• Only banks with more than $100 billion in assets are covered, and the second network offered generally cannot be one of the two networks that already hold the largest market share, meaning it usually can't be Visa or Mastercard alone.
• Merchants would gain new legal protections against being penalized or blocked by banks or networks for choosing to route a transaction through a competing network.
• The Federal Reserve, working with the Treasury Department, must create and regularly update a public list of payment networks considered a national security risk or owned by a foreign government, and those networks cannot be used to satisfy the new routing requirement.
• Credit cards issued under a 3-party model, where the same company is both the issuer and the network, such as American Express, are exempt from these new routing rules.