Chargeback Time Limits: How Long Customers Have to Dispute a Charge, and How Long You Have to Respond

Ask how long a customer has to file a chargeback and most people will say 120 days. That is the right number for a lot of transactions, but it hides three things that matter to a merchant. The 120 days does not always start on the day you charged the card. For some disputes it can stretch as far as 540 days. And the window you have to respond is a small fraction of the window the customer has to complain. This guide sets out the actual limits in the card network rules, where the clock starts for each kind of dispute, and what that means for how long your exposure on a sale really lasts. Visa figures are from the Visa Core Rules and Visa Product and Service Rules edition dated 18 April 2026. Mastercard figures are from its Chargeback Guide, Merchant Edition, dated 30 April 2024, the most recent edition we could obtain in full.

Two clocks: the cardholder's rights and the issuer's chargeback window

Two different sets of deadlines get blurred together. The first is the cardholder's legal right to dispute a billing error with their bank. For credit cards, the Fair Credit Billing Act protects a written billing-error notice the card issuer receives within 60 days after it sent the statement showing the charge (15 U.S.C. 1666). For debit cards, Regulation E sets a similar 60-day window from the statement on which an electronic transfer error first appears (12 CFR 1005.11).

The second is the card network's time limit on the issuer. That is the deadline that decides whether the issuing bank can push the transaction back to your acquirer, and from there to your merchant account. The network limits are set in the Visa and Mastercard rulebooks, they generally run longer than the statutory 60 days, and they are measured per dispute type. When a merchant asks how long a customer can charge back, the network window is the one that answers the question.

Visa: 120 days, measured from different dates

Visa groups disputes into four categories: fraud (10), authorization (11), processing errors (12) and consumer disputes (13). Each dispute condition has its own time limit. The common ones:

• Card-absent fraud (condition 10.4): 120 calendar days from the Transaction Processing Date.
• No authorization or late presentment (11.3): 75 calendar days from the Transaction Processing Date.
• Processing errors such as an incorrect transaction code (12.2) or duplicate processing and paid by other means (12.6): 120 calendar days from the Transaction Processing Date.
• Cancelled recurring transaction (13.2): 120 calendar days from the Transaction Processing Date.
• Merchandise or services not received (13.1): 120 calendar days from either the Transaction Processing Date or the last date the cardholder expected to receive the merchandise or services, capped at 540 calendar days from the Transaction Processing Date.
• Not as described or defective (13.3) and misrepresentation (13.5): 120 calendar days from the Transaction Processing Date or the date the cardholder received the merchandise or services, or 60 days from the issuer's first notice if the cardholder was negotiating with the merchant within 120 days of processing; either way no later than 540 days from the Transaction Processing Date.
• Credit not processed (13.6): 120 calendar days from the date on the credit receipt, no later than 540 days from the Transaction Processing Date.
• Cancelled merchandise or services (13.7): 120 calendar days from the Transaction Processing Date or the date the cardholder received or expected to receive the goods or services, no later than 540 days from the Transaction Processing Date.

Several consumer-dispute conditions also impose a waiting period before the issuer may file at all, which gives you room to fix the problem first. Under 13.3, 13.6 and 13.7 the issuer must generally wait 15 calendar days from the return, cancellation or credit receipt date. Under 13.1 the wait is 15 days from the relevant date, or 30 days for travel agencies and tour operators (MCC 4722) and third-party ticket sellers after a cancelled service. The waiting periods do not apply where they would push the dispute past its time limit, and some do not apply if you refuse the return or cancellation.

One recent change matters to subscription merchants. Effective for disputes processed on or after 18 April 2026, Visa treats a cancelled recurring transaction dispute as invalid when the cardholder's cancellation came after the date of the transaction. A customer who cancels the day after a renewal cannot use 13.2 to recover that renewal. That only helps you if you can show when the cancellation actually happened, so a timestamped cancellation record is now part of your evidence file.

Mastercard: the same 120 days, different starting points

Mastercard's Chargeback Guide sets comparable limits under its own reason codes, measured from the Central Site Business Date, Mastercard's processing date for the transaction:

• No cardholder authorization (4837, the fraud code): within 120 calendar days of the Central Site Business Date.
• Authorization-related chargebacks (4808): within 90 calendar days of the Central Site Business Date.
• Cardholder dispute (4853), which covers goods or services that were defective or not as described, among other conditions: between 15 and 120 calendar days from either the settlement date or the delivery or cancellation date, and for interruption of ongoing services within 120 days from when the services ceased, to a maximum of 540 days from settlement.
• Goods or services not provided, another condition charged back under 4853: where you did not specify a delivery date, the issuer must wait 30 calendar days from the transaction date and file no later than 120 days from settlement; where you did specify one, within 120 days of the latest anticipated delivery or performance date you gave; and for interrupted services, within 120 days of when the cardholder became aware the service stopped, never later than 540 days after the original transaction was presented.

