We put it in your feed within minutes of us receiving and processing it from Mastercard. You can think of refunds as reverse collections/presentments so are subject to a delay of very roughly 1–3 banking days from the time the merchant sends it to the time it arrives with us in a Mastercard clearing file.
In many (but not all) cases, we will receive the “till time” for a payment. This is generally the time that the refund was issued at the till. When this happens, the service will attempt to show you the date that the file says that refund was created in addition to the date and time we received it in the feed as normal.
In many cases where a merchant issues a refund while the transaction is still pending, a merchant can send us an instant Mastercard message to reverse the authorisation as no longer needed. This can only be done before they collect the money though!
In the real world, most merchants don’t bother to reverse the authorisation and will just leave it to expire. When this happens, you can either wait for the full 7–8 day expiry time from the date of the original transaction (30 days in a small number of cases including hotels and car hire) or if you require the refund urgently, check that the original transaction is still pending and send a refund receipt along to us in support. 