Card surcharges end on 1 October. Most businesses will fix the terminal and forget the website

From 1 October 2026, eftpos, Mastercard and Visa are each introducing no-surcharge rules, and American Express, which the Reserve Bank does not regulate, has decided to do the same. The RBA has published an FAQ on the change, and SmartCompany has a good summary of what it means for merchants. Lower interchange fee caps start on the same date, which is meant to take some of the sting out of it.

That is four weeks away, and only about 16% of Australian businesses currently surcharge at all. If you are in that 16%, the pricing decision is a conversation for you and your accountant. This piece is about the other half of the job, which almost nobody plans for: actually finding every place in your business where that fee is switched on.

What is banned, and what is not

Worth being precise, because the distinction is where businesses will get into trouble.

The change applies to a fee added because the customer paid by card. It does not touch weekend surcharges, public holiday surcharges, booking fees or genuine service fees. Surcharges on non-card payment methods are unaffected, and what your payment provider charges you is a fee for a service, not a surcharge.

So the obvious workaround is to rename your 1.5% card fee as a “service fee” and carry on. Do not do that. The ACCC has already flagged that dressing a card surcharge up as a service fee or similar can attract significant penalties, and a fee that appears only on card transactions is not going to survive a look. A booking fee that every customer pays regardless of payment method is a different thing entirely. A card fee wearing a new label is still a card fee.

The fee is in more places than you think

Here is the failure I expect to see a lot of in October and November.

Your bank will contact you about the terminal. Terminals get updated, because the acquirer has an obvious interest in reminding you and a channel to do it. That box gets ticked, everyone feels sorted, and a 1.5% card fee keeps quietly firing on the website for another six months because nothing in that stack has an owner.

This is the same pattern we keep writing about in a different costume. Nobody maps where a rule actually lives, so it gets fixed in the one place that has a reminder attached and stays broken everywhere else. It is why connecting your systems beats adding more of them, and it is exactly the handoff problem in the AI agent piece from earlier this week. Same disease, different symptom.

Where to actually look

Run this before the end of September. For most service businesses it is an hour, not a project.

1. The EFTPOS terminal. The one you will remember. Confirm it rather than assume it, especially if you have more than one, or an old spare in a drawer that still gets used at events.

2. The online checkout or payment gateway. Stripe, Square, Ezidebit, whatever sits behind your payments. Surcharging is usually a toggle or a percentage in the settings, set up once by whoever built the site. Look at it yourself.

3. Invoicing software. Xero, MYOB and the rest can add a card fee automatically or as a saved line item on a template. Check both the automatic setting and your default invoice template, because they are separate things.

4. The booking or deposit flow. If customers pay a deposit when they book online, that is a second checkout with its own settings, often on a different platform to your main one.

5. Recurring and subscription billing. Payment plans and retainers frequently have their own surcharge configuration, set years ago and never revisited.

6. Every place you have written it down. Pricing pages, the FAQ, terms and conditions, quote templates, email footers, printed signage, menus, the laminated sign by the register. This is the one that lingers.

Turning the fee off is only half of it

That last point deserves its own heading, because it is the bit that gets missed.

If your website still says a card surcharge applies after 1 October, you have a problem even if no fee is actually charged. You are telling customers something untrue about your prices, at exactly the moment the regulator is paying attention to how businesses describe payment costs. It also reads as sloppy to anyone comparing you against a competitor who updated their page.

Search your own site for “surcharge”, “card fee”, “processing fee” and a bare “1.5%”. Do the same in your quote and invoice templates. Most businesses find two or three references they had completely forgotten writing, usually in terms and conditions and an FAQ answer from a site build three years ago.

We made the same argument about the unfair trading practices rules and what they mean for your website. A regulatory change lands on your systems and your copy at the same time, and the copy is always the part left behind.

The func.digital take

Almost everything written about this change is about pricing: absorb it, build it in, or offer a cash discount. Fair enough, and none of it is our advice to give.

The interesting question for us is the one the deadline exposes. If someone asked you right now where that card fee gets added, could you answer in under a minute? For most businesses we look at, the honest answer is no, because the fee is configured in four systems that were set up at different times by different people and have never been listed in one place. That is not a payments problem. That is what a disconnected stack feels like when something forces you to touch all of it at once.

The deadline is a good excuse to find out. Whatever you conclude about pricing, you will end up with something more useful than a compliance tick: a written list of every system that touches money on the way into your business.

If you would rather not go hunting through six admin panels yourself, that mapping is a large part of what a free digital systems audit does. We follow the money and the enquiries end to end and hand you the list. Get in touch, ideally before the last week of September.