Payments glossary · Operations
Authorisation Rate (Approval Rate)
The authorisation rate, or approval rate, is the share of payment attempts that the issuer approves. It is a key measure of payment performance, because every legitimate transaction that is declined is a potential lost sale.
How Authorisation Rate works
It is usually calculated as approved authorisations divided by all authorisation attempts, but definitions vary. Some providers exclude retries or payments blocked by fraud screening, and others count per order rather than per attempt, so figures are only comparable when calculated the same way. Rates differ widely by region, card type, merchant category, and whether payments are domestic or cross-border, recurring or one-off.
Common reasons for declines include insufficient funds, expired or cancelled cards, suspected fraud, incorrect details, missing authentication and issuers' caution with cross-border or unfamiliar merchants. Levers that merchants and providers use include local acquiring; network tokens (Visa reports higher approval rates for tokenised card-not-present payments than for those using card numbers); correct flagging of stored-card and recurring payments; sending complete data in 3-D Secure and authorisation requests; account updater services; and retry and cascading strategies that respect scheme rules.
When comparing providers' claims about approval rates, ask for the definition used, whether the figures apply to your region and sector, and whether you can see decline codes in reporting. A higher approval rate is not always better if it comes with more fraud; the aim is to approve as many genuine customers as possible while keeping fraud and chargebacks within scheme limits.