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Merchant Category Code (MCC) Lookup

Search by code or by industry. More useful than knowing what a code is, is knowing why it affects money — see below.

Look up a Merchant Category Code

The 63 codes you meet most often. This is a quick reference, not the full ISO 18245 list (which runs to about a thousand).

MCC	Category	Notes

An MCC decides three things

Interchange. Supermarkets, fuel and utilities sit in lower brackets; travel and jewellery in higher ones. What the merchant pays per transaction is largely set by the MCC.

Rewards. "5% back on dining" is a rule on MCC, not on the merchant's name. That is why a restaurant inside a hotel often earns hotel rewards instead of dining rewards — the whole property bills under one code.

Blocks and risk. Codes like 7995 gambling and 6051 foreign currency / crypto are commonly declined outright by issuer policy, and what comes back is usually a generic 05 that explains nothing.

Who fixes a wrong category? The MCC is assigned by the acquirer when the merchant is boarded — not by the issuer, and not per transaction. So a mis-categorised merchant is mis-categorised for every cardholder, and stays that way until someone amends the boarding record. When a cardholder disputes missing rewards, the acquirer is the only party that can change it; the issuer genuinely cannot re-categorise someone else's merchant.

Where it sits in the message

MCC travels in DE18 (merchant type), four digits, and is echoed in clearing records. It is also one of the fields worth logging on every transaction: without it, "why was this declined?" and "why no cashback?" become unanswerable after the fact.

Merchant Category Code (MCC) Lookup

An MCC decides three things

Where it sits in the message

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