RBA Card Surcharge Ban for Australian Shopify Stores

Quick answer: From 1 October 2026, Australian businesses can no longer add a surcharge to eftpos, Mastercard or Visa card payments, whether the sale is online, in person or through a mobile wallet, and American Express has also dropped card surcharging (RBA, ACCC and the card networks’ FAQ, as at 30 October 2026). The RBA did this by lifting its own ban on “no-surcharge” rules, so the card networks and your payment provider enforce it, not the ACCC. For a Shopify store the job is to find and remove any card fee from checkout, apps, theme code and policy text, then recover the cost through your prices, grossed up and not added on top. This is general information, not legal advice.

If your store has never added a “card fee” line at checkout, you could skim this and move on. I would not. The cost of accepting cards has not gone away, the people who set the rules have been explicit that it now belongs inside your prices, and a handful of places on a Shopify store can still be showing a surcharge you forgot about. If your store has been adding one, you have a different problem: it is now a breach of card network rules, and the way you word the replacement can be misleading under the Australian Consumer Law.

I wrote this on 30 October 2026, four weeks after the change took effect. It covers what the RBA and the ACCC say (I read their pages, not summaries), how to check your own store, the options for recovering the cost, and a worked margin example. The example uses made-up numbers, labelled as such. Plug your own in.

One correction up front. When I started researching this, several secondary summaries said American Express was unaffected. The RBA’s FAQ and the ACCC’s guidance now say American Express has also decided to remove surcharging. Rules like this move quickly, so check the dates on anything you read, including this.

What changed on 1 October 2026

It is a network rule, not a new law

The RBA’s FAQ is direct about this: the RBA does not directly regulate merchants. What it did was lift its own prohibition on “no-surcharge” rules, which freed eftpos, Mastercard and Visa to ban surcharging on their own networks. Each of the three then introduced a no-surcharge rule from 1 October 2026.

That has three practical consequences.

1. Your payment provider and the card networks are the ones who act. The ACCC says it does not enforce the no-surcharge rules; they sit in each card network’s scheme rules and merchant contracts, and the networks or payment providers enforce them. The card networks’ industry FAQ says businesses that keep surcharging may be contacted by their provider or bank to remove it and may be subject to penalties. Neither the RBA nor the ACCC pages I read list a penalty amount, so I will not give one.
2. The ACCC still polices the pricing side. It enforces the Australian Consumer Law, including misleading claims about prices or the reasons for price changes.
3. Legislation is the fallback, not the plan. The RBA’s Conclusions Paper says that if surcharging continues, the Government could legislate a ban on surcharging cards of the designated networks. As at 30 October 2026 I found nothing saying that step has been taken.

The ACCC’s own wording is simpler for a business owner: businesses can no longer charge a surcharge for payments made with Visa, Mastercard, American Express or eftpos credit, debit or prepaid cards from 1 October 2026. Both descriptions are accurate. One describes the legal mechanism and the other describes what you may do.

Which payments are covered

Two details in that table matter for an online store.

Online is not a loophole. The card networks’ FAQ says the changes apply to all in-store, online and digital transactions, including cards stored in mobile wallets. The RBA also looked at whether to treat card-not-present payments differently and rejected it, partly because it would have continued to allow “drip pricing”, where extra costs are added as a shopper moves through checkout.

Wholesale and B2B payments are covered too. The card networks’ FAQ says the rules apply to business payments in the same way as consumer payments. If your Shopify store takes card payments from trade customers, they are not exempt.

What counts as a card surcharge, and what does not

A card payment surcharge is an extra amount a business charges because the customer pays by card. Four edge cases come up for online stores.

• A “service fee” that only appears for card payments is probably still a surcharge. The ACCC gives an example of a takeaway shop that called its card charge a service fee and says it may still be a card payment surcharge. It also warns that describing a card surcharge as another type of fee may be misleading conduct. Stripe’s merchant notice says the same thing in its own words.
• A charge that applies whatever the payment method is not a card surcharge. The RBA FAQ and the ACCC both say weekend and public holiday surcharges, booking fees and service fees that do not depend on how the customer pays are not covered by the card rules.
• But a fee that applies to everyone still has to be shown properly. The ACCC says the minimum total cost must be displayed as a single figure, and that this figure “must include any fee that can be calculated at the time the price is displayed, such as a flat percentage fee.” If you charge a fee on every order, take advice on whether it belongs in the displayed price. Do not assume it does not.
• Exemptions are narrow. The RBA FAQ says exemptions are for each card network to decide, and that businesses, including not-for-profits, are not exempt unless a network’s rules or the law provide one. The card networks’ FAQ gives taxi fares as the example, where state and territory regulators are responsible. I found no exemption for ecommerce or small stores.

