Playbook

The Card Surcharge Ban: What to Do Before 1 October 2026

By David Saleh · Silas Main · 17 July 2026

Right now, your EFTPOS terminal still shows that little surcharge line item. Customer taps, sees the extra 1 or 2 percent, shrugs, pays it. That line disappears on 1 October 2026. Not proposed. Not under review. Final.

From that date, you can't add a surcharge for a customer paying with eftpos, Mastercard, or Visa, whether it's debit, prepaid, or credit. That cost doesn't vanish. It moves from the customer's total back onto your margin, unless you reprice before the date arrives, not after.

What's actually changing, and when

The ban applies to eftpos, Mastercard, and Visa across debit, prepaid, and credit cards. American Express, Diners Club, and buy now pay later services are excluded, so surcharging on those can continue. A second round of changes is slated for 1 April 2027, and the fine detail of that tranche is still being settled. Which is one more reason to get your pricing right before the first deadline, not after it.

The same day the ban starts, the interchange fee cap on consumer credit cards drops from 0.8 percent to 0.3 percent. That's the fee your bank charges you to process a card payment, not the surcharge. It's a separate lever, and it falls at the same time, which claws back some of what the surcharge ban costs you. Not all of it. Some.

Who feels this the most

Not every business feels this the same way. A business with a low card share, plenty of cash trade, barely notices. A business that runs almost entirely on tap and go feels the whole thing land in one hit on 1 October.

In practice, that's salons, gyms, clinics, allied health practices, hospitality venues, and trades businesses that take a deposit or final payment by card. High card volume, thin service margins, and a surcharge line that's been quietly doing real work covering acceptance costs for years. If that's your business, this isn't a distant policy change. It's next quarter's numbers.

What's still legal, and what will get you in trouble

You can still charge for accepting a card. What you can't do is call it something else to dodge the ban. Renaming a surcharge as a "processing fee" or a "convenience fee" after 1 October is the exact move the ACCC has flagged as unlawful. If a fee is really a surcharge for card acceptance and you've relabelled it, that's the enforcement risk, not a loophole.

The two moves that are actually lawful: build the cost of acceptance into your base price, so everyone pays the same number whether they tap a card or hand over cash, or steer customers toward a lower cost payment method, PayID, PayTo, bank transfer, or direct debit, ideally with an incentive rather than a penalty.

The number that should worry you isn't the ban itself. It's the merchants who do nothing and find their margin quietly eaten every month starting 1 October, because the fee didn't go away, it just stopped being visible to the customer paying it.

The maths: what this actually costs you

Take a business processing $30,000 a month through cards, split roughly 60 percent debit, 30 percent credit, 5 percent Amex, currently paying about 1.2 percent in card acceptance costs. Right now, the surcharge line covers that cost. From 1 October, it doesn't.

That's about $3,888 a year, or $324 a month, moving off the customer's receipt and onto your bottom line. The interchange cap drop claws back roughly $626 of that over the year. Net new cost: around $3,262 a year. Reprice your board by about 1.1 percent and it's fully covered.

Your numbers won't match this example exactly, your card mix and your acceptance cost aren't the same as anyone else's. That's the entire point of running your own numbers instead of guessing.

Small differences compound fast here. Drop that same business's Amex share and lift its credit card share, and the net cost climbs, because Amex sits outside the interchange offset entirely. Run the numbers for your actual mix, not a rough guess at what feels typical for your industry.

What to do before the deadline

Don't wait for October to find out what your card mix actually costs you. Pull last month's card statement and get the real split between debit, credit, and Amex, plus the acceptance rate your bank or terminal provider actually charges you, not the number you assume it is.

Run that through the calculator, get your specific dollar exposure and the exact percentage to add to your prices, and make the change to your price list or menu before the ban lands, not the week after, when you're already absorbing the cost with no warning to customers.

Tell your customers before the change goes live, not after. A price move that's explained once, in a sign at the counter or a short email, reads as ordinary business. A price move that's discovered by a regular on their next visit, with no warning, reads as sneaky, even when it isn't. The gap between those two reactions is a single sentence sent a week early.

If you take one thing from this: the businesses that get hurt by 1 October aren't the ones who reprice. They're the ones who assume the surcharge line was never really covering a real cost, and find out otherwise in the next quarter's numbers.

Run your own numbers with the free calculator. It takes your card mix and acceptance rate and hands back the exact percentage to reprice by.

The prompts

I run a small business in Australia and need to work out exactly what the card surcharge ban (effective 1 October 2026) will cost me, so I can reprice before the deadline instead of after it.

Here are my numbers:
- Average monthly card turnover: $[AMOUNT]
- Approximate split of that turnover: [X]% debit, [X]% credit, [X]% Amex or other excluded cards
- My current cost of card acceptance (from my last merchant statement, as a percentage): [X]%
- My current surcharge rate, if I charge one today: [X]%

Do the following:
1. Calculate my current annual card acceptance cost in dollars, based on the turnover and cost percentage above.
2. Estimate the partial offset from the interchange cap drop on consumer credit cards (0.8% down to 0.3%), scaled to my credit card volume only. State this as an estimate, not an exact refund, since the real offset depends on my bank's pass through.
3. Calculate my net new annual cost after that offset.
4. Convert that net cost into a single percentage uplift I could add across my price list to fully cover it, shown both as a percentage and as a dollar example on a $50 and a $200 transaction.
5. Do not assume my numbers, only use what I've given you. If I haven't given you a figure, ask me for it rather than estimating it.

Give me the answer as a short table I can screenshot, plus one sentence in plain English stating the dollar amount I need to recover.

Help me draft a short, honest note to customers about a price change linked to the card surcharge ban starting 1 October 2026. This is not a rename of the surcharge, it is a genuine change to my base prices to cover a real cost that used to be itemised separately.

Business type: [e.g. cafe, salon, trade business, clinic]
What's changing: [e.g. "prices are increasing by 1.1% across the board" or "we're now offering a discount for bank transfer or PayID payments"]
Effective date: [DATE]
Tone: plain, direct, no apology, no over explaining. State the change, state why in one sentence, move on.

Write three versions: one for a printed sign at the counter or till, one for a short email to my customer list, one for a social caption under 280 characters. None of the three should use the word "surcharge" to describe the new price, since the price is now just the price. Do not invent a reason beyond the real one: the surcharge ban means the old itemised fee is now built into the price.

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Adelaide · ACST · ABN 17 626 827 646