Card Surcharge Ban from 1 October 2026: What Small Businesses Need to Know

From 1 October 2026 you can't add a surcharge when someone pays you by card. Visa, Mastercard, eftpos and Amex all end on the same day. If you sell to the public and never surcharged, this is good news, because the fees behind personal cards are being cut. If you sell to other businesses on company cards, you lose the surcharge and don't get the fee cut. And if you're the one paying invoices, expect some of your suppliers to stop taking cards altogether. Cards don't have to disappear from invoices, though: a payment service can sit between the two businesses, so the one who wants to use the card is the one who pays for it and the other side simply gets a bank transfer.

What's changing

The Reserve Bank spent two years looking at what card payments cost and who ends up paying for them, and on 31 March it published the answer. From 1 October 2026, surcharging ends. If you've been running a business in Australia for any length of time you've either added a surcharge or paid one, so this touches pretty much everyone. It's worth walking through from both sides, because you're probably on both: you send invoices and you pay them, and the ban changes each of those in a different way.

The RBA hasn't banned surcharges in the way you'd ban something with a law. It's removed a rule that stopped the card networks from banning them, and Visa, Mastercard and eftpos have each said they'll bring in no-surcharge rules on 1 October. Your payment provider enforces that through your agreement with them. The effect is the same as a ban.

Amex is a bit different. The RBA doesn't regulate it, so it wasn't covered by the decision. But in June Amex confirmed it would fall into line and stop surcharging from the same date, and JCB and UnionPay have said the same. So don't plan around Amex being the exception. It isn't.

You don't have to change any settings yourself. Your provider will do that. What you do need to do is go through anything that mentions a surcharge — your invoice template, your terms, your quotes, your website — and take it out before the end of September.

If you sell to the public, you're probably better off

The RBA reckons 85% of small businesses never surcharged in the first place. If that's you, nothing changes at the till, and you get the second half of the reform for free.

The second half is a cut to the wholesale fee inside your card costs. Every time a customer pays by card, your bank pays a fee to the customer's bank, and it gets passed through to you as part of your merchant fee. On personal credit cards the cap on that fee drops from 0.8% to 0.3%. Debit comes down as well. Small businesses tend to pay right at the cap, so the RBA expects you to see more of the benefit than a big retailer that already negotiated a lower rate.

The one thing to watch is that the cut lands with your payment provider first, and it's up to them to pass it on. From January they have to publish how much they did, so you'll be able to check.

If you sell to other businesses, it's a different story

Say you run a labour hire business and you send a $22,000 invoice to a builder. He pays it on the company Amex, because that gives him another month before the cash goes out, and because he gets points. At the moment you add 1.5% and he doesn't blink. From 1 October you can't add anything, so that's $330 that used to be his problem and is now yours.

The fee cut above doesn't help you here, because it applies to personal cards. Business credit and charge cards stay capped at 0.8%. The RBA said in its own paper that those fees are higher than they should be, but it left them alone so Visa and Mastercard wouldn't lose more ground to Amex, which already has most of the company card market.

So if your customers are builders, restaurants, other tradies, clinics, anyone paying on a company card, you lose the surcharge and you don't get the relief. And because B2B invoices are bigger, the money involved is bigger too. This is where surcharging was doing real work, and it's where the ban is going to be felt.

What you can still do

Not much on the surcharge itself. You can't add one, and you can't rename it. A fee that only kicks in when someone pays by card is a card surcharge whatever you call it, and the card networks will treat a card-only “admin fee” exactly the same way. Fees that have nothing to do with the card — a weekend loading, a booking fee — aren't affected.

What you can do is offer a discount. The RBA was clear that ending surcharges isn't meant to stop you rewarding a payment method you'd prefer, so a discount for paying by PayID or bank transfer is fine. Plenty of businesses will go that way.

You can also put your prices up to cover it, which is what the RBA expects a lot of businesses to do. The trouble with that in B2B is you're raising prices on the customers who already pay you by bank transfer and never cost you a card fee, to cover the ones who do.

And you can stop taking cards. Which brings us to the other side of the invoice.

If you pay suppliers on a card, some of them are about to stop letting you

Go back to the builder. He pays his labour hire, his plumber, his timber supplier, half his subbies, on the company card. Not because it's convenient but because it's cash flow. Up to 55 days before the money leaves the account, on invoices that are due in 14. That's a big part of how he runs the business, and he's been happy to pay a 1.5% surcharge for it.

From 1 October, a lot of the businesses he pays are going to look at that card fee, work out they now have to absorb it, and quietly take the card option off the invoice. Bank transfer only. And the builder loses the 55 days on every one of them. That's the bit nobody's talking about. The ban was sold as consumers saving money at the till, but for a business that pays its suppliers on a card, it means less time to pay.

The RBA actually looked at this. It concluded that the cash flow benefit of a company card goes to the cardholder, not to the business receiving the money, and that the business receiving the money has been carrying the cost. Which is true. But it doesn't make the cash flow gap go away for the person who's been relying on it.

How Cloudfloat handles both sides

The way we see it, the card doesn't belong inside the invoice anymore. It belongs in a layer between the two businesses, where whoever wants to use it can, and whoever doesn't never touches it. That's what Cloudfloat does.

If you're sending the invoice. Your customer can still pay you by card — Visa, Mastercard or Amex — as a guest, without signing up for anything. They see a service fee before they pay and they decide whether the card is worth it to them. It usually is, because they're the one getting the time and the points. You get a bank transfer for the full amount. You're not accepting a card payment, so there's no card fee on your side and nothing to surcharge. If they'd rather pay straight from their bank, they can, for nothing. And if they want longer to pay, they can take terms through Cloudfloat while you still get paid today.

If you're paying the invoice. When a supplier stops taking cards, you can still pay them on yours through Cloudfloat. You put the invoice through, pay on your card, and we pay your supplier by bank transfer. They don't need to accept cards or have anything to do with us. You keep the time on the card and the points, and you pay a service fee for that. Same deal as the other side, just from your seat.

You'll have seen this pattern before if you've ever paid the ATO or your rent by card through a bill-payment service. You pay the service a fee, the biller gets a bank transfer. What's different here is that it's sitting in the invoice you send and the bills you pay anyway, not a separate thing you have to go and set up for each payment.

To be clear about what this is and isn't: it isn't a way of keeping a surcharge going under another name. You're not charging your customer anything. Your customer is choosing to use a payment service and paying that service for it, and the alternative of paying you directly by bank is right there next to it, free. The person who wants the card pays for the card. That's the whole point, and it's a fairer arrangement than the one we've had for twenty years, where the supplier took the hit on every card payment or slapped a percentage on everyone.

This is also how we've always built. Cloudfloat started with pay later on supplier invoices, and everything since — Bill Pay, Invoicing — has followed the same idea: put the payment options inside the transaction where the business needs them, and let whoever benefits from the option be the one who pays for it. Cards after 1 October are the same idea again.