From 1 October 2026 card surcharges end on eftpos, Mastercard, Visa and Amex, and most Australian operators will bury the roughly 1% acceptance cost in a silent price rise. That reflex hands back the trust the change was about to give them. The brave move is to hold price and market the removal.
A fee you remove quietly is a fee you never get credit for.
The Take: On 1 October the surcharge line disappears from every payment terminal in the country, and most operators will file it under admin. That is the error. This is the one clean moment a business gets to remove a fee in full public view, and the reflex answer, folding that cost into a quiet across-the-board price rise, hands straight back the goodwill the change was about to give you.
What actually changes on 1 October?
Australian consumers handed over about $1.6 billion in card surcharges in 2024/25, and from 1 October that line disappears from eftpos, Mastercard, Visa and Amex payments at the terminal.
The surcharges are ending this week after years of argument. From 1 October 2026 the Reserve Bank has removed surcharging on eftpos, Mastercard, Visa and American Express. The Bank puts the total charged in surcharges at around $1.8 billion in 2024/25. Of that, roughly $1.6 billion was carried by consumers rather than other businesses. So the fee about to vanish is not a rounding error to the people who have been paying it. It is real money they have watched get bolted on at the till for years.
This is not a payments-admin change. It is a pricing and trust decision wearing an admin costume.
Why does the silent price rise fail the test?
The card-acceptance cost does not vanish just because the surcharge does. It lands on the merchant, at roughly 1% of card takings, and every operator now has to decide who wears it. The tempting move, with the cash rate sitting at 4.6% and margins already tight, is to smear that 1% across the whole menu and never say a word.
Here is the premise underneath that move: customers will not notice a fraction of a percent spread across forty items. The premise is wrong. They will not audit your menu. They will feel that the coffee crept up in October, and the story they tell themselves is the worst one available, that you used a consumer-friendly rule as cover to lift prices.
The Bank itself estimates that removing surcharging has only a small, roughly 0.1% one-off effect on measured consumer prices. Read that figure the right way. The cost of doing the honest thing is tiny. The cost of being caught doing the sly thing is your credibility.
We score Australian businesses on how they price and how they convert, and across that work the pattern holds. The operators who build trust are the ones who make a saving visible. The ones who bury it get no credit and inherit the suspicion anyway.
The three responses in front of you
The Bank sets out the merchant options plainly: absorb the cost into overall pricing, shop for a cheaper provider or discount alternative payment methods. Strip away the accounting and there are three real postures a business can take.
Surcharges Australian consumers paid in 2024/25, now removed from 1 October (RBA)
Two of those rows spend the same 1% and buy nothing with it. Only the third turns a cost you were going to wear anyway into a reason for a customer to pick you. Do the maths once. The 1% is already decided, and the only open question is whether you get anything back for it. The trade press already expects the ban to reshape spending ahead of the festive season, so your competitors are weighing the same call.
Two operators spend the same 1%. One buys trust with it. The other buys nothing back.
What I would do about it
Hold your headline prices where they are through the changeover, and resist the urge to quietly bundle the 1% back in. Announce the hold clearly at the counter, on the receipt and across your channels, so the message is prices held, surcharge gone, nothing added. Renegotiate your payment provider now, because the blended acceptance cost matters more the day you stop passing it on. If you genuinely have to recover the cost later, do it as a named, visible change months down the track, not smuggled in under the cover of 1 October. Brief your front line so that when a regular asks whether prices went up, the answer is a clean no.
How we scored this
Our methodology here is directional, drawn from scoring Australian businesses on how they price and how they convert. Where a sample is small we keep the language directional rather than precise and say so. You can see how we score.
This is my opinion, not a forecast. I think most operators will take the quiet path because it is the easy one, and I think the handful who hold price and say so out loud will win a slice of trust that money cannot buy back later. If you want to pressure-test where your own pricing sits, start with the Lens.
Frequently asked questions
Does the ban mean my card costs go away?
No. The surcharge you were passing on disappears, but the card-acceptance cost, around 1% of card takings, stays with you. The only decision is who absorbs it.
Will customers really notice a 1% price rise?
Not line by line. They notice the direction of travel. A price that ticks up the same month a consumer-friendly rule lands reads as opportunism, even when the dollars are small.
Should I just absorb the cost and stay quiet?
You can, but you get nothing for it. It is the same cost as marketing the removal with none of the trust. If you are spending the money either way, spend it where it earns you credit.
What about eftpos-only or cash discounts?
The Bank still allows discounts for alternative payment methods. A visible discount for lower-cost methods is fair and can steer customers without adding a fee back on.