Since 1 October 2026, Australian businesses can no longer add a surcharge to customer payments made on EFTPOS, Visa or Mastercard. The Reserve Bank of Australia announced the change on 31 March 2026 as part of a wider reform package that also caps interchange fees on consumer credit cards at 0.3%, lowers the debit cap, and requires card networks and large acquirers to publish what they charge.
The RBA estimates the interchange caps cut merchants' wholesale card payment costs by around $910 million a year, and that consumers were paying $1.6 billion of the $1.8 billion in card surcharges charged each year on the designated networks (RBA conclusions paper). Every business that accepts a card is affected. If you ran a cafe on a zero-cost EFTPOS plan, take Visa in your online checkout, or tap a customer's card at a market stall, the rules that applied for the past decade changed on one day. To put a number on it for your own business, the surcharge ban calculator estimates how much surcharge revenue the ban removed and how much of the provider fee you now absorb. Which providers cut their rates on 1 October, and where every provider's rate sits now, is covered in our companion article on merchant fees after the surcharge ban. The practical steps to take are at the bottom of this one.
What the RBA announced, and what took effect on 1 October
On 31 March 2026, the RBA released its final response to the Merchant Card Payment Costs and Surcharging review. Three reforms sit at the centre.
First, surcharging on EFTPOS, Visa and Mastercard ended on 1 October 2026, when the card networks removed it after the RBA lifted its ban on no-surcharge rules. The mechanism is worth being precise about: the RBA did not legislate a ban. The Payments System Board lifted its long-standing prohibition on "no-surcharge" rules for the designated networks, and the card schemes then apply their own no-surcharge rules, as they do in other countries. The RBA has also said that if surcharging continues, it could recommend the Government legislate a ban. The stated reason is price transparency: when a card surcharge sits at the bottom of a receipt, customers cannot easily compare the headline price of one business against another. For a merchant the practical effect is the same: you are not surcharging Visa, Mastercard or EFTPOS any more.
Second, the cap on interchange fees for domestic consumer credit cards dropped to 0.3% of the transaction value on the same day, replacing a 0.5% weighted-average benchmark and a 0.8% per-transaction cap. The cap on debit and prepaid cards fell from 0.20% (or 10 cents) to 0.16% (or 8 cents). The commercial credit card cap is unchanged at 0.8%. The wholesale cost of processing a consumer Visa or Mastercard transaction therefore fell materially for the first time since 2017.
Third, the reforms require the designated card networks and large acquirers to begin publishing specified information about card payment fees from 30 October 2026, and large acquirers to begin publishing from 30 January 2027 how the interchange reductions have flowed through to merchant service fees. More detailed merchant statements follow from 1 April 2027. The transparency rules are intended to make it harder for acquirers to obscure pricing differences and easier for small businesses to compare offers.
The designation covers eftpos, Mastercard and Visa, and on all three it covers debit, prepaid and credit alike, whether the card was issued in Australia or overseas. The networks outside the designation were free to carry on, but the RBA reports that American Express, UnionPay and PayPal have also removed surcharging (PayPal's rule takes effect on 5 October), and CommBank reports that JCB is doing the same. Diners Club is not on the RBA's list, but do not read that as permission: Adyen tells its merchants that Diners surcharging ended on 1 October too, and several providers have switched surcharging off for every card type they process, so whether you can still surcharge a Diners card depends on your provider. Buy Now Pay Later sits outside all of this, and the individual BNPL providers (Afterpay, Zip, Klarna) set their own merchant rules, several of which prohibit surcharging anyway.
Source: Reserve Bank of Australia, Review of Merchant Card Payment Costs and Surcharging: Conclusions Paper, March 2026, and the RBA's accompanying FAQ.
The timeline at a glance
Here is the sequence of dates and what each one means for a merchant.
| Date | What changed | Who it affects |
|---|---|---|
| 31 March 2026 | RBA announced its final reforms | Industry and merchants put on notice |
| April to September 2026 | Providers updated plans and began switching surcharging off, some weeks before the deadline | Acquirers, PSPs and their merchants |
| 1 October 2026 | Surcharge removal and the domestic interchange caps took effect | Every business accepting cards |
| 30 October 2026 | Large acquirers and card networks begin publishing fee information | Merchants comparing offers |
| 30 January 2027 | Large acquirers publish how interchange cuts flowed through to merchant fees | Merchants checking whether their provider passed the cut on |
| 1 April 2027 | Interchange caps extend to foreign-issued cards, and more detailed merchant statements begin | Businesses with overseas customers, and everyone reading a statement |
The ban itself is done. What is still ahead is the transparency programme, which is where you will be able to see whether your provider passed the wholesale cut on to you.
