The RBA Card-Surcharge Ban From 1 October 2026: What It Means for Food Suppliers and Venues

The short answer

From 1 October 2026, businesses in Australia will not be able to add a card surcharge to eftpos, Mastercard, Visa or American Express payments. The Reserve Bank of Australia published its Conclusions Paper on 31 March 2026 and concluded that card surcharging on both debit and credit cards should end on that date, alongside lower interchange fee caps and new fee transparency rules. If you are a food supplier who charges a card fee at the point of payment, or a venue who charges one at the till, the fee has to come off — and the cost has to go somewhere else. This article explains what changed, what it means operationally, and the three options in front of you.

Nothing here is legal or financial advice. Where the article says a question needs advice, it means it.

What the RBA actually decided

The mechanism is worth understanding, because it is not quite the "government ban" it gets described as in headlines.

Since 2016, an RBA Standard has prevented eftpos, Visa and Mastercard from stopping merchants surcharging. That protection is what made surcharging possible in Australia — it was never a right to surcharge, it was a rule preventing the card networks from forbidding it.

The RBA has now decided to remove that protection. As the law firm Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer explained on 8 April 2026, the practical effect is that the networks are free to apply their own existing "no surcharge" rules to Australia. And they have: the ACCC’s card surcharges page, updated 27 August 2026, states that Visa, Mastercard, American Express and eftpos have each decided to introduce no-surcharge rules from 1 October 2026 — American Express included, despite not being regulated by the RBA in the same way.

That has two consequences worth holding on to:

• The rules sit in your merchant contract, not in legislation. The ACCC states that the card networks and payment service providers are responsible for enforcing them, not the ACCC. Your acquirer is the party who will tell you what changes on your terminal.
• The ACCC still has a role, but a different one: it enforces the consumer law against misleading conduct, including misleading claims about prices or the reasons for a price change.

Two other parts of the package matter to a supplier’s cost base. Interchange fee caps drop from 1 October 2026 — the consumer credit card cap falls from 0.8 % to 0.3 %, and the consumer debit cap from 10 cents to 8 cents fixed, or from 0.2 % to 0.16 % ad valorem. A new cap on foreign-issued cards and some of the transparency measures start later, on 1 April 2027, to give the industry time to implement them.

The RBA’s own plain-language summary says small businesses should benefit most from the interchange reductions, because they tend to pay fees closest to the existing caps. It also says that of the 16 % of Australian businesses that currently surcharge, it will be up to each of them to decide whether to fold payment costs into their prices.

What this changes for food suppliers

Most wholesale food payments are not card payments. Trading terms, direct debit and bank transfer carry the bulk of it, and none of that is affected. But there are four places where this lands on a supplier.

Card-paying customers. Plenty of suppliers take card for new accounts, COD customers, small venues and anyone outside terms. If any of those transactions carry a card fee today, it comes off on 1 October.

Online and portal payments. A "card processing fee" applied at an online checkout is the same thing as a surcharge on a terminal, and it is treated the same way.

Your own cost of acceptance is changing too. The interchange reduction should lower what you pay, but interchange is only one component of a merchant service fee. Whether the saving reaches you depends on your acquirer and your plan, which is precisely why the transparency measures exist. Read your next few merchant statements rather than assuming.

Your customers are dealing with the same change. Every venue you supply is working out what to do with their own surcharge before 1 October. It is a reasonable conversation to have with them, and it is a better one than most sales calls.

For scale, the ACCC publishes RBA 2023–24 figures on what card acceptance typically costs. A small business processing under $1 million a year in card transactions is likely paying 0.85 %–2 % on debit or eftpos and 1 %–2 % on credit. A medium business between $1 million and $100 million is likely paying 0.25 %–1 % on debit and 0.75 %–1.5 % on credit. That is the range of cost you are being asked to absorb or reprice.

The surcharge-versus-service-fee question

This is the part everybody asks about, and it is the part that most needs proper advice.

The ACCC’s position is clear on the principle: other fees are not banned. Service fees, booking fees and delivery fees can continue, and hospitality weekend and public holiday surcharges are unaffected — those are not card payment surcharges. But the ACCC also states that a business should not try to avoid the no-surcharge rules by describing a card surcharge as another type of fee, and that doing so may be misleading conduct.

The distinction the regulator draws is about who pays it. A fee that only applies when the customer pays by card is a card surcharge under a different name. A fee that applies to every customer regardless of how they pay is a genuine fee. That is the test in plain English, but the application of it to a specific fee, in a specific business, with specific wording, is a legal question — and it may also be a question about your merchant contract, since the no-surcharge rules are contractual. Get advice on your own fee before 1 October rather than after. Do not rely on this article, and do not rely on what a competitor appears to be doing.

Two related points from the ACCC guidance that are settled enough to act on:

• You can raise prices. Businesses can recover card costs by folding them into their overall pricing. What you cannot do is tell customers a price rise is because of the surcharge change when it is also driven by other costs — the ACCC’s own worked example is a hair salon that raises a $60 haircut to $65 while its card cost only justified $60.60.
• You can still offer a payment-method discount. Discounts for paying by cash, PayID or bank transfer remain available. The displayed price has to be the full price a customer pays without the discount, and the discounted price must not be shown more prominently.

Three practical options

Every business that surcharges today is choosing between the same three, and the choice is a pricing decision rather than a compliance one.

Option one — absorb it. Take the cost out of margin and change nothing customers can see. This is the least work and the least risk of getting the messaging wrong. It suits businesses where card is a small share of payments, where the transactions are low-value, or where the interchange reduction alone covers most of the hit. Work out your actual annual card cost first: it is often smaller than the anxiety about it.

Option two — reprice selectively. Move prices on the lines where the cost lands, rather than across the board. For a supplier this usually means the COD and card-paying customer segment, not the whole catalogue. It is more work and it needs the reason to be stated accurately if it is stated at all — but it puts the cost where the cost arises.

Option three — build it into the price list. Fold the average cost of acceptance into your prices the way you already fold in freight, packaging and insurance, and stop treating it as a separate line. This is what the RBA expects most surcharging businesses to do, and it has the advantage of ending the argument permanently. The trade-off is that customers who pay by bank transfer are now contributing to a cost they do not create, which is an argument for pairing it with a payment-method discount.

Whichever you choose, three things need doing before 1 October: turn surcharging off in every system that applies it, remove every surcharge notice from menus, price lists, portals, invoices and terminals, and talk to your payment service provider about what they are changing at their end.

A short checklist

1. List every place a card fee is added today — terminal, online checkout, portal, invoice, statement.
2. Get last year’s card volume and total card cost from your merchant statements.
3. Ask your acquirer, in writing, what changes on 1 October and what your fees will be afterwards.
4. If you charge anything that could be read as a card surcharge under another name, get advice on it now.
5. Decide absorb, reprice or build-in — and write down the reason, because you may need to explain it accurately.
6. Update every customer-facing document, and tell your customers before the date rather than after.

How Open Pantry helps suppliers get paid without surprises

Open Pantry’s automated invoicing and payments turn a completed order into a correct invoice without re-keying, so the payment conversation starts from a document the customer already agrees with — which matters more, not less, when a fee line is about to disappear from it. Accounting sync pushes those invoices into Xero, MYOB or QuickBooks Online as drafts, so a pricing change made once in your catalogue reaches the ledger without a second entry. On the platform’s own fee settings: the RBA change affects how payment costs can be presented at checkout across the industry, and our fee settings are under review ahead of 1 October — we will publish what changes before the date. If you are still invoicing manually, our guide to getting paid faster with automated invoicing is a useful starting point.