Australia’s card-payment industry has set an October 1 deadline to stop merchants adding surcharges when customers pay with cards, creating an immediate control and implementation task for acquirers, payment service providers, gateways and point-of-sale vendors.
Australian Payments Network, or AusPayNet, said on September 9 that eftpos, Mastercard and Visa will introduce no-surcharge rules covering in-store, online and digital transactions. The change spans personal, commercial and corporate credit, debit and prepaid cards, including cards used through mobile wallets. American Express, JCB and UnionPay have also voluntarily aligned with the reform, according to the industry’s new guidance site.
The distinction between a scheme rule and a statutory prohibition matters. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission says the no-surcharge requirements will sit in each network’s scheme rules and merchant contracts. Card networks and payment service providers—not the ACCC—will enforce those requirements. Existing consumer-law duties around excessive surcharges and misleading price displays continue to apply until September 30 and remain relevant to how businesses present prices after the transition.
Providers are expected to disable, monitor and remediate
The September 9 guidance gives payment firms a broader role than simply notifying merchants. It says acquirers, PSPs, gateway operators and software providers should identify affected products and channels, review surcharge functionality, prepare merchant communications and test system changes before the deadline.
For acquirers and PSPs, the guidance says supporting compliance may include removing or disabling card-based surcharge functionality, educating merchants, monitoring for non-compliance and supporting remediation. Software and gateway providers are similarly told to update configurations and test changes with acquiring and merchant customers. The exact obligations remain dependent on each network’s rules and implementation guidance, so providers still need to reconcile the common industry message with their own contractual requirements.
This creates a practical accountability chain. A merchant may control its advertised prices, but surcharge settings can also sit inside a terminal, gateway, checkout plug-in or bundled acceptance plan. Providers that leave conflicting functionality active risk creating avoidable merchant non-compliance, customer disputes and last-minute remediation.
Merchants cannot simply rename the fee
The new rules target extra charges imposed because a customer chooses to pay by card. They do not prevent fees that apply independently of the payment method, such as a generally applied booking fee or a weekend or public-holiday surcharge. Surcharging can also continue where an applicable law or regulation expressly permits it, with state- and territory-regulated taxi fares cited as an example.
That boundary is not permission to relabel a card fee. The ACCC’s current guidance warns that a “service” or “handling” fee applied only to some payment methods is likely to be treated as a card surcharge by another name. Businesses also remain responsible for clear, non-misleading pricing under Australian Consumer Law.
Merchants that keep applying prohibited card surcharges after October 1 may be contacted by their acquirer or PSP, required to remove the charge and potentially face penalties under their applicable arrangements, according to the industry guidance. Consumers can separately report misleading price displays to the ACCC or state and territory consumer-protection agencies.
Acceptance costs do not disappear
Ending surcharges does not eliminate card-acceptance costs. Businesses will need to decide how those costs fit into their pricing and may need to review their acquiring plans. The ACCC says processing costs generally weigh more heavily on smaller businesses: based on Reserve Bank data for 2023–24, small businesses processing less than A$1 million in annual card transactions typically faced debit or eftpos costs of 0.85% to 2% and credit-card costs of 1% to 2%, though individual costs can fall outside those ranges.
The Reserve Bank of Australia paired the surcharge reform with lower interchange caps and greater fee transparency. Domestic interchange-cap reductions are also due on October 1, while a foreign-card interchange cap and some transparency measures are scheduled for April 1, 2027. The RBA said small businesses should benefit most from the cap changes because they tend to pay fees closer to existing maximums. Whether those savings offset the lost ability to pass through card costs will depend on each merchant’s acceptance mix, provider pricing and negotiating position.
A short implementation window
The policy itself is not new: the RBA published its final conclusions on March 31 after a consultation process that began in July 2025. The September 9 development is the coordinated industry implementation push and the launch of a common information site for consumers, merchants and providers.
With less than a month remaining, payment firms should be able to show which products still support card-specific surcharging, who owns each required configuration change, how merchant communications are being tracked and what monitoring will identify non-compliant transactions after cutover. Merchants need to update checkout displays and customer communications, test affected payment channels and confirm with their provider which fees remain permitted.
Calling the October change a “ban” without qualification would obscure who is responsible. The card networks set and enforce the contractual rules; acquirers and PSPs are expected to help implement and police them; merchants remain responsible for compliant settings and transparent prices; and the ACCC retains its consumer-law role rather than enforcing the scheme rules themselves.