From 1 October 2026, merchants can no longer pass card payment costs to customers through a surcharge. The Reserve Bank of Australia released its final Conclusions Paper on 31 March 2026, and the position is now settled. Visa, Mastercard and eftpos are required to remove card surcharging, and American Express has confirmed it will align from the same date. Other networks have not yet announced their position.
What hasn't changed is the maths. Every card transaction still carries a cost: interchange, scheme fees, and the acquirer's margin. Those costs do not disappear when the surcharge does. They move. Into your margin.
So the question was never whether you will absorb the cost of accepting cards. You will. The question is how much, and whether your payments are structured to keep that number as low as it should be.
It helps to be clear on the mechanism. The RBA has stopped blocking the no-surcharge rules that the card networks operate, and Visa, Mastercard and eftpos are now putting those rules back, so surcharging on those networks ends. American Express sits outside that designation but has confirmed it will align on the same date. There is no carve-out for a "reasonable" fee. Alongside this, interchange caps come down (though whether you feel that depends entirely on how you are priced), bundling POS software and hardware costs into a card fee is no longer allowed, and acquirers must publish their merchant fees every quarter, so opaque pricing has nowhere left to sit.
Most businesses will treat October as a compliance task. Update the terminal, remove the surcharge, move on. That is understandable, and it is a missed opportunity.
Here is why. If you are on blended pricing, a single flat rate across every card type, your acquirer absorbs the variation between cards. When interchange falls, they keep the saving. You do not automatically benefit. On a cost-plus or interchange-plus model, the real cost passes through with a fixed margin on top, so any reduction actually reaches you. If your statement shows one rate and a total, you are almost certainly on blended, and almost certainly leaving money on the table.
There is a second, quieter risk. Many POS providers bundle payment processing into a single subscription or hardware lease, which makes it genuinely hard to see what you are paying for card acceptance versus software or equipment. Once the surcharge can no longer fund that bundle, one invisible cost becomes three visible ones: a processing fee, a software subscription and a hardware rental. For a small operator, the combined impact can reach 10–15% of net profit. The new transparency rules give you the benchmarks to ask better questions, and a legitimate window to renegotiate.
A terminal and a rate is not a payments strategy. It is infrastructure.
A terminal and a rate is not a payments strategy. It is infrastructure. A strategy starts with your transaction profile and designs around it, then revisits that structure as the rules change. Before October is a good moment to ask which one you actually have.