Surcharge Ban: How North Shore Shops Protect Margins

Running a local business across Sydney’s North Shore or Northern Beaches just got a new pricing plot twist. As of October 1, 2026, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) has lifted the prohibition on ‘no-surcharge‘ rules for designated card networks, effectively ending the checkout card surcharge for Visa, Mastercard, and eftpos.

For the roughly 16% of Aussie businesses that currently rely on these surcharges to cover their payment costs, the immediate worry is taking a hit to their profit margins. But it’s not all bad news. As the Council of Small Business Organisations of Australia pointed out in their recent release, [“Card surcharge changes: COSBOA urges understanding as small businesses adjust” (2026)], this shake-up also brings some serious wholesale cost cuts and new tools to help savvy business owners protect their bottom line.

According to the RBA’s recent [“Review of Merchant Card Payment Costs and Surcharging, Conclusions Paper” (2026)], you now must bake your card processing fees straight into your advertised prices. The goal is simple: no more hidden fees, meaning the price on the shelf is exactly what the customer pays at the till. About 85% of small businesses already absorb these fees, so nothing changes for them. But if you’re currently passing those tap-and-go costs on, you’ll need to bump up your baseline prices, so you aren’t left out of pocket.

If you must absorb card fees now, the good news is that those underlying costs are dropping. To balance out the surcharge ban, the RBA has significantly slashed the wholesale “interchange fees” that drive up your merchant bill:

• Credit & Debit Relief: The interchange cap on domestic consumer credit cards has been slashed to just 0.3% of the transaction value. Concurrently, the cap for domestic debit and prepaid cards has dropped to 8 cents (or 0.16%).
• Tourist Traffic: If your café, restaurant, boutique or clinic caters to international clients, you will benefit from a new 1.0% interchange cap on foreign-issued cards. Previously, these international cards accounted for a massive 20% of the interchange fees paid by Australian merchants, despite making up only 3% of all card transactions.

Here is where local business owners need to pay close attention: the way your bank packages these fees dictates whether you will see these savings.

It’s tempting to go for the simplicity of a “single-rate” or blended pricing plan because you get a predictable monthly bill. However, these plans average a 1.4% cost of acceptance, which is way higher than the 0.9% average that businesses pay on unblended (or “interchange-plus”) plans. More importantly, if you are on one of these simple flat-rate plans, the RBA’s new savings won’t automatically flow into your bank account. You must actively ask for them.

To help small businesses level the playing field, the RBA has rolled out aggressive new transparency rules. Here is how you can use them to take control of your EFTPOS costs:

• Demand Better Data: Your payment provider is now legally required to give you detailed merchant statements breaking down the exact costs of domestic versus foreign cards, as well as in-store versus online sales.
• Compare the Market: The big players (providers processing over $10 billion a year) are now forced to publicly publish their average merchant fees every quarter, broken down by business size and card type. Use this public data to see if you’re getting a bad deal compared to the rest of the market.
• Hold Them Accountable: Providers must publicly report how much of these wholesale savings they are passing on to merchants for the first four quarters following the October 1 changes.

In the end, if your provider isn’t passing those RBA savings on to you, use your new statement data to negotiate a better deal – or take your business to a competitor who will.