The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) has finalised reforms to card payments that take effect on 1 October 2026. You can read more about the changes here. Here's what's changing and what it means for your business.
What’s changing
From 1 October 2026, the Reserve Bank of Australia is removing surcharging on debit, prepaid and credit cards across the Mastercard, Visa and eftpos networks. American Express and UnionPay have also confirmed they will remove surcharging from the same date.
Lower interchange caps on foreign-issued cards will follow on 1 April 2027 - which is relevant if you take a high volume of overseas cards.
What this means for you as a merchant
If you currently surcharge: From 1 October 2026 you'll no longer be able to recover your cost of card acceptance from customers through a surcharge on Mastercard or Visa (or Amex, JCB and UnionPay). Your merchant fees will continue to be itemised on your invoice.
If you don't impose, or have already disabled surcharging: there's no action required - we're just keeping you informed of the change.
If you are offering discounts or negative surcharges, there is no action required.
Other surcharges, such as weekend or public-holiday loadings, are unaffected.
How to prepare before 1 October, 2026
We'll automatically switch off surcharging on 28 September, 2026. We will also update our Terms and Conditions to reflect that we no longer enable surcharging. If you apply surcharges through your own checkout logic or an integrated POS, you'll need to review those settings yourself.
As we switch off surcharging, we recommend you:
- Review every channel where you take payments, including any payment links, and any connected POS or booking systems - and remove card surcharges if you have applied any;
- Update customer-facing materials that reference surcharges: website, invoices, quotes, receipts and in-store signage;
- Brief your team so your messaging to customers is clear and consistent;
- Run a test transaction across your channels to confirm no surcharge is being applied.