Card fees · rule change

Card surcharges in Australia: the ban starts 1 October 2026

The short version

From 1 October 2026 you can't surcharge card payments in Australia. eftpos, Mastercard, Visa and Amex remove surcharging from their scheme rules on the same day. Before 1 October 2026 you may pass on your actual cost of acceptance and nothing more. This page covers what the cap allows before then, what changes on the day, and what to do about your prices.

The rule before 1 October 2026

Before that date, you may surcharge up to your cost of acceptance for that card type, worked out from your provider's statements. The ACCC polices excessive surcharges and has taken action on inflated ones. Keep your statements; they are your evidence of cost.

What changes on the day

The surcharge line disappears from your terminal. Your card costs don't. Whatever a surcharge has been recovering moves into your prices or comes out of your margin.

The size of the hole: what a surcharge was quietly covering

“Build it into your prices” is easy advice and useless without a number. So here is the number. Each row below is a business putting $60,000 a month through cards, costed over a year on the published rates of the four providers with complete rate cards. The left figure is what the cheapest of them charges, the right is the dearest, and the last column is the gap between them. Each figure names the provider it came from and the tax basis that provider publishes on, because those bases are not the same across all four.

The columns are not on one tax basis. These four providers do not all publish on the same footing: Square: GST treatment not stated; Zeller, Tyro and Stripe: incl. GST. So the cheapest and dearest figures in a row can be quoted on different bases, and the gap between them is the distance between two numbers that are not strictly like for like. We show each rate exactly as its provider publishes it rather than grossing any of them up, which would misstate somebody's price. Read the gap as the size of the prize, not as a figure accurate to the dollar, and see the cost-of-acceptance section below for why the basis matters when you work out your own ceiling.

Read those two columns as two different jobs. The left-hand figure is the cost that has to move into your prices from 1 October 2026, because no provider choice makes it go away. The right-hand gap is the part you can still do something about, and it is the cheaper of the two fixes: changing what you pay costs you one afternoon, where changing what you charge costs you a conversation with every customer. Do the first one before you do the second.

These are illustrative businesses at one turnover, not a quote. Put your own turnover and average sale in and the same engine will give you your own version of this table.

Two things landed on the same morning

1 October 2026 was the surcharge date and also the date Stripe cut its Australian domestic card pricing. Anyone who repriced their menu or their fee schedule on the strength of Stripe's rates from before that date is working from a cost base that moved on the same day the surcharge line disappeared.

Stripe's lower Australian domestic card pricing took effect on 1 October 2026 and is what the table above shows: 1.65% plus the fixed cents, down from 1.7%. Stripe has also published that its international card pricing drops from 1 April 2027; the international figures here are the rates in force when this page was checked. That leaves a specific trap: a price set on the old rates over-recovers. If you are on Stripe, check your menu against Stripe's rates from 1 October 2026, not the rates it charged before then.

Every rate quoted on this site is checked as at 4 October 2026 and is due for re-checking on 1 April 2027 for exactly this reason. If you are reading this after that date and the observed date above has not moved, treat the figures as stale and go to the providers' own pages, which are linked under every table.

The trap in working out your own cost of acceptance

Before 1 October 2026 the rule is a ceiling, not a licence: you may pass on your cost of acceptance for that card type and nothing above it. Businesses usually get that wrong through arithmetic. They work the ceiling out from a headline percentage on a pricing page instead of from what actually left the account.

Two things bend that number. The first is everything the headline rate excludes: monthly terminal fees, per-transaction cents, and the higher rates that apply once a payment is taken online or keyed rather than tapped. A blended cost across your real mix is a different figure to the rate on the front of the page, and it is the one your statements show.

The second is the tax basis, and it catches people out because it is invisible. Square's published AU fee schedule does not state whether its core processing rates include GST. It states GST treatment only for Afterpay (6% + 30c, excluding GST). Zeller and Stripe explicitly state their headline rates include GST, and Tyro states it for Payment Links. We show Square's rates exactly as published and do not gross them up, because inventing a GST-inclusive figure would misstate a competitor's price.

A rate published excluding GST and a rate published including it are about ten percent apart on the same money. Build a surcharge on the wrong reading of your own provider's schedule and the ceiling you thought you were under is one you have gone through. Your provider statements are the evidence of cost, and a pricing page is not. After 1 October 2026 the question stops being what you may recover and starts being what you are paying, which is the one this cluster is built to answer.

What you can do instead

Reprice with the cost built in rather than absorbing it silently. Know your blended card cost per hundred dollars (the calculator gives it to you), and if it's high, change plans or providers.

A sensible order to do this in

1. Work out your annual card cost on your real mix.
2. Compare providers on that mix, not on headline rates.
3. Move if moving pays for itself.
4. Reprice with the remaining cost built in.
5. Remove surcharge configuration from your terminal.

Cost of acceptance, by provider

Used here to size what repricing needs to recover. The published card-present rate is the starting point for a business's real cost of acceptance.

Related pages

Calculator · Compare providers · Card fees hub · EFTPOS fees.

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