The card surcharge ban and what it means for your menu prices

Somewhere in your venue right now there's a laminated menu with a line at the bottom that says something like "1.5% surcharge applies to card payments." From 1 October 2026, that line becomes meaningless. Not wrong exactly — just dead weight, sitting on a menu that's about to need reprinting for a reason that has nothing to do with your food.

Visa, Mastercard and eftpos are removing merchants' ability to surcharge card payments across their networks from that date. It's not a blanket government ban on all fees everywhere, and it's not going to feel optional once your terminal provider flips the switch. Here's what's actually changing, what isn't, and why the boring bit — keeping your price the same everywhere it's written down — is about to get harder than it's been in years.

Why it matters

The Reserve Bank handed down its final decision on this on 31 March 2026, confirming that card surcharges are being removed from 1 October 2026. The mechanism is a bit different from how it's usually described. The RBA isn't passing a law that fines you for surcharging — it's removing its own long-standing rule that stopped Visa, Mastercard and eftpos from banning surcharging themselves. From October, those networks are free to prohibit it through their own scheme rules and merchant agreements, and the RBA has directed acquirers and terminal providers to strip the surcharging function out of terminals entirely.

For a venue, the practical effect is the same as a ban: the terminal won't let you add the surcharge, full stop. Nobody's coming to check your receipts, but there's also nothing left to check — the option simply isn't there anymore. No small-business carve-out either. The final decision applies the same way whether you're a two-table espresso bar or a group running six sites.

What's actually banned, and what isn't

This is the part worth getting precisely right, because it's easy to over-apply.

Banned from 1 October 2026: surcharges on eftpos, Mastercard and Visa — debit, prepaid and credit, across every business regardless of size.

Not covered, still legal: Amex, Diners Club, PayPal and buy-now-pay-later surcharges sit outside this reform entirely, because they're not on the RBA's designated card networks. Some providers have signalled they'll drop Amex surcharging voluntarily too, but nothing forces it the way it forces Visa, Mastercard and eftpos.

Also not covered, also still legal: weekend and public holiday surcharges, and separate booking or service fees. These are a different category of charge and this reform doesn't touch them — you can keep them, provided you disclose them the way you already have to.

Underneath all of this sits a rule that isn't new at all. Australian Consumer Law already requires you to display a single, all-inclusive advertised price — GST and any unavoidable charge included — and the ACCC actively enforces it (it fined Air Asia $200,000 over exactly this kind of pricing breach). What's genuinely new on 1 October is that there's no longer a legitimate unavoidable card fee left to fold into that price via a surcharge note. The terminal won't allow one, so the note doesn't just go stale. It stops meaning anything.

Why prices are moving, and everywhere that has to catch up

Nobody is required by law to raise a single price because of this reform. What the RBA has removed is the mechanism — the itemised surcharge line — not mandated a specific response to it. But industry bodies are on the record saying they expect prices to move as a direct result, and it's worth taking that seriously rather than pretending the cost just evaporates.

The Australian Restaurant & Café Association ran a campaign through late 2025 arguing the RBA was moving too fast without enough modelling of the cost to small operators. ARCA's claim: 81% of restaurants and cafés currently surcharging would be forced to lift menu prices once the option disappears. CEO Wes Lambert put a number on what that actually looks like at the till: "people are now going to be paying at least $5.10 for a cup of coffee that previously cost them $5.08 with the surcharge." That's the whole story in one sentence — the fee doesn't vanish, it just stops being a separate line and gets folded into the sticker price instead, and the total moves up by a few cents.

Restaurant & Catering Australia, the larger national body, made a related point through National President John Hart: card surcharges "have never been a revenue stream for hospitality operators" — they were a pass-through of a real cost, not profit sitting on top. R&CA's position is that removing the mechanism without a transition plan will hit operators, and ultimately their customers, given how thin hospitality margins already run (commonly cited around 3–5% net).

There's a separate, genuine offset in the same reform: the RBA is cutting interchange fee caps alongside the surcharge removal (the credit cap drops from 0.8% to 0.3%, the debit cap tightens too), which the RBA estimates saves merchants roughly $910 million a year industry-wide. That's real money back, but it's a different pool from what any one venue was recovering through a 1.5% surcharge on its own card turnover — it doesn't automatically net out venue by venue. The RBA frames the whole package as saving consumers around $1.6 billion a year in surcharges they'd otherwise pay. Whether that number nets out to a win depends entirely on whose pocket you're standing in, and both ARCA and R&CA have made clear they don't think it's a clean win for operators.

So prices are expected to move, even if only by the few cents Lambert describes — and every place that price is written down has to move with it. That's the bit that has nothing to do with the RBA and everything to do with how many places your price is currently written down. It doesn't live in one place. For most venues it's scattered across a laminated table menu, a printed A-frame board out front, a PDF linked from the website or the Instagram bio, the "Menu" section of your Google Business Profile, and however many delivery apps you're listed on — Uber Eats, DoorDash, Menulog, each with its own separate back end. Add any printed catering price list or flyer that mentions the old surcharge terms, and the count keeps climbing.

Every single one of those has to change, separately, and roughly at the same time, because they're all quoting the same product. Miss one and you've got a stale PDF telling a customer the coffee's $5.08 while the till says $5.10 — a small gap, but the kind that erodes trust fast when a customer clocks it. A laminated menu that used to be a one-off print job now has to be reprinted every time prices genuinely shift, which is exactly the kind of moment this reform is about to create industry-wide, all in the same few weeks.

This is the actual failure mode a real website menu is built to solve, and a PDF isn't. Edit the price once on a page you own, and it's live everywhere that page is linked from — no reprint, no re-upload to five different systems, no gap between what the sign says and what the terminal charges. We've written more on why a PDF specifically struggles at this in our comparison of QR PDF menus versus a real page — the surcharge change is just the latest reason the gap matters.

What to skip

A few things not worth your time here.

Don't treat this as "surcharges are banned, full stop." Weekend fees, public holiday loadings and Amex surcharges are all still completely legal. Telling a regular customer "we don't surcharge anymore" when you still add 10% on a Sunday is going to read as either confused or misleading — be precise about what actually changed.

Don't wait for a follow-up announcement that tells you exactly what to charge. There isn't one coming. The RBA has removed the mechanism; whether and how much you move your sticker price is a decision you make, informed by your own margins, not a number handed down to you.

Don't assume your POS provider is handling the menu-consistency problem for you. Most point-of-sale systems will happily stop applying a surcharge on 1 October. None of them reach out and fix the PDF on your Instagram bio or the price sitting stale on Uber Eats.

The honest pitch

We build FastPage specifically so a venue's information — including the price on the menu — lives in one place and updates everywhere it's shown the moment you save it, instead of five disconnected files that all have to be found and edited by hand. That's exactly the kind of change this reform is about to force on a lot of venues at once. If you're still running a laminated card and a PDF that both need updating for 1 October, have a look at what a real site costs, or just start building one for free — you don't pay until you publish, and there's a 30-day money-back guarantee once you do.

The surcharge doesn't disappear on 1 October. It just stops being itemised — and every place your price is written down has to agree with itself again.