Credit Card Chargeback in Belgium: Full Guide

A parcel that never arrives and a debit you never authorised do not fall under the same text. The first one sits under the Visa and Mastercard rulebooks, which are contractual and which bind your issuer. The second sits under Book VII of the Belgian Code of Economic Law (Code de droit économique), which is statutory and which you can hold your bank to directly. The deadlines differ, the evidence required differs, and the party who has to prove something switches sides between the two regimes.

The word "chargeback" describes the first case. It gets used for both, constantly, including at the branch counter.

What Visa and Mastercard require from your issuer

A chargeback is an interbank operation. Your issuer debits the merchant's bank, the acquirer, using a reason code laid down in the network rulebook. The acquirer then passes the cost on to the merchant. At no point does the merchant have to agree, and that is what separates a chargeback from a refund negotiated directly.

The cycle is mapped out. You report the dispute to your issuer, which checks that the case fits an existing ground, then forwards it to the network with the matching reason code. The acquirer notifies the merchant, who has 30 days at Visa and 45 days at Mastercard to produce evidence and re-present the transaction. Silence from the merchant inside that window, and the money stays with you. Continued disagreement, and the network arbitrates, which stays rare.

These rules are not yours. The Visa Core Rules and the Mastercard Chargeback Guide address issuers and acquirers; the cardholder is not a party to them. It is not a consumer right, it is an obligation between banks that the consumer benefits from. The distinction turns very concrete the day your issuer declares your file inadmissible: you cannot hold the network rulebook against them, you can only hold your card contract against them and, if the transaction was unauthorised, Book VII. Both corpora are public and searchable, at Visa and at Mastercard, and neither contains an obligation running from the issuer to its own customer.

The two networks also codify grounds and response windows differently. Our Visa vs Mastercard comparison for Belgium sets out what each scheme guarantees on its own.

Which dispute grounds does the network accept?

The working list, in Belgium, fits inside the dropdown menu of the Worldline dispute form. It translates the network reason codes into boxes the cardholder ticks, and a situation missing from that menu is a file that will never leave.

Non-delivery. The goods or services never arrived. Worldline asks for a copy of the order confirmation or a detailed description, plus your correspondence with the merchant.

Goods returned or not as described. Merchandise sent back without a refund, or an item that is defective or different from the description. Dated proof of return is required in the first case.

Wrong amount or multiple debits. The sum does not match the agreed price, or the same card was charged several times for a single purchase.

Paid by another means. The purchase was ultimately settled some other way and the card was charged anyway. Proof of the second payment is needed.

Cancelled subscription. Charges continue after a cancellation. The form asks for a copy of your cancellation request and its exact date.

Cancelled event, trip or booking. Flight, hotel, car rental, cruise: a separate block of grounds, with the cancellation terms to attach.

Merchant bankruptcy. The business ceases trading before delivery. The bankruptcy notice is one of the expected documents.

Transaction you did not take part in. Card lost, stolen, never received, or the number used without your knowledge. This block switches to a different regime, covered further down.

Two conditions apply to almost all of these grounds, and they are not negotiable. Worldline requires that you contacted the merchant first, except for fraudulent transactions. And a file is only opened once the transaction appears on your monthly statement or in your banking app: a pending transaction cannot be disputed, and a credit card transaction cannot be blocked or cancelled once it is under way.

One detail of the form deserves a flag, because it closes a door many people assume is open: if your booking is non-refundable and you hold travel insurance, Worldline sends you to your insurer instead of opening a file. A dispute does not stand in for a card guarantee. Our credit card insurance guide breaks the cover down issuer by issuer.

Book VII opens a second channel, with its own deadlines

Book VII of the Belgian Code of Economic Law transposes the European payment services directive, and it never mentions chargeback. It speaks of an unauthorised payment transaction, a narrower notion and a far more favourable one for the payer.

Article VII.41 sets the reporting duty: without delay once you become aware of the transaction, and thirteen months after the debit date at the very latest. Article VII.43 requires the provider to refund the amount immediately, and by the end of the first business day following notification at the latest, restoring the account to the state it would have been in. Article VII.44 caps at 50 euros the share the payer carries before notification, a cap that drops to zero where strong customer authentication was not applied, and that falls away in the other direction in cases of fraudulent behaviour or gross negligence by the payer, two notions institutions invoke readily and that Belgian courts read more strictly than those institutions would like. The consolidated text is published on the official Belgian legislation portal.

The burden of proof is the other gap, and it is the heavier one. When you dispute having authorised a transaction, it falls to the provider to establish that it was authenticated, accurately recorded and entered in the accounts. Under a chargeback the exercise runs the other way: you are the one documenting the order, the missing delivery and the follow-up that went unanswered.