Why this matters even if you never added a surcharge

Two reasons.

The cost is still there. The ACCC says businesses still incur costs when accepting card payments, and that those costs should be reflected in overall pricing, not charged as a separate surcharge. The RBA’s Conclusions Paper expects merchants to absorb costs or raise headline prices.

Whether your costs fall depends on your provider. The RBA cut the interchange cap (the wholesale fee paid between banks) on 1 October 2026: for domestic consumer credit cards from 0.8% to 0.3%, with lower caps on debit and prepaid cards as well (RBA Conclusions Paper). Interchange is only one part of what you pay. Your payment provider adds its own margin, and the RBA’s FAQ says its separate reforms aim to lower merchant costs, with large acquirers required to publish how interchange cuts are passed through from 30 January 2027. At the RBA’s Senate appearance on 28 October 2026, the Governor said several large providers had reduced their card processing fees for small businesses. That is encouraging, but it is the RBA’s report on large providers, not a promise about your plan. Your own statement is the only source of truth for your cost.

How to check your Shopify store for a card surcharge

This is a one-hour job and it is worth doing even if you are certain you never added a fee. I have listed places to look. This is a checklist of locations, not a description of how Shopify or any app works.

1. Place a test order with every payment method you offer

Use a cheap product and go all the way to the confirmation page with each method: a card, a wallet such as Apple Pay or Google Pay if you offer them, PayPal if you offer it, and a buy now, pay later option if you offer one. At each step, compare the total with the cart total. Open the confirmation email and the receipt as well. Screenshot every screen. A surcharge that only appears for one method is exactly what you are looking for.

2. Open your installed apps and look for fee tools

Go through the full list of installed apps, including ones you do not remember installing. You are looking for anything that touches fees, payments, checkout or cart. Also check your product catalogue for any item that is really a fee. If you find a surcharge tool, turn the surcharge off, then confirm with the app’s developer what code or settings it leaves behind. Stripe’s notice to its merchants makes the point well: Stripe turning off its surcharging feature does not remove surcharge code, disclosures or pricing that sit in systems you or a third party run. The same logic applies to any app.

3. Search your theme code and checkout customisations

Ask whoever built or maintains your theme to search the code for “surcharge”, “card fee”, “processing fee” and “payment fee”. Include any custom checkout customisation or function a developer added at any point. If you have no developer on call, ask for this as a small, defined job.

4. Check your payment provider and any terminals

Log in to each payment provider you use and look for surcharge or fee settings. If you also sell in person, check your terminals. The RBA’s FAQ says many providers will remove surcharging functionality from terminals around 1 October. A quick email asking “have you disabled surcharging on my account, and is anything still applied?” costs you nothing.

5. Search your own site text

Search the store and your policy pages for the words “surcharge”, “card fee”, “processing fee” and “payment fee”. Check product pages, the cart, shipping and returns text, FAQs, policy pages, checkout notices, email templates and any pop-ups or banners. You can also search Google for site:yourstore.com surcharge to find pages you forgot. Our guide to shipping and returns messaging for Australian Shopify stores covers that page.

6. Check invoices, draft orders and payment links

If you send invoices, use draft orders or take wholesale payments by card link, check the template. The RBA’s FAQ says that if a card payment is made on or after 1 October 2026, surcharging may no longer be available even when the invoice was issued before that date. Old invoice templates are an easy place for a card fee to survive.

7. Write down what you found and what you changed

Keep a dated note of what you found, where, when you removed it and who confirmed it.

If you find a surcharge

Remove it first. Then look at how many orders paid it on or after 1 October 2026. The ACCC’s advice to consumers is that someone who was charged a card surcharge should ask the business to refund it, and the card networks’ FAQ says providers may contact businesses that keep surcharging. Whether and how to refund is a decision for you and your provider, and if the amounts are large or you are unsure, take legal advice. I am not in a position to give it.

