Card surcharges are gone: what to change on your invoices

Card surcharges on everyday card payments end today. From 1 October 2026 a business can no longer add a surcharge to a payment made with eftpos, Mastercard, Visa or American Express. The change comes out of the Reserve Bank of Australia’s review of merchant card payment costs and surcharging, and is written up for businesses on business.gov.au. The mechanism is worth understanding, because it is not a law aimed at you. The Reserve Bank has lifted its old ban on card networks making no-surcharge rules, and the networks have each brought in such a rule from today, so the obligation reaches a sole trader through the terms of their payment provider rather than through a regulator. If your invoices have ever carried a card fee line, or your website says card payments attract a percentage on top, that wording stops being usable now.

Most small businesses have nothing to undo. The Reserve Bank’s plain-language summary of the review puts the share of Australian businesses that surcharge at 16 per cent, and says it is up to each of them whether to put payment costs into sticker prices now that surcharging is finished. If you are in the other group, the only thing worth doing is a quick check that nothing in your system adds a fee quietly.

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

Find every place a surcharge is set

A surcharge is rarely in one spot. The Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman’s guidance suggests going through each system that touches a payment, which for a sole trader usually means the card terminal, any online payment or booking page, the invoice template or footer, the payment terms you send with a quote, and the signage at the counter or in the van.

Work from a real document rather than memory. Open the last invoice you sent and the last quote you sent, and read them line by line. A surcharge set once in a template two years ago is easy to stop seeing.

Decide where the cost goes now

Card acceptance still costs money. The question is only whether it sits inside your price or outside it, and from today it can only sit inside.

Three approaches are common. Absorb the cost and leave prices alone, which is simplest and works when card fees are small against your margin. Lift prices by roughly what cards were costing you, which keeps the margin but needs a number rather than a guess: total card fees for the last quarter, divided by total sales for the same quarter, gives the percentage you were actually paying. Or change the mix, by making bank transfer the default payment method on invoices while still accepting cards.

If you are registered for GST and you lift a price, remember the GST moves with it, so the figure the customer sees is the new price including GST rather than the old price plus a fee.

Update what the customer sees before your next send

Anything that promises a surcharge is now a promise you cannot keep, and a price that is not what the customer pays is a problem under consumer law regardless of card rules. Check the invoice footer, the quote terms, the booking confirmation email, the pricing page, the counter sign and the menu or rate card.

If you are raising prices in response, telling regular clients plainly before the next invoice arrives costs nothing and avoids the awkward call later.

Your card costs are dropping at the same time

The same set of changes lowers what your payment provider is charged. From today the interchange cap on domestic consumer credit card transactions falls to 0.3 per cent of transaction value, and the cap on domestic debit and prepaid transactions falls to 8 cents per transaction and 0.16 per cent of transaction value, with the cap on commercial credit cards held at 0.8 per cent.

That is a cap on one part of the cost, not on your total merchant fee, and it reaches you only if your provider passes it through. A note in the diary to compare your next two merchant statements, or a call to your provider asking what your rate is now, is a reasonable way to check whether the saving arrived.

What the ban does not cover

The Reserve Bank’s questions and answers on the review makes two limits clear. Any exception belongs to each card network, not to the Reserve Bank, so a payment provider is the place to ask about an unusual case. And payment methods that are not cards sit outside this, since the Reserve Bank does not currently regulate surcharges on them.

Surcharges that have nothing to do with cards are also untouched. A public holiday surcharge, for instance, remains allowed where it is clearly disclosed.

Apsis helps with the tidy-up rather than the decision. Payment terms are stored once and printed on your quotes and invoices, so surcharge wording comes out in one place instead of on every future document. A default line-item rate pre-fills quotes and invoices, which means a price change is one setting rather than a number to remember on each job. GST is computed from the line items on every document, so an updated rate carries the right GST without a separate sum.