The card surcharge ban starts 1 October 2026. Here is what your business actually has to do.

The answer, before anything else

From Thursday 1 October 2026 you can no longer add a card surcharge on eftpos, Mastercard or Visa. Debit, prepaid and credit — all of it.

The ACCC states that American Express is introducing the same rule on the same day, which surprises most people, because Amex is not regulated by the Reserve Bank. It has chosen to move with everyone else.

The cost that surcharge was covering does not disappear. That is the whole of the problem, and the rest of this page is about it.

Does this apply to you?

Almost certainly yes.

It applies to every Australian business that accepts eftpos, Mastercard or Visa. There is no industry exemption and no size exemption. A café with four staff, a plumber invoicing from a ute, a physio taking a tap at the front desk, a shop, a salon, a sole trader with one terminal — all the same rule.

It applies online as well as in person. Your checkout, your booking deposits, your invoice payment links.

One thing it does not touch. A weekend or public holiday surcharge is not a card surcharge. It is a different thing under different rules, and this ban does not affect it.

The six jobs

1. Ring your payment provider this week

Not the last week of September, when everybody else does.

Ask three questions and write the answers down:

• Will surcharging switch off automatically on 1 October, or do I need to do it?
• Does that cover every terminal, plus online ordering and any payment links?
• What is my merchant service fee from 1 October, and am I on flat-rate or interchange-plus pricing?

2. Walk your business with your phone and photograph every place the surcharge appears

Most owners find between six and nine. Almost nobody finds them all from memory. The usual suspects:

• The menu or price list
• The counter sign and the A-frame
• The terminal screen itself
• The website checkout
• The booking confirmation email or SMS
• The quote template
• The invoice template
• Any platform that takes payment on your behalf

That photo roll is your removal list. It is also the only way you will know you have finished.

3. Switch surcharging off at every payment point

Terminals, online, deposits, invoices. Anywhere a card is taken.

4. Remove every notice on the list

Signs, price lists, website, apps, advertising.

5. Tell your team what to say

They will be asked, probably on the first day. A staff member who mumbles an apology about bank fees costs you more than the surcharge ever collected. Two sentences, said plainly, and the customer moves on.

6. Write down your September numbers before the month ends

Two figures from your merchant statement: what card acceptance costs you as a percentage of card turnover, and what you collected in surcharges.

You will want both of these in four months and you will not be able to reconstruct them.

The one that catches people

Do not rename it.

A surcharge called a service fee is still a surcharge. So is a card handling fee, a processing fee and a terminal fee.

The ACCC has said this in advance and in public: businesses should not try to avoid the no-surcharge rules by describing a card surcharge as another type of fee, and those that do may be engaging in misleading conduct.

It is worth being precise about who enforces what. The card networks and your payment provider enforce the no-surcharge rules. The ACCC’s interest is the misleading-conduct part — which is the more expensive half.

Remove it. Do not relabel it.

What you can still do

Three things people assume are gone, and are not.

You can still offer a discount for cash. Declared as income, as always.

You can still set a card minimum.

The ban covers the designated networks — eftpos, Mastercard and Visa — and Amex has joined it voluntarily from the same date. Diners Club, PayPal and buy-now-pay-later sit outside the RBA’s designated set. If any of those matter to your business, check your own merchant agreement rather than taking a page’s word for it, including this one.

Will your costs actually fall?

On the same day the surcharge comes off, the wholesale cost of taking a card is legislated downward.

• Domestic consumer credit interchange: 0.8% → 0.3%
• Debit and prepaid: → 8 cents, or 0.16%
• Commercial credit: unchanged at 0.8%
• Foreign-issued cards: a single 1.0% cap from 1 April 2027

The RBA estimates this lowers wholesale card costs for merchants by around $910 million a year.

Now the part the coverage keeps skipping. Interchange is what your acquirer is charged. What reaches your statement depends on your acquirer and on whether you are on flat-rate or interchange-plus pricing. A flat rate does not move on its own.

One bank has already put a number in public. Commonwealth Bank announced on 31 August that its flat-rate in-store merchant service fee falls from 1.1% to 0.99% on 1 October, for flat-rate in-store customers. That is not a saving figure and we are not presenting it as one. It is a rate you can hold against your own statement when you make that phone call.

The date nobody has written down

30 October 2026.

From that date the card networks, and every acquirer processing more than $10 billion a year, must publish quarterly what they actually charge — interchange by card type, scheme fees, and acquirer fees broken down by merchant size. The first publication covers July to September 2026.

This is an obligation on them, not on you. You have nothing to file and nothing to do.

What it means is simpler and better than that. It is the first time in Australian history that the fee your payment provider charges you is a published number rather than a private one. On 30 January 2027 there is a second one: the first measurement of how much of the interchange cut acquirers actually passed through.

Which is why job six matters. Write your September rate down now, and in four months you will be the only person in the room who can tell whether anything reached you.

What it costs you, honestly

These are illustrative figures, not your business. Put your own in and the shape does not change.

A business turning over $1m with 80% of sales on card is running $800,000 through the terminal.

The RBA’s published range for what card acceptance costs a small business is 0.85% to 2% for debit and eftpos, and 1% to 2% for credit. Sit in the middle at 1.5%.

That is about $12,000 a year.

Until 1 October, a business that surcharges recovers it. From 1 October it does not.

What you do about that is a decision for you and your accountant, and we are not going to tell you what to do with your prices. What we can do is make sure the decision gets made on published facts and a real number off your own statement, rather than on something someone said at a supplier night.

Two doors

If you surcharge today, the line comes off, you have a known amount to account for on a known date, and you have three weeks to decide deliberately rather than react in October.

If you do not surcharge, nothing at your counter changes — and your cost of acceptance is legislated downward on the same day anyway. Your job is to notice whether that reaches you, which is the same job six as everybody else.

Either way, the work is an hour. The businesses that will feel this in February are the ones that did nothing in September and never wrote down where they started.

Get the checklist

The 1 October Removal Checklist. Ten items in the order we would do them, the three questions to put to your payment provider, and the September baseline sheet.

You will also get The Savvy Operator, our weekly Wednesday briefing for Australian operators. One play a week, every number sourced and dated. One click to leave, any time.

Questions people are asking

Who wrote this

Rowan Shead, Strategic AI Marketing. We work with Australian restaurants and trade businesses, and we publish our own measured numbers including the ones that make us look bad.

Everything on this page traces to the Reserve Bank of Australia’s Conclusions Paper, the ACCC’s published guidance, or a bank’s own announcement. Nothing here is a forecast, and none of it is pricing, tax or accounting advice.

Ask me

Tell me your trade and the suburbs you work. I will tell you what I would do first and roughly what it would take.

That reply costs you nothing and it is not a call in disguise.

[email protected] +61 420 745 357

Rowan Shead. Fifteen years quoting and marketing trade and building businesses before this one — locksmiths, sparkies, plumbers, chippies, builders, fabricators. Manly Chamber of Commerce, seven years. One person, not a rotating account manager.