The card surcharge ban is coming. Have you done the maths?

From 1 October 2026, businesses across Australia will no longer be able to charge customers a surcharge for paying by card. If you currently add a surcharge at the till, on your invoices, or through your booking system, this is worth sitting with for a minute, because it is not just a compliance change. It is a change to your bottom line.

What is actually changing

It is not a new law passed by parliament. The Reserve Bank already had the power to set standards for how card payments work in Australia, and it used that power to remove a rule it had held in place since 2003 forcing the card networks to let merchants surcharge. Once that requirement was lifted, Visa, Mastercard, eftpos and American Express all brought in their own no surcharge rules, effective 1 October 2026, covering debit, credit and prepaid cards across those networks.

A few things sit outside the ban. Cash, BPAY, PayPal, Diners Club and taxi fares are not affected. Hospitality businesses can still apply weekend and public holiday surcharges. Genuine booking, delivery and service fees are also still allowed, and businesses can still offer a cash discount rather than a card surcharge if they want to keep some difference between payment methods.

There is a catch worth being precise about here. A booking or service fee only stays legitimate if it applies to everyone regardless of how they pay, and if it is included in the advertised price upfront rather than tacked on at checkout. If it only shows up for card payers, or it is really the old surcharge with a new name, that is a disguised surcharge under Australian Consumer Law, not a legitimate fee, and it carries the same ACCC risk as calling it an "admin fee." Renaming a surcharge does not get around the ban.

On enforcement, the straightforward part of the ban, still surcharging after 1 October, is enforced by the card networks through the merchant agreement, they can instruct a business's payment provider to cut off their terminal. Disguised surcharges are a different matter and fall under misleading or deceptive pricing, which consumers can report directly to the ACCC.

The part most business owners are missing

Here is where it gets interesting, and where the bank conversation comes in. At the same time as banning surcharges, the RBA is cutting the interchange fee caps that sit underneath the whole system. Consumer credit card interchange fees are dropping from 0.8% to 0.3%. Debit card fees are coming down too. Small businesses have historically paid more in these underlying fees than large retailers, sometimes as much as 0.8% compared to rates as low as 0.18% for big chains, so this change is meant to close that gap.

In theory, your actual cost of accepting card payments should come down, even though you can no longer pass a surcharge on to cover it. Whether it does, and by how much, depends entirely on what your bank or payment provider passes through to you. That does not happen automatically just because the RBA has set a lower cap. It is worth a direct conversation with your bank or provider now, not after 1 October, about what your new rates will actually look like.

What to do before 1 October

Work out how much surcharge revenue you are currently relying on and what losing it does to your margins. For some businesses this is negligible. For others, particularly higher volume, lower margin operators, it is a real number.

Contact your bank or payment provider directly and ask what your new merchant fees will be once the interchange changes take effect. Do not assume the saving is passed on in full, ask the question.

Decide whether you need to build the cost of card acceptance into your general pricing instead of surcharging separately. Many businesses will end up doing this quietly rather than announcing a price rise, but it is worth thinking through now rather than reacting in a rush.

Update your signage, menus, invoices, booking system and website. Anything that currently mentions a card surcharge needs to be removed or changed before the ban starts.

The bottom line

This is one of those changes that looks small on the surface, a line item removed from a receipt, but it touches pricing, cash flow and your relationship with your bank all at once. If you have not already asked your payment provider what your fees will look like from 1 October, that is the first call to make.

Sources:

NSW Small Business Commissioner: Card surcharge ban coming into effect from 1 October 2026

ACCC: Card surcharges

business.gov.au: Card payment surcharge changes are coming

RBA: Review of Merchant Card Payment Costs and Surcharging, Conclusions Paper, interchange fees

RBA: Frequently Asked Questions, removal of payment surcharges from 1 October 2026

Tyro: RBA surcharge ban confirmed, what your business needs to know

SmartCompany: Card surcharges end on October 1, here's everything you need to know

LegalVision: What is the 2026 ban on credit card surcharges?