Who is affected by the surcharge ban
Every Australian business that accepts a Visa, Mastercard or EFTPOS card payment is affected. The size of the impact varies by sector.
Hospitality sits squarely in the firing line. Cafes, restaurants, pubs and food trucks were the most visible surchargers in Australia, and the surcharge line on a coffee receipt had become a regular consumer grievance. That line can no longer appear.
Small retail and trades that ran zero-cost EFTPOS terminals are the next most exposed. The entire commercial premise of those plans was that the customer paid the fee. Now that the surcharge is gone, the merchant either absorbs the cost or changes provider.
Online retailers lose the checkout surcharge on the designated schemes entirely. The rule follows the card network rather than the channel, so an online Visa payment is caught exactly as a terminal one is, and it reaches foreign-issued cards on those networks too. With American Express, UnionPay and PayPal removing surcharging as well, very little is left to surcharge at an Australian checkout, and whether Diners Club is part of it depends on your provider.
The money involved is not small. A South Australian bakery told the ABC it paid $5,785 in card fees last financial year, and The Conversation puts the typical small business cost at about 1.4% of each card sale against about 0.6% for large merchants. Businesses with significant Amex volume, B2B card-not-present payments, or a heavy BNPL mix have different exposures and may want one-on-one guidance. Our services team covers tailored statement reviews and provider negotiation.
The end of "zero-cost EFTPOS"
Zero-cost EFTPOS was the marketing name for a pricing model where the merchant paid nothing for terminal hire or transaction fees, because the fee was automatically added to the customer's bill at the point of sale as a surcharge.
That model relied on the surcharge being allowed. Since 1 October 2026 it is not, at least for Visa, Mastercard and EFTPOS volume. Providers that sold zero-cost plans have had to move their merchants onto a plan where the business pays the fee. A hybrid that surcharges only American Express and international cards is not a way out: the removal covers foreign-issued cards on eftpos, Mastercard and Visa, and American Express removed surcharging on the same day.
One example in the Australian market is Smartpay, now trading as Shift4. Its terminal plan, Low Cost EFTPOS Pass, was built entirely on the surcharge: the terminal worked out the surcharge for each transaction and added it to the customer's bill, so that the merchant's cost of acceptance netted to zero. Shift4's own description of the feature was "calculate the right surcharge automatically, no admin or guesswork". That was not a discount or a promotion, it was the product.
If you were on a plan like this, your payment costs did not rise gradually. They went from effectively zero to the full merchant rate on a single day. Shift4 switched surcharging off on its terminals remotely at the beginning of October and moved Zero Cost and Low Cost EFTPOS Pass merchants onto its Low Cost EFTPOS plan, where the business pays the merchant service fees. That plan carries a minimum monthly fee ($100 + GST minimum per month): if your fees for the month come to less, you are billed the difference. Shift4 does not publish the transaction rate on that plan, so ask for it in writing and check it against your first unsurcharged statement.
Take a cafe doing $50,000 a month in card sales. On a zero-cost plan the fee was zero because the customer paid it through the surcharge. Since 1 October that same fee falls on the business, at whatever rate its provider charges. The realistic options are to stay on the same provider's flat-rate plan and reprice the menu to recover most of it, or to compare flat-rate plans and switch. The surcharge ban calculator estimates the surcharge revenue you lost and the provider fee you now carry, and the live comparison table shows every provider's current rate at your volume.
What providers did on 1 October
Most providers we track said they would switch surcharging off for their merchants, several of them before the deadline (ANZ Worldline from 21 September, Westpac from 25 September, Airwallex on 28 September), while CommBank pointed its merchants to a self-service guide to switch the setting off themselves. Four providers had also cut a published rate by 1 October: Westpac, CommBank, NAB and Stripe. Square, Zeller and Tyro announced switch-offs rather than rate changes, and ANZ announced no cut on its own pages. The provider-by-provider detail, what each one said, which rates moved and by how much, and where every provider's rate sits now, is in our companion article on merchant fees after the surcharge ban; the live figures are always in the comparison table.
