Surcharge ban and online payments: what changes

Most of the coverage of the surcharge ban has been written for a café with a terminal on the counter. If you take payments online, the rule is the same but the work is different — and in a few respects the exposure is worse.

From 1 October 2026 you cannot add a card surcharge to an online payment. Not at checkout, not on a pay-by-link invoice, not on the renewal of a subscription. This page covers what actually changes in an online business, and what has to be fixed before the date rather than after it.

Yes, it covers online

There’s no card-present versus card-not-present split in any of this. Some submissions to the Reserve Bank asked for one — different surcharging rules online — and the Payments System Board knocked it back, on the basis that it just adds complexity for no good reason.

So the coverage is the same as in-store: eftpos debit and prepaid, Mastercard and Visa credit, debit and prepaid, and Amex credit, which Amex is dropping voluntarily rather than because it has to. If a card can’t be surcharged over a terminal, it can’t be surcharged in your checkout either.

The full coverage table and the exemption position are on the main reference page.

Online is the harder case, and here is why

Three structural things make this land differently online.

Your cost of acceptance is higher to begin with. Card-not-present transactions carry higher interchange than card-present ones, and on top of that you are paying for a gateway, fraud screening, and the chargebacks that come with taking payments from people you never see. An online business that was surcharging was often recovering a genuinely larger number than the shop down the road.

You have no least-cost routing to fall back on. In-store, a dual-network debit card can be routed to eftpos, and for a small-ticket merchant that is a real saving. Online, routing is far more limited in practice — it depends on your gateway and your acquirer supporting it, and plenty of setups simply do not. So the lever that in-store merchants are being told to pull is not available to most online merchants.

The surcharge lives in your code, not on your terminal. In-store, the provider disables the function and it is done. Online, the surcharge is a rule in a plugin, a gateway configuration, or your own checkout logic. Someone has to go and change it, test it, and make sure it did not leave a stray line on the receipt or the tax invoice. That is a task with a deadline, not a switch someone else flips for you.

The one place online does better

Online card mixes skew towards credit. In-store skews towards debit.

Worth knowing, because the interchange cut is almost all on the credit side — consumer credit drops from a 0.80 per cent ceiling to 0.30 per cent, while debit only moves from 0.20 to 0.16 per cent. So an online business running 60 per cent of turnover on consumer credit gets a lot more out of this than a café running 80 per cent debit.

It won’t cover what you lose. But if you’re online, the credit cut is the part that’s actually pointed at you. The detail on each cap is here.

Foreign-issued cards are your exposure

Cards issued outside Australia carry no Australian interchange cap until 1 April 2027, when a 1.0 per cent cap starts — and that cap applies to card-not-present transactions as well as card-present ones.

If you sell internationally, read those two dates together. You lose the ability to surcharge on 1 October 2026. The relief on your most expensive card type arrives six months later. For a business with a meaningful share of overseas customers, that gap is the single most important thing on this page, and it needs to be in your pricing before October rather than absorbed and discovered in November.

What actually has to change at your checkout

Run through this against your own setup. It’s usually more places than people expect.

• The surcharge rule itself — in the payment plugin, the gateway’s merchant portal, or your checkout code. Turn it off — don’t just set it to zero, or someone switches it back on later.
• Displayed pricing. If your product pages, cart or shipping page mention a card fee, those strings need to go too.
• The order confirmation, receipt and tax invoice templates. A surcharge line that prints as $0.00 still tells a customer you charge one.
• Terms and conditions, and any FAQ or help page that describes a card fee.
• Your accounting integration. A surcharge that was mapped to its own revenue account will silently stop producing entries. Better to know that in advance than to find it at BAS time.
• Anywhere a fee is calculated twice. If both your platform and your gateway can add a surcharge, check both.

Subscriptions and stored cards

This is the trap. A recurring plan set up in 2025 with a card fee built into the billing amount will keep charging that amount after 1 October unless someone changes it.

