Card surcharges disappear at the till from tomorrow, but the RBA acknowledges that some businesses that currently add them may respond by lifting the prices on their shelves and menus.

Picture a familiar moment at a café counter: the coffee is listed at one price on the board, the card reader shows a slightly higher number, and a small line on the receipt explains the difference as a card surcharge. From Thursday 1 October 2026, that line is due to vanish. Under the Reserve Bank of Australia's reforms, surcharges on eftpos, Mastercard, Visa and American Express payments end, covering credit, debit and prepaid cards.

What happens next to the number on the board is a separate question, and one the RBA itself has flagged. In material explaining the conclusions of its Review of Merchant Card Payment Costs and Surcharging, the central bank notes that about 16% of Australian businesses currently surcharge, and that these businesses may choose to raise their sticker prices.

That is not a forecast that prices will rise across the board. It is a recognition of simple arithmetic: a business that has been recovering card costs through a separate fee now has to decide how, or whether, to recover those costs another way.

Why the cost doesn't simply disappear

Card payments are not free for merchants. When a customer taps a card, the business typically pays a merchant service fee to its payment provider, known as the acquirer. That fee generally bundles together interchange (a fee set by the card scheme and paid by the merchant's acquirer to the bank that issued the customer's card), scheme fees and the acquirer's own margin.

A surcharge is one way of passing that cost to the particular customers who pay by card. Removing the surcharge option does not remove the underlying cost. For the roughly one in six businesses that currently surcharge, the choices broadly look like this:

  • absorb the cost and accept a thinner margin;
  • lift listed prices so the cost is spread across all customers;
  • offer a discount for a cheaper payment method, which the reforms still allow;
  • review their payment arrangements in search of a lower-cost service.

Which path a business takes will depend on its margins, its competitors and how sensitive its customers are to price changes.

The RBA's offsetting move: lower interchange

The RBA has not simply banned surcharges and left businesses to carry the cost. The same review lowered the maximum interchange fees for consumer credit and debit card payments, and introduced a new cap for transactions on foreign, or overseas-issued, cards. The RBA says the reductions in interchange "should help to lower card payment costs for businesses, especially small businesses".

The logic is straightforward. If the wholesale cost embedded in each card payment falls, the amount a business needs to recover, whether through prices or margin, should also fall, all else being equal. Amended RBA standards took effect in April 2026, ahead of the surcharge ban.

Whether an individual merchant sees those savings depends partly on how its payment provider passes them on. That is where the transparency elements of the reforms come in. Large acquirers must publish the fees they charge; eftpos, Mastercard and Visa must disclose fee information; and merchant statements are to carry standardised fee information. The aim is for businesses to see what they are paying and to compare it more easily.

What stays the same, and what may change

Shoppers should not expect every extra charge to vanish. The reforms target card surcharges specifically. Still permitted are:

  • weekend surcharges;
  • public holiday surcharges;
  • booking and service fees;
  • discounts for paying with particular payment methods.

Taxi surcharging, meanwhile, remains the responsibility of state and territory regulators rather than the RBA.

What a business can no longer do is add a fee because the customer chose to pay by card on one of the covered networks.

For anyone trying to interpret price movements over the coming months, it helps to keep the surcharge change in proportion. Around 16% of businesses surcharge, which means the large majority were already covering card costs some other way, typically within their prices or margins. Any sticker-price adjustments linked to the ban are likely to be concentrated among that minority, and to vary widely from one business to the next.

The change also lands at a time when prices are already under close scrutiny. The RBA's homepage shows headline inflation at 4.0% over the year to August 2026, as measured by the monthly CPI indicator, and the Monetary Policy Board lifted the cash rate target by 25 basis points to 4.60% on 29 September, stating that "inflation remains elevated". The Board's statement also observed that "Firms are experiencing cost pressures" and are increasing or planning to increase prices.

The surcharging reforms are a payments-system policy, not a monetary-policy tool, and it would be a mistake to blur the two. But households already feeling stretched may notice any menu or shelf changes more acutely at a time when, as Governor Michele Bullock put it at her media conference, "Every household has seen how the price of everything has gone up in recent years."

Questions consumers and businesses may be asking

For consumers, a few practical questions may help make sense of what they see:

  • Has a business that previously surcharged changed its listed price, and how does the new price compare with the old price plus surcharge?
  • Is a discount now being offered for a particular payment method?
  • Is a remaining fee a booking, service, weekend or public holiday charge, which is still allowed, rather than a card surcharge?

For businesses, particularly those among the 16% that surcharge, the questions are about cost and communication:

  • What does the business actually pay per card transaction, and has that changed this year?
  • Does the fee information now being published by acquirers and schemes point to a cheaper arrangement?
  • If prices need to change, how will that be explained clearly to customers?

The bottom line

The end of card surcharges on 1 October removes a visible fee at the checkout, but the RBA is open about a likely side effect: some of the businesses that surcharge today may fold that cost into their listed prices instead. Lower interchange caps and greater fee transparency are designed to shrink the cost being passed around, especially for small businesses. How it nets out will differ from shop to shop, and for consumers the clearest signal may simply be comparing the old price-plus-surcharge with the new sticker price.