The interchange fee caps: 0.3% on consumer credit, 0.16% on debit
Interchange is the wholesale fee a card issuer (your customer's bank) charges the acquirer (your payments provider) on every transaction. The acquirer passes it through to you either explicitly (interchange-plus pricing) or implicitly (flat-rate pricing).
Before 1 October, consumer credit interchange in Australia was held to a 0.5% weighted-average benchmark with a 0.8% cap on any single transaction. The cap is now 0.3% of the transaction value, bringing Australia roughly into line with European Union and United Kingdom rules. The debit and prepaid cap fell from 0.20% (10 cents) to 0.16% (8 cents). Commercial credit cards are unchanged at 0.8%, so a business whose customers pay on company cards gets less of the cut.
What it means for your bill depends on how your provider prices.
If you are on interchange-plus pricing, the saving flows straight through. The lower wholesale rate appears on your statement from October. Merchants on Adyen or on Stripe's interchange-plus tier (Stripe provider page) sit in this bucket, as do merchants on negotiated interchange-plus plans at the banks. CommBank says it passes the new caps through on these plans by adjusting the interchange fees automatically.
If you are on flat-rate pricing, the cap does not reduce your rate by itself. A flat rate is a price the provider sets: when interchange falls, the provider's wholesale cost falls, and your rate moves only if the provider moves it. The same applies to least-cost routing (Westpac and NAB call it Merchant Choice Routing), which sends dual-network debit taps via the cheaper network. On a flat-rate plan the saving from routing goes to the provider, because you pay the flat rate either way; it reaches the merchant directly only on interchange-plus pricing. A provider that quotes individually above a volume threshold, which is how Tyro (Tyro provider page) prices, is still giving you a blended rate rather than interchange passed through at cost.
Will the interchange cut reach your fee?
The $910 million is a wholesale figure, and wholesale is the load-bearing word: the reduction lands first on what acquirers pay, and it reaches a business only if its acquirer passes it on.
Westpac and CommBank applied their 1 October cuts automatically to merchants already on their flat rates, which is pass-through you can see on a statement, but a flat-rate merchant elsewhere should not assume anything moved. CommBank's head of retail sales and services, Angus Sullivan, told AAP the change is "probably going to create some more price-based competition for merchant services", and from 30 January 2027 large acquirers must publish how much of the cut flowed through to merchant fees. Who has cut so far, and by how much, is set out in the companion article.
Surcharge removal is a separate flow, and it is not a saving to merchants at all. The RBA puts what consumers were paying in surcharges at $1.6 billion a year, and for the roughly 16% of businesses that surcharged (Reuters) it is a transfer of cost onto the business. Whether that cost reaches shelf prices is already being argued over. A Sydney bar owner told Reuters on day one, "100% this will be passed on", while COSBOA's chief executive, Skye Cappuccio, put it more carefully: "there is no such thing as a cost that simply disappears". Businesses that priced in their surcharges keep the markup as margin and lose the line on the receipt; in commoditised categories like coffee and takeaway, competition may push some headline prices down over time.
What merchants should do now
Five practical steps, in order of priority.
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Read your first October statement for the new rate. If your provider is one that cut its published rate, confirm the cut shows on your account rather than only on its website. Westpac and CommBank applied theirs automatically to merchants already on the flat rate; if yours did not move, or you are on an older or negotiated plan, ask in writing whether the 1 October reduction was applied to you and when. Interchange-plus customers should see lower wholesale lines without asking.
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Check that your terminals and checkout have actually stopped surcharging. Most providers said they would switch it off for you, but CommBank pointed its merchants to a self-service guide to do it themselves, and a surcharge configured in a third-party POS or set up as a service charge, tax or automatic tip stays on until you remove it. On 1 October the chief executive of the Australian Restaurant and Cafe Association, Wes Lambert, told Reuters he bought a coffee from a national chain at Brisbane airport and was charged the surcharge. Do a test transaction on every device and ask your provider to confirm in writing that surcharging is off.