Where the two qualifications overlap, I push towards the unauthorised transaction, and I accept that this is arguable. A subscription renewed after cancellation reads either as a commercial dispute or as a run of transactions you no longer authorised. The second reading is harder to get accepted at the counter. It gives you thirteen months instead of three, and it puts the burden of proof on the other side.

Which deadline actually binds you: 120 days, 13 months or three months?

The clocks do not start from the same point, and that is what kills files that are sound on the merits.

The 120 days belong to the networks. Visa and Mastercard give the issuer 120 days to raise the chargeback, counted depending on the ground from the transaction processing date, the expected delivery date or the date the service was due. It is a bank-to-bank deadline.

The thirteen months are the statutory deadline in Article VII.41. They cover unauthorised transactions only, and they run from the debit date.

The three months are the deadline Worldline states on macarte.be: a dispute must be filed within three months of the date of the statement on which the transaction appears. It is the shortest of the three, and it is the one that concerns you, because it belongs to the channel your file has to travel through.

So the deadline binding you is almost never the longest one. A purchase processed on 3 January and carried on the 31 January statement has to be disputed through this channel before 30 April, while the network itself would still take a file in early May. The margin you think you have does not exist.

There is a floor as well, and it surprises people more. Worldline will not take a dispute filed less than fifteen days after the transaction date, nor less than fifteen days after the return date for returned merchandise. The usable window is bounded at both ends.

The channel, for its part, is more centralised than it looks. Fifteen issuers appear in the dropdown of the Worldline form as of 21 August 2026: Argenta, AXA, Bank J. Van Breda & Co, Banque CPH, Belfius, Beobank, BNP Paribas Fortis, bpost, CBC, Crelan, Deutsche Bank, ING Belgium, KBC, Nagelmackers and VDK. A Belgian credit card dispute therefore lands with the same operator, whatever brand is printed on the card. Processing times announced by the banks run from four to ten weeks, but the circuit is shared.

What I cannot give you is the success rate. No Belgian issuer publishes the share of disputes it actually carries to the network, nor the share that comes back as a credit on the cardholder's account. Worldline does not publish it either. Ombudsfin publishes its own statistics, but with no breakdown by institution or by dispute type. Ranking Belgian banks on that criterion is out of reach with the public data available on 21 August 2026, and I would rather write that down than fill the gap with an estimate.

Bancontact sits outside the chargeback system

Bancontact is a domestic scheme, the Belgian debit card network. An in-store payment validated by PIN on that rail falls under no Visa or Mastercard rulebook, therefore under no chargeback, and the Worldline form says so plainly: for a Bancontact, Maestro, Visa Debit or Mastercard Debit card, it sends you to your own bank's website or app. Close to 18 million Bancontact cards are in circulation in Belgium.

Replacing Maestro cards with Debit Mastercard cards, under way since 2023, shifts the border. Transactions routed over the Mastercard network, online purchases and payments abroad, come within the network rules. Local in-store payments do not.

Book VII ignores that distinction entirely. An unauthorised transaction on a Bancontact card opens exactly the same rights as on a credit card: thirteen months, refund by the first business day, payer's share capped. Credit-versus-debit comparisons routinely skip past this, and our credit card vs debit card guide restores the split.

What is Ombudsfin worth when your issuer says no?

A refusal should be requested in writing and with reasons. That document opens everything that follows, and plenty of files stop dead because nobody asked for it.

Ombudsfin is the mediation service for financial consumers in Belgium. Filing is free, it happens at ombudsfin.be, and the service has 90 calendar days to issue its opinion. That opinion binds nobody in law. Institutions follow it in the large majority of cases, which is not the same thing as an obligation.

The 2025 figures are worth reading closely. Ombudsfin received 8,686 requests, down 2% year on year, but declared 2,422 files admissible, a level never previously reached and up by more than 10%. Of the 2,164 files handled, the mediator found 781 justified, or 36%, against 41% in 2024. The successful mediation rate held at 82.5%. The annual reports are published on the Ombudsfin website.

For a purchase from a merchant established in another European Union country, the European Consumer Centre Belgium, the ECC, steps in free of charge and contacts its counterpart in the seller's country. For civil disputes up to 5,000 euros, the Justice of the Peace (juge de paix, Belgium's local small-claims court) remains competent, with a short and inexpensive procedure.

Fraud itself follows a different path, with Card Stop as the first step and a police report mandatory for a lost or stolen card. Our credit card fraud guide for Belgium walks through that chain.

One last point explains a good share of the fog around this subject. The 781 files found justified in 2025 cover the whole of financial services, credit and investments included, and the report does not isolate the share of card payment disputes. Nobody in this market therefore holds a numeric success rate for Belgian chargebacks, and the percentages you will see circulating come from somewhere else.