On 1 October the eftpos, Mastercard and Visa networks stop letting Australian businesses add a card surcharge. Most of the coverage has been written for shoppers. If you run the business, the useful question is narrower: which of your systems still adds that fee, and who is actually responsible for switching each one off. For a lot of companies the answer is not the bank.

Digital One Agency builds and maintains the checkouts, booking flows, invoicing and marketplace platforms where those fees are configured, and we are working through this with clients now. If you want every place your stack applies a card fee found and fixed before the deadline, book a meeting and we will go through it with you.

What changes on 1 October, precisely

The Reserve Bank’s reforms remove surcharging on prepaid, debit and credit cards across the eftpos, Mastercard and Visa networks from 1 October 2026. American Express and UnionPay are not regulated the same way, but both have said they will remove surcharging from the same date, according to the RBA’s own FAQ. PayPal’s no-surcharge rule starts four days later, on 5 October 2026.

Three other dates sit behind it. Lower interchange caps on domestic-issued cards start on 1 October too. Networks and acquirers have to publish fee information from 30 October 2026. Interchange caps on foreign-issued cards, plus more detailed merchant statements, arrive on 1 April 2027.

Plenty is untouched. Cash and BPAY are outside it. Taxi fares are regulated by the states. The ACCC is explicit that the change applies to card payment surcharges and does not stop businesses charging genuine service fees, booking fees or delivery fees, and that hospitality venues can keep charging weekend and public holiday surcharges.

The $690 million that quietly moves onto merchants

The RBA’s numbers are worth sitting with. Its conclusions paper estimates consumers pay $1.6 billion of a total $1.8 billion in card surcharges each year on designated networks. Separately, the lower interchange caps are expected to cut wholesale card payment costs for merchants by around $910 million a year.

Line those two up. About $1.6 billion that businesses used to recover at the point of sale stops arriving, and roughly $910 million of cost relief turns up to replace it. The gap is close to $690 million a year that businesses now carry themselves. That arithmetic assumes surcharge revenue was broadly tracking acceptance costs, which is the entire premise of a surcharge, and it is collective rather than a forecast for any one business.

It also lands very unevenly. The RBA’s impact chapter notes that around 85 per cent of small merchants do not surcharge at all, and that smaller businesses tend to pay interchange closer to the caps, so they gain most from the cuts with nothing taken away. ABC News reported that roughly 16 per cent of businesses surcharge. That minority wears the whole adjustment. If you are in it, the repricing decision matters more than the compliance one.

Your terminal may be handled. Your software is not.

This is where businesses are getting caught, because the banks are not saying the same thing.

NAB tells merchants it will “update eligible NAB terminals automatically starting from 1 September 2026” and that “for most merchants, no action is required”. Read a little further and the carve-out appears: if you use the NAB Transact or NAB Gateway API to apply surcharges, or you have recurring payment arrangements that include a surcharge, NAB says you may need to update those yourself before 1 October.

ANZ starts from the opposite assumption, telling business customers that “most systems won’t update the surcharges automatically, so you’ll need to go in and reset them before October 1”.

CommBank said on 31 August that it would contact every merchant customer with the actions required, “including updating terminal settings, switching off surcharging in point-of-sale systems, informing staff, and removing any store or online signage that refers to surcharging”.

Three acquirers, three different starting points, one consistent thread: the physical terminal is the easy part, and anything you or a developer configured stays your problem. If a third party built your payment flow, NAB’s advice is simply to contact that provider directly. That is us, for a fair number of Australian businesses, and it is the conversation we are having this fortnight.

Where the fee is actually hiding

A surcharge is rarely in one place. It is usually in two: the number, and the sentence describing the number. Fix the calculation, leave the copy, and you have replaced a pricing problem with a consumer law problem.

Worth checking every one of these:

• The online checkout, whether that is a WooCommerce fee plugin, a Shopify script, or a hand-built Stripe or Square integration that appends a fee line before capture
• Recurring billing: subscriptions, payment plans and membership renewals, the category NAB names specifically
• Invoice templates, including the card fee row in the generated PDF and the setting in the accounting package that puts it there
• Booking and appointment flows, especially where a deposit is taken at the time of booking
• Marketplace and multi-vendor platforms, where acceptance cost is often passed to the buyer inside split payment logic that nobody has opened in two years
• Quote and proposal templates
• Pricing pages, FAQs, terms and conditions, confirmation emails and receipts

The last one is the one people skip, and after 1 October a line reading “a 1.5 per cent card fee applies” is not untidy copy. It is a price claim that is no longer true.

The deadline that will catch app owners

If you take payments inside an iOS or Android app, check today whether the surcharge percentage lives in the app build or on your server.

