After years of debate, Australia’s card surcharge landscape is changing in a meaningful way. On 31 March 2026, the Reserve Bank of Australia announced it would lift its current ban on “no surcharge” rules for prepaid, debit and credit cards from certain card networks. From 1 October 2026, Visa, Mastercard and eftpos can ban businesses from applying card payment surcharges when accepting payments.
It is estimated that this change could save Australians around $1.2 billion per year in surcharges. Whether you’re a consumer who’s grown tired of paying extra at the checkout, or a business owner working out what this means for your pricing, there are practical implications on both sides worth understanding before October arrives.
What’s Actually Changing?
The current rules allow businesses to charge a surcharge on card payments, provided it doesn’t exceed their actual cost of accepting that payment method. What changes from 1 October is that the card networks themselves can now step in and ban surcharges entirely through merchant agreements.
Visa, Mastercard and eftpos will all be able to prohibit surcharges on debit, credit and prepaid cards from 1 October 2026. These networks are regulated by the RBA because they dominate the Australian payments market and are essential for most businesses to operate.
American Express and PayPal surcharges are unaffected, provided they do not exceed actual processing costs. So if your business currently adds a surcharge for Amex payments, that can continue after October as long as the amount reflects your genuine cost of acceptance.
One thing worth noting clearly: a business can’t escape the ban by calling a card payment surcharge something else. If a business charges a service fee or handling fee that only applies to some payment methods, this is a card payment surcharge by another name and the ban applies. The ACCC treats this practice as drip pricing, which is a form of misleading conduct under Australian consumer law, and businesses that breach these rules can face serious fines.
What This Means If You’re a Consumer
For most people, the change is straightforward and welcome. About 16 per cent of businesses currently use surcharges, which are intended to cover the cost of processing a transaction. According to RBA estimates, payment processing costs can range from under 0.5 per cent for EFTPOS to around 1 to 1.5 per cent for credit cards, with debit cards sitting in between.
From 1 October, when Visa, Mastercard and eftpos impose their bans, you should no longer see those line items appearing at checkout for those payment types. The businesses that have been surcharging will need to absorb those processing costs or adjust their base pricing. Either way, the cost shouldn’t be presented to you as a separate charge at the point of payment.
It’s also worth knowing that if you encounter a business still charging a surcharge on a banned payment type after October, or one that has simply renamed the fee as something else, you can report it. For Visa, Mastercard and eftpos, the enforcement sits with the card networks through merchant agreements.
What This Means If You’re a Business Owner
This is where the change requires more thought, because absorbing card processing costs is not a trivial exercise for every business.
Between covering the costs of staffing, utility bills and card processing fees, increasing numbers of small and medium-sized businesses have been passing surcharges to customers as a means of staying afloat. Larger businesses are generally better positioned to negotiate payment processing rates and fees with banks, which means the impact of the ban is felt more acutely at the smaller end.
The RBA found small businesses would be $185 million better off under the changes overall, with 90 per cent of them benefiting, largely because the reforms also include reductions to the interchange fees that merchants pay the card networks in the first place. Lower processing costs mean that what businesses have to absorb is less than it might currently appear.
That said, the practical steps are real and worth working through before October.
Review your current surcharge arrangements. Know which payment types you’re currently surcharging, at what rate, and what your actual cost of acceptance is for each. Your merchant statements from your bank or payment processor will show this. Having that full picture before you make any pricing decisions is the right starting point.
Decide how you’ll handle the cost. There are broadly three options: absorb the processing cost within your existing margins, adjust your base prices upward to account for the cost, or set minimum transaction values for card payments where that’s practical for your business. The right answer will depend on your margins, your customer base, and how price-sensitive your market is.
Don’t rename the surcharge. The ACCC is clear that calling a surcharge an “admin fee”, “service fee”, or “handling fee” doesn’t change its legal classification. If the fee only applies to card payments, it is still a card surcharge regardless of what you call it. The penalties for getting this wrong are not worth the short-term revenue protection.
Check whether American Express applies to your business. If you currently surcharge Amex transactions, those rules don’t change in October. You can continue to pass on the cost of Amex acceptance provided the surcharge doesn’t exceed your actual cost.
If Your Business Uses Stripe
Stripe is a payment processor rather than a card network, so it sits slightly differently in this picture, but the practical implications for businesses using Stripe are just as real.
Stripe charges merchants a processing fee for each transaction, currently 1.7% for domestic cards and 3.5% for international cards plus a 30 cent fixed fee. That’s what Stripe charges your business to process the payment. What the new rules govern is whether you can then pass that cost on to your customer as a separate surcharge at checkout.
From 1 October, if you use Stripe to process Visa or Mastercard payments, you can no longer add a visible surcharge to recover that processing cost from the customer. The Stripe fee itself doesn’t change. What changes is that you can no longer present it as a line item to the person paying.
Amex payments processed through Stripe are treated the same way as Amex payments processed anywhere else. If your cost of acceptance justifies a surcharge, you can continue to apply one after October, provided it doesn’t exceed your actual cost.
It’s also worth noting that the interchange fee reductions the RBA is implementing alongside the surcharge ban may eventually reduce Stripe’s wholesale cost of processing, which could flow through to lower merchant fees over time. Stripe hasn’t announced any pricing changes in response to the reforms, and there’s no guarantee reductions will be passed on, but it’s worth keeping an eye on as the changes bed in.
The practical action for any business currently adding a Stripe surcharge to card payments is the same as for any other payment processor: that surcharge needs to come out of your checkout flow before October, and you’ll need to decide whether to absorb the cost, adjust your base pricing, or review whether your current Stripe plan is still the most competitive option for your transaction volumes.
The Broader Picture
The surcharge debate in Australia has always sat at the intersection of consumer fairness and small business viability, and the new rules don’t fully resolve that tension. Businesses that have been using surcharges transparently and accurately, covering only their genuine cost of acceptance, have been doing what the rules allowed. The change from October doesn’t mean they were doing anything wrong. It means the system is moving toward one where those costs are built into pricing rather than disclosed at checkout.
For most businesses, the honest question is whether your current pricing reflects your real cost of doing business, including card processing. If it does, absorbing the surcharge and adjusting your base price where necessary is a clean and compliant path forward. If it doesn’t, October is a useful prompt to review whether your pricing model is sustainable.
If you’d like to talk through how these changes affect your business’s pricing or payment setup, reach out to your Prime Partners accountant. We’re across the detail and happy to help you work through what the right approach looks like for your specific situation