Card fees · Australia

Stripe fees in Australia

Stripe's published Australian rates

incl. GST

Stripe states its card fees include GST.

Monthly and fixed costs

Stripe's standard pay-as-you-go pricing has no monthly fee and no setup fee.

Negotiating. Stripe offers custom and interchange-plus pricing for large volume or unusual business models.

Where these numbers come from

Stripe: Pricing (Australia) (observed 2026-10-04) · Stripe: Updates to card pricing in Australia from October 2026 (observed 2026-10-04)

The cents on every tap, and why small tickets feel them

Stripe charges 1.65% + A$0.10 on a card-present payment. The other three providers costed on this site charge a percentage in person and nothing per transaction, which makes Stripe the only one of the four whose in-person price depends on how big the sale is.

Turn those cents into a percentage and the effect is easy to see. On a pub or restaurant ticket of $65, the fixed component adds 0.15% on top of the headline rate. On a clinic ticket of $140, the same cents add only 0.07%. The schedule is identical and the cost differs materially, decided entirely by average sale size. A high-volume venue with a small average round should be more suspicious of a fixed-fee schedule than a clinic billing three figures a visit. Quoting Stripe as a flat percentage understates it precisely where it is dearest.

Two further per-authorisation charges sit on Stripe Terminal and are easy to miss when budgeting hardware: Stripe states that Tap to Pay adds A$0.15 per authorisation, and that optional point-to-point encryption adds A$0.07 per authorisation. Neither is in the headline rate, and neither is modelled in this site's tables or calculator.

What Stripe charges on overseas cards

Stripe publishes 3.5% + A$0.30 online / 3.5% + A$0.10 in person for overseas-issued cards, and adds a further 2% where currency conversion is required. Square also publishes a figure for overseas cards; see the international row on that provider's own page.

That transparency is worth having, and it is also a warning. Stripe's published international percentage is about 2.1 times its domestic online one. A business on a tourist strip, taking a meaningful share of overseas cards, is not running the rate it thinks it is. Where another provider publishes its own overseas loading, the calculator on this site applies it; where one does not, the domestic rate stands in and the answer is unconfirmed on that share.

Stripe's international pricing is also on a different clock to its domestic pricing. Stripe's domestic Australian card rates changed on 1 October 2026; Stripe has published that the international change does not arrive until 1 April 2027. If overseas cards are a real share of your takings, the domestic change covers only part of your cost.

The lowest percentage on Stripe's schedule is a bank payment

Stripe publishes a rate for PayTo and Australian BECS Direct Debit of 1% + A$0.30, and that is the number worth a second look on this whole page. Its percentage is the lowest on Stripe's own schedule, and lower than every card-present rate this site prices. Read it carefully, though: it is a percentage and a fixed amount, and the fixed amount is what decides whether it saves you anything on any given sale.

On published rates the crossover is $100.00. Above a sale of that size PayTo costs less than every card-present rate on this site; below it, it costs more than the cheapest of them, which is 1.3% in person, published by Tyro, with no per-transaction cents to carry. On the $65 pub and restaurant ticket this site uses elsewhere, PayTo is $0.95 against $0.85 for tapping a card. On a $140 clinic invoice it is $1.70 against $1.82, and the order reverses.Anyone told that bank transfer beats cards outright is being told something that is only true above a ticket size, and the ticket size is the whole argument.

So it is a real lever, pointed at one end of the business. For invoicing larger amounts on terms (a clinic, a functions deposit, anything where the customer is not standing at a counter), moving that volume off cards can beat changing card provider. For a counter charging small rounds it is the wrong lever, and the card-present rate is still the one to argue about.

The opposite end of the same schedule: Stripe publishes Zip at 5.49% + A$0.30, several times its own card rate. Buy-now-pay-later is a marketing decision priced as a payment method, and it belongs in the same budget conversation as card fees rather than a separate one. Both figures are in the other-charges table above, exactly as Stripe publishes them.

On negotiating. Stripe offers custom and interchange-plus pricing for large volume or unusual business models. Of the four, Stripe is the only one naming interchange-plus as an available structure (a different kind of pricing, and worth understanding before asking for it).

This page is the detail. The comparison lives elsewhere

Everything above is Stripe on its own terms: what Stripe publishes, what it charges for, and the conditions attached. That is deliberately a one-provider view. A rate on its own tells you very little. What matters is what it comes to across a year of your turnover, at your average ticket, on your mix of in-person and online. Three other pages do that arithmetic.

• What card fees cost a venue, salon or clinic: the hub, where Stripe is costed against every other provider over a year, in three trades. Start there if you have not settled on a provider yet.
• Square vs Zeller vs Tyro vs Stripe, head to head: the four published rate cards in one table, then the annual total across six turnover and ticket combinations.
• Run your own numbers: the same engine, on your turnover instead of a worked example.

The same depth on the others: Square · Zeller · Tyro