RBA Surcharge Reform · Effective 1 October 2026
The surcharge has gone. The cost has not.
From 1 October 2026, you could no longer add a card surcharge to a customer’s bill. But the cost of accepting cards did not disappear. Interchange, scheme fees and acquirer margin all remained. The only real question is how much, and whether your payments are built to keep it low.
Oct 2026
When card surcharging ended, across in-store, online and phone payments.
4 networks
Visa, Mastercard and eftpos must comply. American Express also aligned.
1–1.5% of revenue
The card cost that now lands on your margin, not your customers.
What actually changes
This is what came into effect on October 1, in plain terms, without the jargon.
Card surcharging stopped
From 1 October, Visa, Mastercard and eftpos were required to remove card surcharging, and American Express also aligned from the same date. There was no exception for a “reasonable” surcharge.
Interchange caps fell, but you might not have felt it
The wholesale cost built into card payments, interchange, is capped lower. Whether that saving reaches you depends entirely on how you are priced.
POS and hardware can’t hide in a surcharge
Bundling terminal, software and equipment costs into a card fee is no longer possible. Those costs do not vanish. They become visible.
Fees came into the open
Your acquirer (the company that processes your card payments) must now publish its fees every quarter. Opaque pricing has nowhere left to sit.
The cost becomes invisible to customers
No line on the receipt means no prompt, for them or for you, to check what card acceptance is actually costing. Easy to overlook, and easy to overpay.
Why it matters
A compliance task on the surface. A margin decision underneath.
If you used to surcharge, that 1–1.5% was never really yours to keep. Removing it lands the cost squarely on your P&L. And if your POS bundles software and hardware into payments, unbundling can turn one invisible cost into three visible ones: a processing fee, a software subscription and a hardware rental.
Most businesses treated October as a box to tick: updating the terminal, removing the surcharge, then moved on. The ones who come out ahead will use it as a reason to look properly at how their payments are built, not just what they cost on the surface.
What to look for in a provider
A provider gives you a rate.
A strategy gives you a structure.
A terminal and a rate is not a payments strategy. It is infrastructure. A strategy starts with your transaction profile, your card mix, volume and channels, and designs around it. Zero Payments has worked with Australian merchants for nearly 20 years, through every regulatory shift. As a Tyro ISO Platinum Partner, we work with a single acquirer chosen deliberately for transparent pricing, strong least-cost routing, and a platform built for Australian business.
Card acceptance and card-payment availability across the last four quarters, on the Tyro network.
Reported online platform uptime over the past three years.
The RBA now requires providers to publish reliability data. Tyro does, and so do we, as a Tyro ISO Platinum Partner.
A fair question to ask any provider: can they show you their reliability data? Many can’t. A number of payment facilitators and international acquirers don’t publish it at all.
“We came in to tick a box. We left with a blueprint to cut our payment costs and protect our margin. Zero took our strategy further than the surcharge change itself.”
Zero Payments top 10 hospitality customer
A straightforward starting point
See exactly where you stand
An independent review of your current payments: your rates, pricing model and card mix. Around 30 minutes. No cost, no obligation, no lock-in. You’ll leave with a clear picture, and a number that’s yours, not a headline.
- ✓The 5-step guide to surcharge reform, yours to download the moment you submit
- ✓A no-cost, no-obligation review of where you stand
- ✓Bring your last two or three merchant statements, that’s all we need
Surcharge Ready guide + Free Review
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