Debit, prepaid and credit card surcharges on the Visa, Mastercard and eftpos networks to be banned from 01/10/2026
Review of Merchant Card Payment Costs and Surcharging – Conclusions Paper
Excludes American Express.
RBA to Ban Visa, Mastercard and eftpos Debit, Prepaid and Credit Card Surcharges from 01/10/2026
browser on 31/03/2026 - 09:55
Last edited 31/03/2026 - 10:12 by 2 other users
Last edited 31/03/2026 - 10:12 by 2 other users
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Such as the cinema charging a dollar or two just to book online? I paid that once or twice, but the cinemas are practically empty these days so I can just rock up and pay on the day and not have to worry about missing out, can check the online bookings before I leave (get up to the seat selection part) to see that they've only sold 1 - 5 seats and when the movie actually starts there is only around 10 - 15 people sitting down.
Quite stupid to be nickel and diming you that much when they already bereft of customers, and a popcorn + drink costs you something ridiculous like $30, on top of the $20 to $25 ticket.
thats why i havent been in over a decade, overseas
That is what will happen…!
Everyone from council to coffee shop owner will start charging "processing fees" or "admin fees" or "booking fees"…and most of them will now charge even more then what they used to chargw ! …LoL
Just another opportunity to put the prices up? Haha …
this guarantees price goes up by 5-10% by October. It means nothing.
It should have never been introduced in the first place and as Herald Sun said, as the institution which introduced this in the first place, they should be ashamed… and Glenn Stevens should apologize.
It was a own goal.
Many businesses did not charge card fees, they make a rule that encouraged the fees.
Now try to make it look like a win.
Do u reckon its like the R&E scheme, the manufacturer apparently already increased the price to factor in the 10c
prices going up
I'd rather they go up and know exactly what I have to pay, rather than have a nice suprise after I'm handed the receipt.
all subsidised by those who pay cash……..but don't have the advantage of using the bank's money or "section 75" protection.🤔
There is a cost for handling and managing cash, which everyone was already paying.
It is actually those using cards who subsidise those who pay cash. Cash is always more expensive for a shop to handle than cards; the security issues alone are enough to ensure that even before adding the other costs of cash handling. That's exactly why Colesworth encourages you to take cash out at the register.
Small stores that prefer cash only ever do so to dodge tax.
That's a very good move - yes it might not save us anything and the cost may be passed on to consumers anyway but at least we will pay what they advertise. I was getting really sick of cafes and restaurants where the coffee was advertised as $6 and when you pay, $6.10 would be taken out.
We don't do many things good in Australia but one thing we were really good at was that all prices advertised were inclusive of all taxes etc, but this sneaky charge was taking that away from us.
coffee was advertised as $6 and you pay $6.07-$6.08 you mean?
now the business might round down to $0.05 or might round up to 10 cents, who knows?
@furyou which is fine, the point is that the customers should know in advance exactly what they will be paying not like $6 plus card fee.
Yes I agree with that but I'd rather say $6 + 1% with visa and 3% for ae. And have a choice to pay by cash.
My problem is for the cafes where you can only pay by card and they don't tell you the fee.
I don't have a problem when I know the fee and I can choose
I was getting really sick of cafes and restaurants where the coffee was advertised as $6 and when you pay, $6.10 would be taken out.
So now you will be paying $6.50…
What a win !!!
So now you will be paying $6.50…
Or on a flip side I will decide not to spend $6.50
I will decide not to spend $6.50
What a win for the store and our economy !!!
Three cheers for the RBA… 🥳🥳🥳
@jv: or the business can decide to keep the price at $6.10 - as long as I know in advance what I am up for, I am OK with it.
@IMadeYouReadThis: Businesses that do underhanded things up front would do a lot worse out the back. Imagine how they handle your food.
Good. It cost businesses more to handle cash then these fees were. RBA already capped the fees merchants pay at reasonable amounts so businesses cannot cry poor over an increase of less than 1% of their cost base.
Yes, businesses refuse to acknowledge electronic payments have boosted their productivities.