If it is in the build, removing it is a code change, then a new build, then store review, then a release. Worse, you cannot make anyone update. Every customer still running the old version keeps being charged, and you have no switch to flip. If the value is read from your server or a remote config, you change one number and every device picks it up.

There are nine days. That is comfortably enough for a server-side change and a copy sweep, and it is not enough for an app store release that begins on 29 September. Businesses running a mobile app with in-app payments should start with this one and work outwards.

Nobody is going to fine you, and that is worse than it sounds

Here is the part most summaries get wrong. The ACCC states that “any ‘no surcharge’ rules will be set by each card network’s scheme rules and merchant contracts” and that the networks or payment service providers, not the ACCC, will enforce them.

So the first consequence of getting this wrong is contractual. It comes from your acquirer, through the agreement you signed, and acquirers have a blunter set of tools than a regulator does.

The second exposure is the one worth losing sleep over. The ACCC and the state consumer protection agencies keep enforcing consumer law, which includes the requirement that businesses do not make misleading claims about prices. Stale surcharge text on a live pricing page after 1 October is exactly that shape of problem.

Our read on the obvious workaround: a fee that only appears when the customer chooses a card is a card surcharge whatever you name it in the database. Genuine service and booking fees that apply to every customer regardless of payment method are a different thing and remain allowed. The distinction is not the label, it is whether the payment method triggers it.

What to do about the margin

If you are among the 16 per cent, you have three honest options and one bad one.

Absorb it, if the surcharge was small relative to your margin and you would rather compete on a clean advertised price. Reprice, and do it before 1 October rather than three weeks after, because a price rise on the same day the surcharge disappears reads very differently from one that arrives later and looks like a reaction. Or lean on payment method discounts, which stay permitted, and steer volume toward the cheaper rails rather than penalising the dear ones.

The bad option is renaming the surcharge and hoping. See above.

Then go and find out what the interchange cut is actually worth to you. That number is not visible today for most merchants, which is the point of the 30 October acquirer publication requirement and the more detailed statements from 1 April 2027. Until then, ask your acquirer directly for your effective rate before and after 1 October.

What we do about this

We work on the software side of it, which is the part your bank will not touch. That means auditing every system that can apply a card fee, changing the ones that do, and sweeping the copy so the site, the invoices and the emails all agree with what the checkout now charges.

In practice that is a short engagement: we look at the checkout, the recurring billing, the invoice templates, any app, and the marketplace or membership logic if you have one, then come back with a list of every place a fee is applied and what each one takes to remove. Scoping depends on your stack, so we quote after we have seen it rather than before. If you already have us on a website care plan, this falls inside the work we do for you. If your platform is a fintech or payments build, the split payment and recurring logic is where we would start looking, because that is where the fee is usually buried deepest.

You can do a lot of this yourself, and if you run a single WooCommerce store with one fee plugin, you probably should. Bring someone in when the fee is set in more than one place, when it is in an app, or when nobody at the company can say with confidence where it is configured.

Nine days. Book a meeting with Digital One Agency and we will walk your checkout, billing, invoices, app and site copy with you, and you will leave the call with a written list of every place a card fee is applied, who has to change each one, and how long each change takes. If nothing needs doing, we will tell you that and you will have it in writing before 1 October.

Frequently asked questions

Does the card surcharge ban apply to online payments as well as in store?

Yes. The removal of surcharging applies to card payments on the designated networks, not to a particular channel, so your website checkout, booking form and invoices are covered the same way your terminal is. In practice the online side needs more attention, because acquirers are updating terminals for many merchants but leaving software integrations to the business.

Can I still charge a booking fee or a weekend surcharge after 1 October 2026?

Yes. The ACCC says the change applies to card payment surcharges and does not stop genuine service fees, booking fees or delivery fees, and hospitality venues can keep charging weekend and public holiday surcharges. The test is whether the fee is triggered by the customer paying with a card. If it is, renaming it does not help.

Will my bank switch surcharging off for me?

Partly, and it depends on the bank and the system. NAB says it will update eligible terminals automatically from 1 September 2026 but that API integrations and recurring payment arrangements may need changing by you. ANZ tells merchants most systems will not update automatically. Anything a developer configured, including your website checkout, is yours to change.

What happens if a card surcharge is still being applied after 1 October?

The no surcharge rules sit in the card networks' scheme rules and your merchant contract, and the ACCC has said the networks and payment service providers enforce them rather than the ACCC. Separately, leaving surcharge wording on your pricing pages or invoices once it is no longer accurate is a misleading pricing risk under consumer law.

Should I put my prices up to cover the lost surcharge revenue?

Only if you were actually surcharging, which the RBA indicates about 85 per cent of small merchants were not. If you were, decide before 1 October rather than after, and weigh it against the lower interchange caps starting the same day. Ask your acquirer for your effective rate before and after the change before you set new prices.