Why pricing has to absorb the cost

The RBA and the ACCC are both clear on the direction: the cost of accepting cards goes into your prices. What is left to decide is how, without hurting conversion or breaking the pricing rules.

What the regulators expect

• The ACCC says businesses can recover card costs by building them into overall prices, and they are generally free to set, raise and lower prices. They must not mislead consumers about prices, including the reasons for any price increase.
• The ACCC’s worked example is a salon charging $60 with a 1.0% card surcharge. After 1 October it could set the price at $60.60. But if the salon also raises the price to $65 because energy and labour costs went up, it must not tell customers the increase is due to the surcharge change, because that would be misleading.
• The RBA’s Conclusions Paper says that, because interchange is falling, merchants would need to raise prices by less than the amount they used to surcharge.

Your options

Worked example (illustrative numbers)

These figures are invented to show the arithmetic. They are not from a real store, and your blended card cost will differ. To find yours, divide the total fees on a recent statement by the card sales they relate to.

Say a product sells for AUD $60.00. It costs $24.00 to buy or make and $9.00 to pick, pack and ship, so the order leaves $27.00 before payment costs, ads and overheads. Assume a blended payment cost of 1.8% of the order value.

Two things to notice. Absorbing costs you $1.08 an order, which is 4.0% of the $27.00 you used to keep. And adding 1.8% to the price falls a couple of cents short, because you pay the fee on the higher price as well. The gross-up formula is price ÷ (1 − fee rate): $60.00 ÷ 0.982 = $61.10. At a higher fee rate the gap between “add the percentage” and “gross up” grows, so use the formula.

A decision rule from the same numbers. Raising the price to $61.10 beats absorbing the cost as long as your conversion rate falls by less than about 4% in relative terms (because $25.92 ÷ $27.00 is 0.96). If your conversion rate is 2.00%, that is a fall to 1.92%. A $1.10 rise is unlikely to do that on its own, but “unlikely” is a guess, so treat it as a hypothesis to test, not a result.

Scale. Take an illustrative store with AUD $500,000 in annual revenue where 90% of orders are paid by card or card-based wallet. At 1.8% that is $8,100 a year, or 1.6% of revenue, on a store that keeps 45% of each sale after product and shipping costs. “Just absorb it” deserves a calculation before it becomes the default.

Two pricing traps

Do not freeze the price at the old surcharge rate. If your effective rate falls as providers pass on the interchange cuts, a price built on the old rate means you keep the difference. That can be a fine decision, but make it on purpose, and recheck your statement once your provider publishes its pass-through figures.

Mind the sale calendar. If you raise prices now and then run a sale on Black Friday (27 November 2026), the ACCC’s guidance on price displays says a “was” price comparison can mislead if the item was not sold at that price for a reasonable period right before the sale. The ACCC does not define a number of days on the page I read, so build in as much time as you can, or avoid a “was” comparison on repriced items. Our Black Friday checklist covers honest sale pricing in more detail.

If you offer a payment-method discount

The ACCC allows discounts for paying a particular way, such as cash or PayID, with conditions. The discount should be clearly disclosed before the customer chooses to order or pay. The price displayed must be the full price a customer pays without the discount, and a business may also show the discounted price, but must show it alongside the full price and not make it more prominent. The ACCC’s online example has full prices on every page and a PayID discount that updates the total at checkout once selected.

A discount only works if it costs you less than the card fee it avoids, so check what the cheaper method costs you in all, including any provider or app fees. How you set one up depends on your Shopify plan, your payment provider and any app you use, and this post does not cover Shopify’s settings. Test it end to end, then check the total shown at each step against the ACCC’s rules.

After you change prices: measure it properly

If you change prices, you want to know within a few weeks whether the change cost you orders. Most stores read this wrongly because several things move at once.

1. Write down a baseline before you change anything. Thirty days of conversion rate, average order value, revenue per visitor and checkout completion, split by device. Our guide to a good Shopify conversion rate explains how to measure each one.
2. Check that your analytics agree with Shopify. If GA4 and Shopify Analytics disagree and you cannot explain why, fix that first, or you will argue about which number is wrong.
3. Do not read a price change across a sale weekend. Black Friday and Cyber Monday bring different shoppers and different offers. Keep the sale period separate, as in the Black Friday checklist.
4. Change one thing at a time where you can. A price change, a new payment method and a theme edit in the same week cannot be told apart.
5. Test if traffic allows. Many stores lack the traffic for a clean A/B test of a small price change; our guide to A/B testing with low traffic covers what to do instead.
6. Look at checkout, not just the product page. A checkout leakage audit shows where buyers drop out and how to read it.