The Mastercard rules include narrower windows for some domestic markets, including Mainland China, and both networks carve out regional exceptions throughout. The figures above are the ones that apply to ordinary US transactions.

Why 540 days matters more for high-risk business models

For a merchant that ships the same day, the 120-day window is effectively the whole story: the clock starts when the charge settles and ends four months later. The longer tail belongs to merchants whose customers pay now and receive later. For those disputes the rules start the clock from the expected delivery or service date rather than the sale, so a preorder that never ships can be disputed long after the charge settled.

That describes a large share of the businesses mainstream processors decline: preorders and backorders, event tickets, travel, memberships and prepaid service packages, annual plans billed up front, coaching programs delivered over months, and any continuity product where the service can stop partway through. For those models a sale can come back as a chargeback well over a year after it cleared, up to the 540-day ceiling. It is also why acquirers that underwrite future-delivery merchants look hard at delivery timelines, and why they often hold a reserve after an account closes rather than paying out the final balance on the day processing stops.

Your clock is much shorter

The customer's window runs to months. Yours runs to days. Under the Visa rules, for processing-error and consumer disputes the acquirer's dispute response, the stage most people call representment, must be made within 30 calendar days of the Dispute Processing Date. For fraud and authorization disputes there is no separate response stage: the acquirer's challenge is itself a pre-arbitration attempt, and it too must be made within 30 calendar days. At Mastercard, the second presentment, its term for representment, must be submitted within 45 calendar days of the chargeback settlement date for most transactions.

Those are the deadlines for your acquirer, not for you. Your processor has to receive your evidence, review it and submit it before the network deadline, so the deadline in your merchant agreement will be earlier, and it is set by contract rather than by the networks. Read that clause and put the real number on your calendar. American Express works the same way for merchants who accept Amex through a processor: its April 2026 Merchant Operating Guide directs merchants to their Merchant Services Provider for the applicable response time frames, and Amex's own dispute guidance tells merchants to respond by the reply-by date shown for each case.

Missing the deadline is a loss. A chargeback your processor does not answer in time stands, whatever evidence you could have produced. What happens after a response, when the issuer and acquirer argue through pre-arbitration and arbitration, is covered in our guide to chargeback pre-arbitration and arbitration.

Refunds and the clock

A refund you issue before a dispute is filed can resolve it, but only if the issuer can match the refund to the sale. Visa's rules require an issuer that receives a dispute on a transaction already credited to apply that credit, or explain why it does not resolve the dispute. If the credit details do not match the sale, or you have not told the issuer the credit relates to the disputed transaction, the issuer may only apply that credit to a transaction no older than 120 calendar days from the dispute. Refunding against the original transaction, on the original card, is what makes a refund count.

The credit-not-processed dispute (13.6) runs from the date on the credit receipt you gave the customer. If you acknowledge a refund and it never posts, the customer's 120 days start from that receipt, not from the original sale, up to 540 days after the sale.

What to do with this

1. Keep transaction evidence for at least 540 days on anything delivered in the future or over time: order records, delivery confirmation, service logs, signed terms and customer correspondence. For same-day goods, keep it for comfortably longer than 120 days after delivery.
2. State delivery and performance dates in writing at checkout. Both networks measure non-delivery disputes from the date you promised; where no date was given, the issuer can file after a short wait of 15 or 30 days.
3. Calendar your processor's response deadline, not the network's. The contractual deadline is the one that decides whether your evidence gets submitted.
4. Refund against the original transaction, quickly, and keep proof that it posted. A refund the issuer cannot match to the sale may not stop a dispute.
5. Timestamp every subscription cancellation and stop billing at once. Under Visa's April 2026 rule, a cancellation dated after the renewal defeats a cancelled recurring dispute, but only if your records show the date.
6. Plan for the tail. If you sell preorders, travel, tickets or long-running services, budget for chargebacks arriving long after the sale, and expect a reserve that outlasts your processing relationship.

How PayKings approaches it

Long dispute windows are one of the main reasons high-risk merchants are underwritten differently: the bank is not just pricing today's sales but the chargebacks that can arrive on them for months afterwards. PayKings places merchants with acquiring banks that underwrite these models deliberately. When you apply, expect to be asked how and when you deliver, how you handle cancellations and refunds, and what your dispute history looks like, and ask in turn what the response deadline in your agreement is. If your business model carries a long chargeback tail and you want to know how an acquirer will view it, talk to a PayKings specialist about a high-risk merchant account.