Australia ends card surcharges and cuts interchange caps on 1 October: what merchants and payment providers must change

Australia ends card surcharges and cuts interchange caps on 1 October: what merchants and payment providers must change

29 September 2026 — The Reserve Bank of Australia's retail-payments reforms, set out in its conclusions paper of 31 March 2026, take effect on Thursday 1 October 2026. From that day merchants can no longer add a surcharge to payments on the designated debit, prepaid and credit card networks, and the caps on the interchange fees that card issuers earn fall. Startup Daily reminded businesses on 29 September that the change lands this week and that American Express is joining voluntarily.

What changes on 1 October

• No surcharging on designated debit, prepaid and credit card networks. The RBA achieves this by removing its ban on the networks' own "no-surcharge" rules, so the networks can once again forbid merchants to surcharge.
• Lower interchange caps: 0.3% of the transaction for consumer credit cards, 0.8% for commercial credit cards, and 8 cents or 0.16% for debit and prepaid cards.

What follows

• 30 October 2026: card networks publish their first quarterly interchange and scheme fees, and acquirers processing more than $10 billion a year publish their first quarterly merchant service fees by card type and merchant size.
• 30 January 2027: acquirers publish how much of the lower costs they pass through.
• 1 April 2027: a 1.0% cap on interchange for foreign-issued cards, and merchant statements must separate domestic from foreign cards and card-present from card-not-present payments.

Who is affected

Every Australian business that takes card payments, in shops, online or on invoices, and the software they use to do it: point-of-sale systems, e-commerce checkouts, invoicing and accounting tools, booking systems and payment gateways. Payment facilitators and acquirers must change their fee schedules and reporting.

What to do

• Switch off surcharge settings in POS terminals, online checkouts, invoice templates and booking engines before 1 October, and remove surcharge wording from receipts and websites.
• Decide how to handle card costs in prices instead, now that they cannot be passed on separately.
• Ask your acquirer or payment provider when its merchant service fees will fall to reflect the lower interchange, and compare its rates with the published figures from 30 October.
• Software vendors serving Australian merchants should confirm that surcharge features are disabled by default for Australian accounts.

Sources

• Reserve Bank of Australia: Review of Retail Payments Regulation, Conclusions Paper — Impact and implementation — 31 March 2026
• Reserve Bank of Australia: Review of Retail Payments Regulation, Conclusions Paper — 31 March 2026
• Startup Daily: Card surcharges end this week. Here’s what’s changing — 29 September 2026