Imagine a typical 2 men coffee stall, in peak morning hours, have to make coffee, prepare food, and handle cash payments. This is the same kind of business pushing the fees to their customers.
Then there are high turnover entertainment venues already making healthy profits, and they have to milk that 1%.
We used to pay people 5 hours or more a week to stand in queues at the bank. Not cheap.
Not to mention day to day manual handling of cash, miscounting and recounting, balancing the till, and when it comes up short.
Yep, the daily bank run to deposit cash was such a pain in the ass. Glad cash has mostly died.
Business still like cash because they can undeclare like 90% of the cash earnings and still generate more profits.
Can you guess how many coffee shops would go broke if cash got banned?
These people are not rich, they go into it with a dream, and struggle every day to hold it.You suggesting they're not paying their taxes and pocketing cash takings?
Because that's the only way card isn't cheaper to handle. It takes far longer to accept cash, count it, hand over change, and then at the end of the day/week take it to the bank than it does to get someone to tap their card.
This frees up time for staff to make more coffee and serve more customers.
@stirlo: I assume you have never run a small business, or have the same business knowledge as Jacunta
Agree - more traceability for auditing purposes too. If you ask me, I'd prefer a cashless world. I only leave my house with my phone these days. No wallets. No car keys, no house keys.
Its not 1% of cost base, that's assuming every dollar of the sale is profit. Profit is usually in the 10-20% range. Say the shop sells something for $100 with $20 profit, that 1% surcharge (1$) is 5% of the profit. that is not a small number.
That's the problem, the mentality that card fee is a separate expenditure that should be passed on to customers.
What about tyre kickers wasting time asking questions and not buy anything? Pulling workers away for other activities or missed sales opportunities?
Or people buy 1 drink and sit there for 2 hours to charge their laptop and use the WiFi, holding up the table.
Or customers return to ask for refund or exchange causing additional work?
The point is, not all transactions are equal, a business sometimes makes more, sometimes makes less, sometime loses money. But as long as overall it is turning a reasonable profit it is a good business.
Except that for almost all businesses with card surcharges the cost of handling cash is higher. There’s the people who have to reach for their wallet, the people who count out an absurd number of coins, employees accidentally giving wrong change, theft by employees, needing to have a secure location to hold cash, and the time to take the money to the bank and deposit it, plus bank charges on business accounts, and then bookkeeping to add it all up.
With cards the totals are almost instantly available in the businesses account, the books are 100% accurate through automated reporting and the chance of theft is near zero.
Businesses charge a fee because they can, not because card transactions truly cost them more.
Do thpse staff that steal get caught when they balance the register? Or even from the store camera?
Also curious with payid is it auto reported aswell? Or is it more liek cash isnteqd of contactless thing?I see alot of places doing only cash + payid
The cap will be gone once cash is gone.
Cash won't be gone.
Doesnt really matter. We all kno the cost will be passed down to the consumer in one way or another….
I'd rather see it all upfront then have it show up as I'm paying.
by 1.4%? If businesses add 1.4% to their prices and we no longer pay the 1.4% surcharge, wouldn't that just be us paying the same?
isnt that what he just said?
optimistic/naive if you think prices will rise only exactly what the card surcharge was.
If 1.4% less profits bring small business over the brink, It might not have been a good investment for them. Another black market cig shop will take its place. I don't think they'll increase them so much as sticker shock is more significant on the item than discovering the surcharge on your bank app 8 hours later.
Good news for gift card split payments (Restaurant Choice etc.), the surcharges made that much more difficult.
I am a bit confused by this bit at the end though, surely you don't need to use physical card vs virtual card on mobile wallet (Google Pay/Apple Pay etc.):
The RBA plans to start a public consultation in mid-2026 to assess the public interest case for regulating areas of the retail payments system that were not covered under this Review, including mobile wallets
@mapax - umm how do we handle this one? Good news and gift card used in the same sentence. I'm confused.
I’ve spent the last hour liasing with the board and they said to wait, it won’t be long before the good news goes sideways.
