Card Surcharge Ban 2026: What Online Stores Must Do

The card surcharge ban is in force in Australia: remove separate card fees from your online checkout and include payment costs in your pricing. Visa, Mastercard and eftpos payments are covered, including credit, debit and prepaid cards. American Express has also removed surcharging under its own rules.

If you previously added a 1.5% card fee, your task is to remove it wherever an order can be paid. A gateway’s automatic switch-off won’t necessarily remove fees added by your store’s checkout software or invoice templates.

What the Surcharge Ban Covers

The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) changed its standards so designated card networks can impose no-surcharge rules. Visa, Mastercard and eftpos have introduced those rules. The restriction covers online and in-person payments, including foreign-issued cards on these networks.

The RBA’s card surcharge guidance gives the exact commencement boundary and network exceptions. The change is already effective in 2026. It operates through network rules and your payment provider, rather than a new rule directly regulating every retailer.

American Express is outside the designated-network regulation but has separately prohibited surcharging. UnionPay and PayPal have also removed it under their own rules. Don’t treat a network’s position outside the RBA designation as permission to keep a fee.

Non-card payment methods aren’t generally regulated by this RBA change. Any proposed fee still needs to comply with that method’s provider rules and consumer law. Genuine delivery charges are a separate pricing issue. Renaming a card surcharge as a service fee doesn’t change its purpose.

For Square sellers, the built-in card surcharge setting is automatically disabled. A card fee created manually as a service charge or tax needs separate removal. The same distinction applies to a payment terminal connected to another point-of-sale system.

Surcharging Rules Until the Ban Starts

The transition has ended for the covered networks. The former cost-of-acceptance rule doesn’t permit you to keep a smaller card surcharge now.

Before the network ban took effect, a permitted surcharge couldn’t exceed the cost of accepting that payment type. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) enforced the excessive-surcharge rules. A business using one rate across different covered cards had to keep it within the lowest applicable acceptance cost.

Surcharges also had to be disclosed before payment. Where customers had no surcharge-free payment option, the minimum unavoidable surcharge had to be included in the displayed price. The ACCC’s card surcharge guidance explains the former regime and today’s pricing obligations.

An invoice issued before the change doesn’t preserve a right to surcharge a later card payment. Review unpaid invoices and payment links as well as new orders.

Changes to Card Fees and Interchange

The ban removes the shopper’s separate surcharge, but your provider still charges you to accept payments. Interchange is one component of that cost, paid between participants in the card system.

The RBA’s interchange decision lowers the domestic consumer credit card cap to 0.3%. Domestic commercial credit cards retain a 0.8% cap. Domestic debit and prepaid caps fall to 8 cents or 0.16%, depending on the fee basis. These are interchange caps, not caps on your total merchant bill.

Foreign-issued card interchange caps and more detailed merchant statements are part of a later implementation stage. Published network and acquiring fees will help you compare providers. Use the RBA’s implementation timetable for the exact boundaries. A lower interchange cap won’t necessarily reduce a blended provider rate by the same amount.

For a hypothetical store, take one period’s Australian-dollar sales, excluding tax and delivery. Assume its domestic debit sales are $60,000 and consumer credit sales are $40,000. Suppose its own statements show all-in acceptance costs of 0.8% and 1.4% respectively. These are illustrative merchant costs, not quoted provider rates.

The calculation is $60,000 × 0.8% plus $40,000 × 1.4%, or $1,040. If the store previously recovered those costs through permitted surcharges, removing that recovery reduces its contribution by $1,040 before repricing. If its provider then reduces actual costs to $900, the remaining cost is $900. Don’t budget for a saving until it appears in your agreement or statements.

Replace the example with your own card mix, fixed transaction fees and taxable fee treatment. Compare periods on the same basis with your accountant.

How to Adjust Prices and Checkout

You can absorb acceptance costs, recover them through advertised product prices or discount a cheaper payment method where its rules permit. Absorbing the cost lowers your margin. Repricing spreads the cost across sales, including customers who previously used a cheaper method.

A discount needs a clear base price and eligibility rule. Don’t inflate a claimed saving or use a renamed fee to recreate the prohibited surcharge. Ask your accountant about tax treatment and your legal adviser about payment contracts or unusual fee arrangements.

Work through the payment path in this order:

1. Export your payment statements and calculate actual cost by card type. Separate provider fees from the surcharge you charged customers.
2. Choose your revised advertised prices or permitted discount. Update product prices and any feeds that supply other sales channels.
3. Remove the card fee at its source. Inspect checkout extensions, fee apps, gateway settings and any custom amount calculation.
4. Update invoices, saved payment links and receipt wording. Check that an outstanding balance doesn’t retain an old surcharge line.
5. Place test orders through each payment path. The amount authorised must match the final total shown to the customer, with no prohibited card fee.

Square’s removal instructions distinguish its automatic setting from manual service charges. Remove manual card fees yourself and refresh the app if an old setting still appears.

Stripe disables its surcharge support for Australian online payments and Stripe Terminal. Its Australian surcharge instructions require you to remove surcharge calculations and parameters from your own integration. Review connected third-party software too.

Tyro automatically removes Tyro-managed surcharging on the affected networks, including American Express. Its merchant instructions distinguish terminal-managed fees from amounts added by an integrated point-of-sale system. Remove any surcharge that system adds before sending the total to Tyro.

In Shopify, review Settings > Payments > Shopify Payments > Manage to see your card rates. Those rates are your merchant costs. Inspect any fee app or custom checkout change that adds them to the customer’s order. Remove that charge at its source and test both ordinary checkout and invoice payments.

For WooCommerce or another storefront, inspect payment-method fee extensions and gateway-specific fee settings. Keep genuine delivery charges separate. The guide to showing total prices explains how to present unavoidable charges, while the checkout optimisation guide covers the wider purchase flow.

Card Fees at a Chat Checkout

A chat checkout must apply the same price rules as the web checkout. For the same basket, delivery choice and discount, the final amount must match. A shopping agent can’t add a card fee that the network prohibits.

Before the customer commits, show the product quantities and prices, discounts, tax treatment and delivery cost. Display the final total and payment currency. If a different payment method lawfully attracts a fee, disclose its amount and resulting total before authorisation.

Use the same test basket in chat and on the website. Record the displayed total, amount sent to the gateway and amount captured. Check that the receipt matches too. Repeat for each supported payment method and delivery choice.

If chat still charges a fee after the gateway setting changes, inspect the order amount created by the agent’s checkout connection. The fee may already be included before the gateway receives it. Correct that calculation, then repeat the same order until every total agrees.

Telling Shoppers About the Change

Tell customers what changed without promising that every order is cheaper. A store that absorbs the fee can write, “We no longer add a separate card payment surcharge at checkout.”

If you revised product prices, use factual wording such as, “Our advertised prices include our card acceptance costs. Delivery charges are shown before you pay.” Use that sentence only if both statements match your store.

Replace the old surcharge notice in help pages and checkout messages. Give staff the same explanation for invoice payments and chat orders. Finish by checking that a customer can read the total, authorise payment and receive a receipt without encountering the removed fee.