Visa Credit Card Interest Rates and Charges

The Visa Credit Card Interest Rates and Charges filing from ESL Federal Credit Union sets out a purchase APR of 10.25%–17.99%, no annual fee, a 12-month 0% opening period and a 18% penalty rate. The purchase rate sits at roughly the 28th percentile of the 4,587 agreements indexed here.

What the agreement puts on the record

ESL Federal Credit Union filed this agreement for Visa Credit Card Interest Rates and Charges with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It is issued on the Visa network and the filing runs two pages.

Terms captured from the document include a purchase rate, a penalty rate, an annual fee line, a late payment maximum and a grace period. A cash advance rate, a balance transfer rate and a foreign transaction fee are not stated.

The promotional period

The filing discloses a 0% introductory rate running 12 months. For that window, balances covered by the promotion accrue no interest at all.

About 458 agreements in this corpus carry a zero-percent opening rate; this is one of them.

What matters more than the promotion is the rate waiting behind it: 17.99%. A $2,500 balance that survives the promotional window costs roughly $493 a year from that point on.

The promotional window is therefore worth something on the order of $493 on $2,500, measured against the same balance priced at the standard rate for the same period.

Pricing the purchase rate

Purchases price between 10.25% and 17.99% under this filing. The 7.74-point gap between the two is material, and nothing in the agreement indicates where a given account would land.

The floor of that band sits at about the 12th percentile of filed purchase rates; the ceiling sits at about the 28th. In corpus terms the same card can be cheap or expensive depending on how it is priced.

This is disclosed as a variable rate. The number above is a snapshot: it tracks an index, so it changes without the agreement being amended.

This figure is the post-promotional rate. The introductory pricing is handled separately further down.

What a balance actually costs

Put $5,000 on the card and never reduce it, and twelve months of interest at the disclosed purchase rate comes to approximately $985.

Priced at the median of 21.99%, that balance would generate about $1,229 in a year — so this agreement comes in around $244 cheaper for the same debt.

Treat this as an illustration of what the disclosed rate does, not as a projection of a real account, which would be shaped by payments and by the fees described elsewhere in the filing.

The fee structure

There is no annual fee. That is the common case in this corpus — about 75% of the filings that disclose an annual fee at all disclose it as $0 — so it is a baseline expectation rather than a distinguishing feature.

What a missed payment costs

If the account defaults, the filing permits a rate of 18%. Among disclosing agreements here that ranks near the 19th percentile.

$25 is the disclosed ceiling on a late payment fee, placing it near the 32nd percentile of the set.

The grace period

25 days is the disclosed grace period for purchases — the interval in which paying in full costs nothing.

What is outside the disclosure

Absent from the captured terms: anything about cash advances, balance transfer terms and a foreign transaction fee. The original document is the place to look for any of these.

It is worth being explicit about scope: these filings record terms and pricing. They say nothing about rewards programmes, cardholder benefits, promotional offers or who the issuer will approve, and this review does not speculate about any of it.

How it sits in the issuer's own range

8 separate ESL Federal Credit Union filings appear in the corpus. Across that lineup purchase rates span 16.25% to 17.99%; this filing's 17.99% sits above 1 of the comparable ones.

Reading the agreement yourself

This summary stands or falls on the linked PDF — two pages. Agreements are amended over time, and the filing reflects the terms as submitted rather than as they stand today.

In short

The pricing here is middling by the standards of the index — 17.99% on purchases is near enough to typical.