MCC Codes List: Merchant Category Codes by Industry

MCC codes by business category

Grouped the way you actually think about a merchant — "what kind of shop is this?" — with codes in ascending order inside each group. This table covers the 63 codes that show up most often in authorization traffic; the full ISO 18245 registry runs to roughly a thousand entries, most of which you will never see in practice.

Dining and drinking places

Retail and grocery

Digital goods

Transportation, travel and lodging

Financial services

Utilities, telecom and media

Entertainment and recreation

Professional and business services

Healthcare and education

Government, tax and non-profit

Where the MCC sits in an ISO 8583 message

The MCC travels in DE 18 (merchant type), four numeric digits, in authorization requests — see the field-by-field guide for where it sits among the other 127 fields, or paste a raw message into the parser and it will pull DE 18 out for you. The same code is echoed in clearing records, so it also drives how a transaction is categorized after settlement. There are worked messages with DE 18 populated in the message examples.

One fact matters more than any individual code: the MCC is assigned by the acquirer when the merchant is boarded. It is not chosen by the cardholder, not set by the issuer, and not decided per transaction. When you are staring at a decline and suspect the MCC, remember that the value in DE 18 was fixed months earlier in somebody's boarding record — every transaction from that merchant carries the same code, for every cardholder, until the boarding record is amended.

What an MCC actually changes

Four places where this one field decides real behavior:

• Issuer risk rules. Authorization policies routinely key on MCC. Codes like 7995 (gambling) and 6051 (foreign currency / crypto) are declined outright by many issuers as a standing rule — and what the terminal sees back is usually a generic 05 "do not honor" that says nothing about the real reason. If a card works everywhere except one merchant, check the MCC before anything else.
• Rewards and cashback. "5% back on dining" is implemented as a rule on MCC, not on merchant names. That is why the restaurant inside a hotel often earns hotel-category rewards: the whole property bills under one code, typically 7011.
• Cash-like treatment and installments. 6010 and 6011 are cash disbursement: interest from day one, no grace period, usually excluded from rewards. Some issuers extend the same treatment to 6051. Installment eligibility works the same way — issuers whitelist or blacklist MCCs for conversion to installments, which is why the option appears for a 5732 electronics purchase but not for a 6011 withdrawal.
• Reconciliation and reporting. A merchant boarded under the wrong MCC is the most common field problem in this area: transactions get declined by category rules they should never hit, or settle fine but land in the wrong bucket in every downstream report. Because the code lives in the boarding record, the error repeats on every transaction until the acquirer corrects it — the issuer cannot re-categorize someone else's merchant.

👉 Need to search rather than scan? The MCC lookup tool filters this same list by code or keyword. New to the concept? Start with what an MCC is.

Read next

• What Is an MCC (Merchant Category Code)?
• ISO 8583 Field Quick Reference
• ISO 8583 Message Examples, Field by Field