How every estimate is built, and where it can be wrong
Holdeta doesn't know your bank's internal queue, and won't pretend to. What it knows are the published rules every hold must obey, the documented norms issuers follow, and the calendar. That's enough for an honest window. Never enough for a promise.
The three-stage model
Every hold release is modelled as a pipeline with three owners:
- Merchant stage (calendar days). How long this merchant type typically takes to finalize or reverse after the anchor event, same-day for fuel pumps, 0–3 days for hotel folios, 0–5 for rental agreement close-outs, 0–7 for retail refunds. These ranges come from how each industry's settlement actually works (night audits, batch-out, agreement review), not from wishful averages.
- Network stage. The release or capture message transits Visa/Mastercard/Amex/Discover in minutes to a day. More importantly, the network sets the backstop: the maximum authorization validity, after which the hold must die no matter what anyone does.
- Issuer stage (business days). Your bank posts the release: modelled per region (US 0–3 business days, UK/EU 0–2, Canada 0–4, Australia 1–5, elsewhere 1–5), with weekends and computed public holidays excluded. Prepaid cards add a documented penalty. US fuel gets a faster profile reflecting real-time clearing rules.
Earliest = fastest merchant + fastest issuer. Typical = the modal path. Latest realistic = slow merchant + slow issuer, capped at the backstop. If today is already past a boundary, the estimate switches to telling you what to do about it rather than predicting.
The network rules we rely on
| Rule | Value | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Visa authorization validity | 5 days card-present · 10 days online · 31 days lodging, vehicle rental, cruise | Visa's published authorization best-practice documentation ↗ |
| Visa reversal duty | within 24h of knowing the sale won't complete | Visa authorization & reversal processing requirements ↗ |
| Mastercard validity | 7 days final auth · 30 days pre-authorization | Mastercard Transaction Processing Rules ↗ |
| Fuel pre-auth cap (US) | up to $175 | 2022 Visa/Mastercard automated-fuel-dispenser update (raised from $125), widely documented by consumer press ↗ |
| Restaurant tip tolerance | final may exceed auth by ~20% | Network tip-tolerance rules for service merchants |
| EU/UK release duty | "without undue delay" once final amount known | PSD2 (Directive 2015/2366) art. 75 ↗; UK Payment Services Regulations 2017 reg. 78 |
| Amex / Discover validity | ~7 days / ~10 days typical | Issuer and processor documentation; less uniformly published. Estimates carry a lower confidence tag |
Calendars, computed. Never stale
Business-day math uses algorithmic holiday calendars for any year: US federal holidays (with observance shifts), UK bank holidays (with substitute days), euro-area TARGET closing days, Canadian statutory holidays and Australian national public holidays. Easter via the Meeus/Jones/Butcher computation. Regional and state holidays aren't modelled; around those, read estimates one day looser.
The confidence tag
- High: Visa/Mastercard, and a modelled region, the rules are published and the issuer norms well documented.
- Medium: Amex/Discover, or thinner documentation, the shape is right, the tails are wider.
- Low: prepaid cards, unknown networks or unmodelled regions. Treat the backstop date as the planning date.
What Holdeta deliberately does not do
- No fake precision. No "your hold releases at 2:47 PM Thursday." Nobody outside your bank can know that; anyone claiming to is selling something.
- No bank-by-bank claims. Individual banks change policies quietly and often. Where a bank publishes a figure, the country guides say so in general terms; the estimator never pretends to know your specific bank's queue.
- No data collection. The engine is one JavaScript file running in your browser. Your amounts, dates and card details never leave your device. There is no server to send them to. Verify with your browser's network tab.
Corrections
Found a rule that's changed, or a bank behaving differently at scale? Tell us. Sourced corrections ship fast.
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