Paying by card in Australia no longer costs extra at the checkout. From 1 October 2026, businesses in Australia are banned from adding a surcharge when you pay with an eftpos, Visa, Mastercard or American Express credit, debit or prepaid card, in store or online. The change follows the Reserve Bank of Australia's (RBA) review of merchant card payment costs, concluded on 31 March 2026.
What exactly changed
Under the old rules, a business could pass its card acceptance costs on to you as a separate surcharge, capped at what it actually cost the business to accept that card. Typical surcharges ran from about 0.25% to 2% of the bill, so a $100 purchase could quietly become $102 at the terminal. The RBA estimated Australians were paying about $1.1 billion a year in card surcharges.
Under the new rules, that separate fee is gone. The RBA removed its long-standing prohibition on card networks having "no surcharge" rules, and eftpos, Mastercard and Visa each wrote a ban into their network rules from 1 October 2026. American Express, which the RBA does not regulate in the same way, chose to remove surcharging from the same date, and UnionPay did the same, with PayPal following on 5 October 2026. The ban is enforced through each business's contract with its payment provider, not by the ACCC directly. The same package also cut the cap on interchange fees from 0.8% to 0.3% on domestic consumer credit cards.
One thing has not changed: fees that are not based on how you pay are still legal. Weekend and public holiday surcharges in hospitality, booking fees and service fees charged to every customer remain allowed, provided they are disclosed and, where calculable in advance, included in the single total price shown to you.
Who is affected
Almost everyone who shops in Australia. If you pay with an eftpos, Visa, Mastercard or American Express card, in a shop, a cafe, or online, the displayed price should now be the price you pay. Cash payments are unaffected, as they never carried a card surcharge.
Businesses are affected too. Shops, cafes, tradespeople and online sellers can no longer recover card costs through a checkout fee, even if it exactly matched what their bank charges them. They must absorb the cost, negotiate lower provider fees, or build it into their general prices. Payments between businesses are covered too, so an invoice paid by card after 1 October cannot carry a surcharge, even if issued in September.
What you need to do
As a shopper, there are four simple steps:
- Check your receipts. Any purchase made on or after 1 October 2026 should show no separate card surcharge. If one appears, ask the business to remove it and refund the fee.
- Watch for renamed fees. A "service fee" or "handling fee" charged only when you pay by card is still a card surcharge, whatever it is called. The ACCC warns that describing a card surcharge as another type of fee may amount to misleading conduct.
- Escalate if needed. If a business will not fix it, report the charge to the card network or the business's payment service provider, which enforce the no-surcharge rules, or to your state or territory consumer protection agency for misleading pricing.
- Expect some prices to move. Businesses may fold card costs into shelf prices, so compare the total price, not the fee breakdown, when choosing where to shop.
If you run a business, the ACCC's checklist is short: disable surcharging on every terminal, online checkout, invoicing tool and payment link you use, remove surcharge notices from menus, signs, websites and apps, and confirm with your payment provider that the change has been applied everywhere.
Why it matters
Supporters, including the RBA, argue the old system had stopped working. Surcharging was introduced more than 20 years ago to steer people toward cheaper payment methods, but with cash use in steep decline and many businesses charging a flat fee regardless of card type, the RBA concluded the fees no longer changed behaviour and had become a confusing add-on that meant the displayed price was rarely the final price.
Small business groups see it differently. CPA Australia members have warned that the reform shifts card costs onto small firms with thin margins, which must now renegotiate fees with large payment providers or raise prices for everyone, including cash customers. Card issuers, which stand to lose significant interchange revenue, have also signalled they may trim rewards points, shorten interest-free periods or raise card fees, so some of what shoppers save at the checkout could reappear elsewhere.
The key date to remember is 1 October 2026. Any card surcharge added to a payment on or after that date should not be there, and you are entitled to ask for it back.