Sole traders: ATO credit card cut-off moves to 30 June 2027

If you spent last week moving your tax payments off a credit card, you can ease off. On 9 October the federal government said it will cover the card fees itself so the Australian Taxation Office can keep accepting credit cards until the end of this financial year, which pushes the cut-off from 30 November 2026 out to 30 June 2027. The ABC reported the announcement and the transitional funding behind it, after the ATO’s original notice that it would stop accepting credit cards after 30 November 2026. For a sole trader this lands in two places. The rush to re-plumb a payment plan before the end of November is off, and the longer question of where the money for a tax bill actually comes from is still there, now with a later date attached to it.

General information, not tax advice. The ATO is the authority - see ato.gov.au or ask a registered tax or BAS agent.

What moved, and what did not

Two different things got tangled together in the coverage, so it helps to pull them apart.

The first is how you pay the ATO. That is the part that moved. Credit cards keep working for income tax, BAS, PAYG instalments and instalments under a payment plan until the new cut-off, with the government paying the merchant fees in the meantime. The ATO had put the cost of absorbing those fees at about $200 million a year and said around 5 per cent of small businesses used a credit card to pay a tax bill, according to the ABC’s report.

The second is what you can charge your own clients. That has not moved at all. A business still cannot add a surcharge on eftpos, Mastercard, Visa or American Express payments, credit or debit, and the ACCC’s page on card surcharges sets out the rule that started on 1 October. Headlines about a card back-down are about the fees the tax office pays, not the fees you charge. So if a card fee came off your invoices, your quotes and your payment terms a week or two ago, it stays off.

If a payment plan or direct debit already changed

Plenty of people acted on the first announcement, which was the sensible response at the time. There is no need to undo it. A payment plan drawing from an Australian cheque or savings account is the arrangement least likely to fail quietly, and the ATO’s guidance on managing your payment plan covers changing the method a plan draws on if a different one suits better.

What is worth two minutes is confirming the change actually took. Did the next instalment come out of the account you nominated? Did a bookkeeper or agent switch the method they use on your behalf, or only say they would? A payment method that was half-changed looks identical to one that was changed, right up until an instalment is returned unpaid and a plan slides into arrears.

The date worth putting in the diary

The new cut-off is the end of the 2026-27 financial year, which is a long way from a final answer. The extra time was framed as room for the ATO to consult small business and work out longer-term arrangements, and the Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman called the extension “valuable breathing room for small businesses who use credit cards as a legitimate cash flow management tool”. Reporting on the announcement also notes the expectation that paying the ATO by credit card after the cut-off would run through a third party rather than the tax office directly, as Capital Brief described it.

Two things follow. One, the cost of the next change is not known yet, because a third-party service that pays the ATO for you charges a fee of its own. Two, the cost of the extension is being finalised in the mid-year budget update in December, so the arrangement may be revisited before the cut-off rather than on it. Watching the ATO’s own payment options page beats relying on a headline, because that page is where a method quietly appears or disappears.

Treat the card as a bridge, not a plan

For most sole traders the credit card was never about points. It was two or three weeks of room between a tax due date and client money landing. Keeping that room until the end of the financial year is genuinely useful, and it is also a good window in which to need it less. The habit that does the work is boring: put GST and tax aside as income arrives rather than finding it on the due date, and know which invoices are realistically going to be paid before that date. The second half is the one usually left to memory, which is why due dates feel like an ambush.

Apsis can make both halves visible. On the paid plan the tax module gives a GST and BAS view with an income tax estimate, so the number you are planning for comes out of your own documents instead of a guess. Alongside that, the business overview has a cash-flow card showing expected receipts from sent and part-paid invoices due in the next 30 days, and the invoice list filters by status and flags overdue rows, so the money you are counting on before a due date is money a client has actually been billed for.