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Reprice rather than itemise. You cannot show the cost of card acceptance as a separate line, but you can fold it into headline prices freely. Your merchant statement discloses your cost of acceptance, the figure that used to cap your surcharge; that is the number to recover. If you are repricing, do it once and tell repeat customers why, rather than adjusting in small steps.
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Audit your effective rate and compare. Divide three months of total fees by total card turnover to get your real cost of payments as a percentage, then benchmark it against the live rates on our comparison page. Four providers had cut published rates by 1 October while the rest left theirs where they were, so the gap between plans has changed; run your own volume through the surcharge ban calculator to see what switching would save.
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Get help if your statement is complicated. Businesses with multiple terminals, Amex volume, international card exposure, or interchange-plus pricing often leave money on the table because the arithmetic is hard. Our services team does one-on-one statement reviews and provider negotiation for a flat fee.
Frequently asked questions
When did the RBA surcharge ban take effect?
The ban took effect on 1 October 2026, the same day the 0.3% interchange cap on consumer credit cards and the 0.16% cap on debit cards began. The RBA announced the package on 31 March 2026, giving merchants and acquirers six months to update contracts, pricing, signage and point-of-sale systems.
Did my provider switch surcharging off for me?
Most providers said they would, and some did it before 1 October: ANZ Worldline from 21 September, Westpac from 25 September, Airwallex on 28 September, and Shift4 remotely at the beginning of October. CommBank pointed its merchants to a self-service guide to remove the setting themselves, and any surcharge built outside the provider's own surcharge setting (a service charge, tax or automatic tip in your POS) stays on until you remove it. Check every device with a test transaction and ask your provider to confirm in writing. What each provider said is in the companion article.
Can I still surcharge Amex or Diners?
Not American Express, and Diners Club only if your provider still allows it. The RBA's designation covers EFTPOS, Visa and Mastercard, and the RBA reports that American Express, UnionPay and PayPal have also removed surcharging (PayPal from 5 October 2026). CommBank reports that JCB is doing the same. Diners Club is not on the RBA's list, but several providers have switched surcharging off for every card type they process, and Adyen tells its merchants that Diners surcharging ended on 1 October too. Buy Now Pay Later stays subject to each BNPL provider's own merchant rules. If a terminal is still surcharging Amex, switch it off.
What happened to my zero-cost EFTPOS plan?
The pass-through model that made zero-cost EFTPOS work has not been permitted for Visa, Mastercard and EFTPOS transactions since 1 October 2026. You either absorb the fee on the same provider's flat-rate plan or switch to a competitive flat-rate offer. Compare the alternatives on our comparison page.
Will the 0.3% interchange cap reduce my fees automatically?
Only if you are on interchange-plus pricing. The new cap applies to the wholesale fee that your provider pays, and on interchange-plus the cost is passed straight through. If you are on flat-rate pricing, your headline rate does not move unless your provider chooses to cut it. Some did on 1 October, and large acquirers must publish from 30 January 2027 how much of the cut reached merchant fees.
Can I just raise my prices to cover the fee?
Yes. Repricing your menu or product list to cover the cost of card acceptance is the standard response, and the simplest. The rule is that you cannot itemise the cost as a card surcharge on the receipt. You can absorb it into headline prices freely.
What about BNPL services like Afterpay and Zip?
BNPL transactions are not covered by the surcharge ban. You can still pass on the BNPL fee to the customer, subject to the rules each BNPL provider sets in your merchant agreement. Some BNPL contracts prohibit surcharging directly, so check your terms before relying on it.
The bottom line
The surcharge ban is in force, and the deadline work is behind you. What is left is checking: that every terminal and checkout has stopped surcharging, that any rate cut your provider announced is actually on your statement, and that your repriced menu or product list recovers the cost you now carry. Then look at whether your provider is still the right one, because four providers had moved their published rates by 1 October and the rest left theirs unchanged.
Work out your exposure with the surcharge ban calculator, then compare Australian payment providers and run a fee calculation, and read which providers cut their rates and where every rate sits now. If your statement is complicated or you want a human in the loop, our services team reviews statements and negotiates with providers on your behalf.