Two things to do. Reprice the plan itself, so what goes out in October is a clean price and not a price plus a fee. And check how the fee was built in — if it’s a separate line on the subscription it’s easy to find, but if it got folded into the plan price years ago it isn’t, and you’ll have to go looking.

If you’re going to put plan prices up to cover the cost, do it as its own price change, on its own timing, and tell people. Do it in the same billing cycle the surcharge vanishes and every customer reads the two as the same thing.

Invoices and pay-by-link

The date that matters is when the card payment happens, not when the invoice was raised.

An invoice you issue in September with a card-payment surcharge on it, paid by card on 3 October, is a card payment made after the ban. Several providers have said they will disable surcharging functionality outright from the date, in which case the payment simply will not accept the fee.

If you invoice on 30-day terms, that means your September invoices are already affected. Stop putting card fees on invoices now rather than on 1 October.

What you can still charge for

The rule’s about card surcharges, not about your prices.

You can still set your prices wherever you like, including higher than they were. You can charge genuine fees for genuine things — delivery, express handling, booking or ticketing services, small-order fees — provided they are what they say they are and not a card fee wearing a different name. And a payment service provider’s own fees to you are fees for a service it provides, not a surcharge; they simply cannot be passed to the customer as one.

What you cannot do is keep the mechanism and rename it. A “processing fee” that appears only when a card is used, and scales with the card type, is a card surcharge whatever the label says.

Non-card methods, for now

The Reserve Bank does not currently regulate surcharges on non-card payment methods. Bank transfer, PayTo and BPAY sit outside the ban, and so does buy now pay later.

Treat that as a current position rather than a settled one. The 2025 amendments to the Payment Systems (Regulation) Act brought three-party card networks and BNPL services inside the RBA’s regulatory perimeter, and the settings for them are still being worked through. Building a pricing model that depends on being able to surcharge BNPL is building on ground that is explicitly under review.

Wallets are a separate question. Apple Pay and Google Pay are ways of presenting a card, so a payment made through them is a card payment and the ban applies. Methods that are their own scheme rather than a card in a wrapper are a question worth putting to your provider in writing, because the answer determines what your checkout is allowed to display.

What to do before 1 October

1. Audit every place a card fee is displayed or calculated — plugin, gateway, checkout code, templates, terms, accounting mapping.
2. Stop adding card fees to invoices now, not on the date, because of payment timing.
3. Reprice recurring plans before the October billing run.
4. Get your card mix, split by domestic debit, domestic credit, commercial and foreign-issued. Foreign-issued is the number that decides how much of a gap you are carrying until April 2027.
5. Ask your provider what happens on the date — whether the function is disabled outright, and whether it is repricing your rate in light of the interchange cuts.

FAQ

Does the surcharge ban apply to online payments?

Yes. The reform makes no distinction between card-present and card-not-present transactions. Proposals for separate online rules were considered and rejected. The same networks and card products are covered online as in store.

Can I still charge a payment processing fee online?

Not if it functions as a card surcharge — applied because a card was used, or varying with the card type. Genuine service fees for genuine services are unaffected, and so is your ability to set your prices.

What about an invoice I issued before 1 October that gets paid after it?

The payment date is what counts. A card payment made on or after 1 October 2026 is covered even if the invoice predates it, and many providers will have disabled the functionality by then.

Do I have to change my subscription prices?

You have to stop charging a card fee. Whether you raise the plan price to absorb the cost is your decision — but a recurring amount with a fee baked into it will keep billing that fee until someone changes it.

Is buy now pay later covered?

Not by this reform. The RBA does not currently regulate surcharges on non-card payment methods. BNPL was brought within its regulatory perimeter by the 2025 amendments to the Payment Systems (Regulation) Act, so the position is under active consideration rather than settled.

Are foreign-issued cards covered by the ban?

Yes — the ban follows the network and the card product, not where the card was issued. The interchange cap on foreign-issued cards is the part that comes later, on 1 April 2027.