Card surcharges stop on 1 October: check your invoices

Card surcharges stop on 1 October, and the change reaches further into your paperwork than a setting on a payment terminal. Under the Reserve Bank’s retail payments reforms, the eftpos, Mastercard and Visa networks bring in no-surcharge rules from that date, with American Express, UnionPay and PayPal removing surcharging alongside them, as the RBA sets out in its questions and answers on removing card payment surcharges. The same page confirms lower caps on domestic interchange fees from 1 October, with foreign-issued cards following on 1 April 2027. The ABC reported this week that banks are trimming rewards programs and adjusting card fees as those caps land, and that around one in six Australian businesses surcharge today. If you are one of them, the wording sitting in your invoice footer and on your quotes has a few days left before it is wrong.

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 mentioned

The Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman’s guidance on the surcharging ban suggests working through payment terminals, point of sale systems, invoicing, online payment platforms and any other place a card fee is applied or described.

For a sole trader the list is usually shorter but easy to under-count. Think about the invoice template footer, the payment terms paragraph on quotes, the standard wording in your payment reminder emails, the payment page a client lands on, your website, and any booking or job-acceptance form. A surcharge line that nobody has looked at since it was set up is exactly the one that gets missed.

Invoices already sent are covered too

This is the detail that catches service businesses. The RBA’s questions and answers state that where an invoice was issued before 1 October and is paid by card on or after that date, a surcharge cannot be applied, and that payment service providers will be switching that function off.

A 30-day invoice sent in the middle of September is still sitting in someone’s inbox when the rules change. So the job is not only updating the template for new work, but going back through unpaid invoices that quote a card fee and reissuing or correcting the ones a client could still pay in October. The same goes for quotes that are open and might be accepted next month.

Know what card payments actually cost you

The surcharge existed to recover a cost, and that cost does not vanish. What changes is that it has to live inside your prices instead of being added at the end.

Pull your last three merchant statements and work out what you paid in fees as a percentage of what you took through cards. Then look at what share of your income arrives by card at all. A tradie paid mostly by bank transfer is in a very different position to a mobile business taking nearly everything by tap. Those two numbers tell you whether this is a rounding error or a real margin question, and it is worth having them before deciding to change any prices.

Repricing without misleading anyone

If the answer is that prices move, the ACCC’s card surcharges page is worth reading first. It makes the point that businesses cannot get around the no-surcharge rules by describing a card payment surcharge as some other kind of fee or charge, and that doing so may amount to misleading conduct. A “card processing fee” line on an invoice that only ever appears when someone pays by card is the same thing under a different name.

The cleaner approach is to lift the underlying rate or price so the cost is carried across everything you sell, rather than bolting on a replacement line. Whether that is worth doing at all depends on the numbers from the step above.

What you can still charge

The ban is narrower than it can first sound. The RBA’s page and the ACCC’s guidance both note that businesses can still offer discounts to customers who pay another way, still charge weekend, public holiday and booking fees where they are properly disclosed, and still charge for genuine payment services such as terminal rental. Only the fee applied because a customer paid by card is going.

Also worth remembering: goods and services tax still applies in the normal way to what you charge, so a repriced line item changes the GST on the document along with it.

Where Apsis helps

The part of this that eats time is finding the old wording rather than writing the new wording. In Apsis, the invoice list can be filtered by status and searched across the invoice number, title, overview, notes and client, so unpaid invoices that mention a card fee can be found rather than remembered, and overdue rows are flagged as you go. Your trading name and payment terms are stored once and printed on quotes and invoices, so a line about card charges is one setting to correct rather than a change repeated document by document. If repricing is the answer, the default line-item rate that pre-fills new quotes and invoices is a single number to update, and GST is calculated from the line items on every document, so the change carries through without a separate sum. On the paid plan, document templates give you one more place to make the wording consistent across everything that goes out.