Credit facility, deferred debit: the Belgian card glossary

“What does ouverture de crédit actually mean?” That question almost always comes too late, once the contract is signed. It is the only one of the ten words in this glossary with a definition in Belgian law. The other nine come from the payments trade, and nobody at the counter takes the time to explain them.

Which words describe what your card legally is?

These four words decide whether you signed a credit contract or just a payment arrangement. The National Bank can tell the difference.

Ouverture de crédit (credit facility)

A credit facility is a credit contract under which purchasing power, a sum of money or another means of payment is placed at the consumer's disposal, drawn in one or several instalments and repaid on agreed terms.

The definition comes from Book VII of the Belgian Code of Economic Law, and it has a very concrete consequence. You must be able to choose when and how much you draw, and to draw again once you have repaid. Most Belgian cards offering staggered repayment land in this box, and the contract then goes to the Central Individual Credit Register.

The zeroing period published by the FPS Economy frames how long the credit may stay drawn: twelve months at most where the credit amount is 3,000 euros or less, sixty months above that, the clock starting within two months of the first drawdown. Checked 18 August 2026. Registration is covered in our guide to the Central Individual Credit Register; Wikifin, the FSMA's financial education site, gives a neutral overview.

Débit différé (deferred debit)

Deferred debit is the settlement arrangement under which transactions over a period, usually a month, are pooled and taken from the current account in one go at the due date.

It is a calendar, nothing more. Belgian law does not know it as a category. A deferred-debit card repaid in full at every due date generates no interest at all. The day you tick staggered repayment, the credit reserve opens and the borrowing rate starts running.

Statutory maximum APRs on credit facilities, cards with staggered repayment included, fell by 1.5 percentage points on 1 June 2025 before being left unchanged on 1 December 2025, per the FPS Economy maximum rates. These ceilings are reassessed in March and September, so a variable-rate contract signed two years ago no longer carries the same maximum today. Our guide to credit versus debit cards sets out the two logics, and our guide to interest rates gives the rates issuers actually charge.

Débit immédiat (immediate debit)

Immediate debit is the arrangement under which each transaction is taken from the current account at the moment of payment, with no delay and no pooling.

The Bancontact card works this way, and so does every neobank card distributed in Belgium. No credit is granted, so nothing is registered at the National Bank, and the payment fails the moment the balance runs short.

Bancontact and Payconiq together processed 2.5 billion payments in 2024, all on immediate debit, and not one of them created a debt. If you hold a Belgian account as an expat, this is the card in your wallet by default. Our guide to contactless payment covers the in-store side.

Carte prépayée (prepaid card)

A prepaid card is a payment instrument whose spending capacity is limited to the funds loaded onto it in advance, with no current account behind it and no credit reserve.

It mostly serves to ring-fence a budget or equip a teenager. No credit contract behind it, so nothing lands at the Central Individual Credit Register, and no income check either.

One measurement we ran ourselves, and it surprised me: the query carte prépayée draws 720 searches a month in French-speaking Belgium per Google Ads Keyword Planner, measured 18 August 2026, but the demand goes elsewhere. Carte prépayée Proximus reaches 1,300 monthly searches, carte prépayée Orange 1,000. The word points to a telecom top-up far more often than to a bank payment instrument. Our dedicated guide to prepaid cards in Belgium sorts the genuinely banking offers.

What actually happens when you pay?

These three words describe the steps of a payment. They are enough to understand why an amount sits as pending for two days.

Autorisation (authorisation)

Authorisation is the message by which the terminal or the merchant site queries the card issuer, which checks the balance, the limit and the security rules, then answers yes or no within seconds.

An approved authorisation reserves the amount. It does not move the money yet. Hence the payment showing as pending in your app for a day or two, then settling with a label and a date that have changed.

Each of the 2.5 billion Bancontact and Payconiq payments made in 2024 triggered an online authorisation request. A decline is therefore rarely a technical glitch: it is a decision by your issuer, and the number to call is theirs. The rules applied online are set out in our guide to online shopping with a credit card.

Préautorisation (pre-authorisation)

A pre-authorisation is an authorisation for an estimated amount, which blocks part of your spending capacity as a guarantee without debiting the account.

This is the mechanism behind hotel deposits and car rentals. Petrol stations use it too, at the automatic pump. The amount is not taken: it becomes unavailable until the merchant completes the transaction or the hold expires. On a credit card it eats into your available limit. On a debit card it eats into real money in your account, and that is where a holiday gets complicated.

Watch the detail: no single Belgian rule fixes the release period. It depends on the issuer and the sector, and in principle runs from a few days to a month. It sits in your general conditions, a document people unfortunately open after the block rather than before. Our guide to renting a car with a credit card gives the amounts rental firms operating in Belgium actually hold.

Compensation (clearing)

Clearing is the step after authorisation: approved transactions are batched, then the amounts actually move between the merchant's bank and your card issuer.

It explains the gap between the moment you pay and the moment the line settles on your statement. The label gets more precise, and the final amount sometimes shifts by a few euros, typically after a tip or a fuel stop.

What that means for you: a pending amount has not left yet, and a cleared amount can no longer be cancelled by the merchant without a refund or a dispute. Our guide to credit card repayment explains how to read the two dates on a statement.

Which terms sit on the card itself?

These three are printed on the plastic or buried in the contract. Nobody explains them when you open the account.

Plafond de dépense (spending limit)

The spending limit is the maximum amount your card authorises over a given period, set contractually by the issuer and independent of your account balance.

Plenty of cardholders confuse it with the credit amount or with the available balance. Those are three different figures. On a Belgian card the limit can usually be revised on request, up or down, and a temporary increase before a trip takes a few days.

Our 18 August 2026 measurement gives a telling number: 10 monthly searches for limite dépense carte bancaire, as many for plafond dépense carte Visa. Which is to say, almost nobody looks up their limit before hitting it at the till. That is exactly why we wrote a full guide on the credit limit.

Co-badgeage (co-badging)

Co-badging is the fact that one card carries two payment brands, for instance Bancontact and Debit Mastercard, with the choice of brand belonging to the cardholder.

That choice is a European right. Regulation (EU) 2015/751 of 29 April 2015 on interchange fees provides that the consumer decides on the brand at the point of payment, and bans any terminal device restricting that choice.

The same regulation caps interchange at 0.2 % of the amount for a debit transaction and 0.3 % for a credit transaction, which explains a good part of card pricing in Europe. Since 2023 Belgian banks have replaced Maestro with Debit Mastercard on the second badge: the brand offered at the terminal changed, your right to choose did not. See our guides on Bancontact versus credit cards and Visa versus Mastercard.

BIN

The BIN, or Bank Identification Number, is the run of digits at the front of the card number identifying the network, the issuing institution and the card type.

The terminal reads it first. It routes the transaction to the right network and reveals along the way whether the card is debit or credit, before any authorisation is requested. That is why a rental desk declines a card in three seconds, without having keyed in a single amount.

Since April 2022 Visa and Mastercard have assigned eight-digit BINs instead of six, under standard ISO/IEC 7812-1, without the card number length moving, sixteen digits for most of the Belgian estate. Visa documents the transition in its eight-digit BIN technical note. The BIN is not secret, unlike the security code: our guide to credit card fraud separates what you may share from what you must never share.

Which term points to which document?

FAQ

Seven questions that come up as soon as someone opens their contract instead of filing it away. For what comes next, compare the offers with our comparison tool.