Impact calculator

The Impact Calculator lets you estimate the environmental impact of a transaction in real time. It’s typically used in direct API integrations to surface meaningful insights for your customers and offer them ways to take action.

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See the API reference for payload examples.

What it does

• Calculates the carbon impact of a transaction (in grams and ounces) based on the following required fields:
  • Transaction amount and currency
  • Merchant country
  • Merchant category code (MCC). Learn more about MCCs.
• Provides real-world equivalents (e.g., “500km by car”, “67 phone charges”) so consumers can contextualise their footprint
• Returns a compensation amount required to balance the impact (including service fee)
• Suggests round-up options (with or without compensation)

For more information on how the carbon footprint is calculated, see Our carbon footprint methodology.

Key fields explained

• carbonImpact.grams or ounces → raw footprint value
• carbonImpact.equivalents → helps consumers visualise their impact
• compensation.compensationValue → compensation required to balance this specific transaction (includes service fee)
• roundUp → pre-calculated suggestions for “round-up to nearest” flows (with or without contribution)
• merchant → merchant details and MCC to ensure more accurate calculation
• calcReference → use the calcReference returned in the response to build an ImpactPay URL

Best practices

• Contextualise the data: pair the raw footprint with equivalents to make it relatable.
• Offer easy actions: use round-up flows for frictionless contributions.