From 1 October 2026, you can no longer add a card surcharge to a customer's bill. That doesn't mean the cost of taking a card disappears. It means you decide where it lives instead.

What's actually changing

The Reserve Bank has banned surcharges on EFTPOS, Visa and Mastercard payments, debit, credit and prepaid, from 1 October 2026. Amex, JCB and UnionPay have said they'll remove surcharging voluntarily from the same date. PayPal and buy now pay later services sit outside the ban for now.

It's a genuine ban, not a suggestion. Card networks are pulling surcharge functionality from terminals and payment software at that date, and enforcement runs through merchant agreements rather than the ACCC. If your booking system or POS currently charges a separate "card fee" that only applies to card payments, that counts as a surcharge too. Relabeling it won't get you around the rule.

The part that gets skipped

The cost of taking a card was never really the surcharge line item. It was always the merchant fee sitting behind it. That fee is getting cheaper at the same time surcharging disappears. Interchange fees on consumer credit cards are being capped, dropping from 0.8% down to 0.3%. For most small venues, the true cost of accepting a card is about to fall, even as the visible surcharge line disappears from the till.

That's the trade worth understanding properly before September. You're not just losing a fee recovery tool. You're also getting a cheaper card to accept. The two changes land together, not separately.

What it means for your pricing

You've got three honest options, and most cafes will land somewhere between the first two.

Build it in. Take your average blended card cost and fold it into your menu prices across the board, the same way you already account for rent or wages. This is the cleanest option if most of your trade is already on card.

Absorb it. If your interchange costs drop enough under the new caps, the gap left by surcharging might be smaller than it looks. Worth running the actual numbers before assuming you need a price rise to cover it.

Do both, deliberately. A small, even price adjustment across the menu, sized to what your real card cost turns out to be once the caps land, rather than a guess.

What doesn't work is waiting until October and finding out your terminal simply stopped letting you surcharge. A cafe processing meaningful volume through card can be looking at real dollars a year in fees that used to sit on the customer's side of the ledger and now sit on yours. Better to know that number in August than discover it in November.

What to do before October

Pull your last quarter of transaction data and find your true blended card cost, not the surcharge percentage you've been charging, the actual cost your processor bills you. Call your payment provider and ask what your rate looks like once the new interchange caps apply, most haven't repriced yet. Then decide, with real numbers in front of you, whether that cost gets built into your prices, absorbed, or split.

Do this before the ban makes the decision for you. Have you pulled your actual card cost yet, or are you still working off the surcharge number you've always charged?