I think it’s because Mobile wallets currently don’t route to the cheapest network by default eg if you have eftpos and visa, it’s gonna be setup as visa. It then only tried eftpos if visa fails due to some intermittent issue. Though that was what was happening last year, maybe changed now.
It was only a few years ago that Apple added the ability to swap to the eftpos network when adding a card to your digital wallet.
sucked in Aldi
Just about the only major supermarket who insist on surcharges.
Don't worry they'll use the current war inflation to cover their surcharge price rises. And magically prices will never fall even when the ear ends.
And still be cheaper than the other three
I actually don't care about the CC surcharges, I just pay cash.
This isn't an RBA jurisdiction, but the weekend and public holiday surcharges are worse, especially when you suspect that these establishments don't pay weekend awards anyway.
You're not wrong about the weekend surcharge.
Wife's cousin was in town recently so we took her to a cafe for breakfast before showing her around Brisbane. The cafe's web ordering system had higher prices than the menu… I didn't click as to what the higher price was for (been a long time since I've dined out on a weekend) so I went up to the counter to order. And up there was a 5% weekend surcharge sign…
5%!!!!
Saw that one of the restaurants down at Hobart that I visit every time I'm down there has a weekend surcharge. So I'm dining there on a weeknight when I'm down there.
5% is low. I’ve seen 15%.
Edit: wait i thought you were talking about public holidays15% wkend in Sydney, then CC % on top
they wonder why ppl don't go out muchIsnt 10 the norm for weekend and 15 for public holiday?
There's two cafes in Hobart that aren't absolute garbage. Take it as a win haha
biggest advantage: the price you see is the price you pay
good businesses need to compete on face value of menu prices and not make us play mind maths working out these percentages
Watch prices start creeping up as businesses try to offset the revenue hit from this. A lot of operators, especially across hospitality and service industries, introduced these surcharges over the past few years because everyone else was doing it, and it ended up being an easy boost to the P&L. Now that stream is disappearing right when costs are rising faster than revenue, so something has to give.
So how much does it cost to accept cash? I can tell you it’s not free and that doesn’t even include staff/people stealing the cash
You guys do realise that the vast majority of businesses already don't add explicit surcharges don't you? Why should all the prices go up? It's not like the places that charge the surcharge are cheaper than anywhere else. They just go "Surprise!" when you go to pay. If they want to build in the surcharge and make themselves less competitive than the ones who never charged it, then go right ahead.
I just wish they'd extend it to every other BS charge too, like the million random charges that businesses like Uber add on these days.
I think Australia just wants to maintain the standard that whatever price you see should be what you pay (US and South East Asian countries are terrible at that)
But also many restaurants are also guilty only showing the surcharges at the cashier instead of on the menu/door.
One day i was running out of a bag of coffee and was driving past a coffee shop that I know stock a specific specialty coffee (which was already expensive) and i walked in, grabbed a bag, and went straight to the cashier and only realised that they had 20% surcharge on the coffee beans too. I had not seen any sign of the surcharges because that cafe only had them shown on the menu.
One less surcharge for me to track on surcharge.com.au
It’s the small victories for consumers
Hopefully fuel surcharge isn’t going to be a big thing…
Great news.
About time.
Some businesses get surcharges as extra revenues, some use it to discourage electronic payments to cook the book, some do it for both.
If a business is running so thin that they cannot afford to pay the bank to use their payment services that actually help to save them time, the business has a bigger problem.
Small businesses are always thinking about costs. Smarter management and cost cutting probably would make loads of small struggling businesses solvent. Just changing suppliers could double profits for many.
This isn't the saving people think it is, they'll just put up the normal price of whatever you're buying to make up for it.
I'd rather see the final price and deciding whether to buy it or not than whats normal these days of thinking about what additional bs charges are going to be added on. If anything this needs to be extended to restaurant surcharges on specific hours/days etc. Print and use different menus if you have to.
