Visa Secured Credit Card Interest Rates and Charges

ESL Federal Credit Union's filed agreement for Visa Secured Credit Card Interest Rates and Charges discloses a 16.25% purchase APR, no annual fee and a 18% penalty rate. Against the 4,587 filings on this site, that rate lands around the 18th percentile.

The disclosed terms

ESL Federal Credit Union submitted the terms for Visa Secured Credit Card Interest Rates and Charges to the CFPB's agreement database; this is what they contain. It is issued on the Visa network and the filing runs two pages.

The filing is explicit about a purchase rate, a penalty rate, an annual fee line, a late payment maximum and a grace period. No figure appears for a cash advance rate, a balance transfer rate and a foreign transaction fee.

Collateral and the deposit

Secured cards work against a deposit held by the issuer. The rate and fee figures summarised here say nothing about the size of that deposit or the terms attached to it, both of which are matters for the agreement text itself.

It is worth noting that collateral does not automatically mean a cheap rate: at 16.25%, this filing's purchase APR still sits at about the 18th percentile of the whole corpus, secured and unsecured filings alike.

How the purchase rate compares

Ranked against the corpus, this purchase APR — 16.25% — sits at approximately the 18th percentile and is comfortably below what most issuers filed.

The agreement labels the purchase rate variable, so the quoted figure reflects the index at the time of filing rather than a locked-in price.

The arithmetic of revolving

A $3,000 balance left untouched for twelve months accrues about $529 in interest at this purchase rate.

Priced at the median of 21.99%, that balance would generate about $738 in a year — so this agreement comes in around $208 cheaper for the same debt.

Per statement cycle that is on the order of $40.33 on $3,000, which is the number that actually shows up on a bill.

These figures are arithmetic on the disclosed rate, not a quote: they assume the balance is never reduced, ignore any payments, and take no account of fees charged separately.

The downside terms

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

The jump from 16.25% to 18% is 1.75 percentage points, worth roughly $21 extra per year on $1,000 of balance.

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

Fees, and what triggers them

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.

The grace period

Purchases carry a 25-day grace period: pay the statement in full inside it and the purchase rate never applies. That matches the 25-day median across the corpus almost exactly.

How it sits in the issuer's own range

ESL Federal Credit Union has 8 agreements indexed on this site. The others all file the same 17.99% purchase rate. Whatever separates these products, it is not the cost of borrowing.

The limits of this document

This page cannot tell you anything about cash advances, balance transfer terms and a foreign transaction fee, because the filing's disclosure table as read does not contain them.

What this analysis can address is bounded by the filing: rates, fees and the terms around them. Everything a card issuer might advertise — rewards, benefits, bonuses, who qualifies — falls outside the document and outside this review.

Reading the agreement yourself

Everything here is a reading of the filed agreement, two pages of it, which is linked above and which governs. Terms also change between filings, so the date on the document matters.

In short

16.25% places this filing at the inexpensive end of the set, which is the headline here.