Exactly right. Let’s aim to standardise the displayed price always being the final price - we always had that right until fairly recently, unlike countries that force gratuity or show pre-tax pricing.
You can never win with the terminally-whinging
It's the "free postage" trick…
$10 + $8 shipping, *Drake no meme.jpg*
$20 + free shipping, *Drake yes meme.jpg*Majority of businesses will charge the most they can for their goods or services. They don’t need an excuse to charge more if they can
You can't educate the masses. Transparency isn't always appreciated. Just look at the constant whinging around this site. But yiu can bet they'll suck up to price rises on Netflix and do nothing about it.
I’ve been a churner and it will be a bit of a relief if they stop the bigger signup bonuses and make it less (or not at all) worth jumping around.
If it goes the way we think then I’ll probably cancel cards and take one up with my home loan provider for free with a larger limit and put everything through that.
I’ve enjoyed the challenge of hitting spend criteria (through normal spending) and getting rewards for doing normal spending. But it’s another thing to keep track of in an increasingly busy schedule around everything else.
On paper this will look good, in reality you will pay more (in both eft and cash formats)
Poor Qantas, how will the survive not charging you $20 credit card fee on a $2k airfare … the horror !!!!
The ticket will be 2,020 cash or card or bank transfer.
That's an ugly looking figure. Let's make it a neat 2100.
No no. That looks too expensive. $2099 looks smaller. But… and this is a secret just for us marketing folks… it's really only $1 difference! /s
Surcharges are not really being "banned." Mastercard and VISA are, at the end of the day, businesses, and they still charge a surcharge. They don't operate for free lol.
What is being banned is transparently passing those fees on to the invoice of those who incurred the fee. Now it will be instead bundled into operating costs and subsidized by everyone else, including cash users: those who never swiped the card.
As someone who strictly never uses cash I'm not too bothered. Fine by me! However, lets not pretend were all being "ripped off". You used a service, so you paid for the service. Now cash users subsidize it for us.
At least majority of consumers use credit cards. But online shops have been charging even more on top of that because of Afterpay no fee policy. So they have to change the price even for the non Afterpay transactions.
Eh. Sort of. It doesn't really "cost" stores to use Afterpay. They charge the retailer fees, sure. But by offering free credit they also bring in increased trade. Most stores would be in a "net profit" situation, or they wouldn't be singing up lol.
No, it does cost stores to use Afterpay and the fees are higher than other payment system but a bit similar to Paypal really.
However, Afterpay has this no surcharge policies meaning to ensure that stores can still serve payment through Afterpay, they will just increase the price so there are no visible "surcharges" for all payment methods across the site.
They will secretly increase the price by 5% to cover that. Tell us it's inflation
How do you secretly increase the price? When you go to pay you will see and pay a higher price so it’s not exactly a secret
Interesting that the RBA only looked at interchange fees, which are not the full fee charged when paying by credit card.
Fees are usually Interchange + Scheme + Acquirer margin.
https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/bulletin/2022/sep/the-co…We use stripe for credit card processing, which is all up is 1.7 - 3.5%.
Just sat through a webinar for the travel industry.
Apparently its still legal to offer a X% discount if paying by cash or ETF when you're paying, just not in the advertised price.
This will encourage uptake of card payments, banks will be happy. Potentially ATO as well, more traceability.
Some business may start offering discounts when pay by cash, some restaurants already do, typically 5%. Have seen 10% with minimum spend, i.e. 10% off when pay by cash over $50.
Goes to show that it's not the fees, small businesses prefers cash, for some reason. ;-)
Took em long enough, still not immediate either which is a joke
To be fair, they have to give time for businesses to adjust. Certain POS systems are not straightforward to change, nor the counter staff know what to do.
Excellent. Now ban Sunday/public holiday surcharges.
Curuous Whats ur opinion of tips? Or even gratuity charges btw?
Sad.
Will likely go back to using my credit card for paying everything. Will also mean I'll likely just churn VISA and MC credit cards until Amex has its surcharges removed too.
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It doesn't prevent dodgy booking fees.