What is still moving (as at 30 October 2026)

• Wider payment regulation. The RBA opened a Review of Payments System Regulation on 25 June 2026 with an Issues Paper that raises mobile wallets, non-designated card networks and buy now, pay later services among the areas it raises. Submissions were due on 7 August 2026. The Governor said on 28 October 2026 that the RBA intends to release regulatory priorities by the end of 2026, with further consultation planned for mid-2027. What that means for BNPL surcharging is not decided.
• Fee transparency. Card networks and large acquirers must publish fee information from 30 October 2026, large acquirers must publish pass-through measures from 30 January 2027, and merchant statements must carry more information from 1 April 2027. This should make your costs easier to compare. Use it.
• Foreign cards. A cap of 1.0% on foreign-issued card interchange starts on 1 April 2027, so costs on overseas orders may change.

What I could not verify

I did not find a Shopify Help Centre page or Shopify merchant notice about this change as at 30 October 2026, so this post says nothing about what Shopify Payments or the Shopify checkout does or does not do with a surcharge. Check your Shopify admin notifications and Shopify Support. A Shopify community thread on the topic had no reply from Shopify staff when I read it, and a forum thread is not a source.

This post also does not cover what Afterpay’s or Zip’s merchant terms say about surcharging. Read your own agreement. The RBA’s Conclusions Paper describes some BNPL products as not price-regulated and not allowing surcharging, but does not say which.

Finally, I did not see a penalty amount for a merchant that keeps surcharging, nor a list of network exemptions beyond the taxi example. If those matter to your business, ask your payment provider.

Key takeaways

• From 1 October 2026, surcharging eftpos, Mastercard and Visa card payments is no longer allowed, online or in person. American Express, UnionPay and PayPal have also decided to remove it (RBA FAQ, ACCC, as at 30 October 2026).
• It is a card network rule enforced through your provider, not an ACCC penalty regime. The ACCC still enforces misleading price claims.
• Check every place a surcharge can hide: test orders by payment method, apps, theme and checkout code, provider settings, site text and invoice templates.
• Renaming a card surcharge as a “service fee” or “processing fee” is a trap. The ACCC says it may be misleading, and a fee that only appears for card payments may still count as a surcharge.
• Recover the cost through price, with the gross-up formula, or through a clearly disclosed payment-method discount. Do not blame a price rise on the change if other costs also rose.
• In the illustrative example, absorbing a 1.8% card cost cuts what you keep per order by 4.0%. A small price rise wins unless conversion falls by more than about 4% in relative terms.
• Measure against a baseline, by device, and keep sale weekends separate.
• This post does not cover what Shopify or the BNPL providers say about this. Check them directly.

FAQs

Is there a card surcharge ban for online stores in Australia?

Yes, in effect. From 1 October 2026, eftpos, Mastercard and Visa card networks have no-surcharge rules covering in-store, online and digital transactions, including cards in mobile wallets (card networks’ FAQ). The ACCC puts it as: businesses can no longer charge a card payment surcharge from that date. Strictly, it is a network rule enforced through your provider, not a new law (RBA FAQ).

Does the ban include American Express?

Yes. The RBA’s FAQ and the ACCC both say American Express decided to remove surcharging from 1 October 2026, though it is not regulated by the RBA in the same way. Earlier summaries that said Amex was unchanged are out of date as at 30 October 2026.

Can I charge a “payment processing fee” instead?

Be very careful. The ACCC says describing a card payment surcharge as another type of fee may be misleading. If the fee only applies when a customer pays by card, it is likely to be treated as a card surcharge whatever you call it. A fee that applies to every order regardless of payment method is not a card surcharge, but it may need to be included in your displayed price. Get advice before you rely on that.

Can I offer a discount for paying by bank transfer or PayID?

The ACCC says yes, with conditions: disclose it clearly before the customer chooses, show the full price (the price without the discount) and do not make the discounted price more prominent or show only the discounted price. Check the total shown at each step of your checkout.

Do Afterpay and Zip count?

The RBA’s decision covers the eftpos, Mastercard and Visa networks, plus the others that chose to follow, and does not change the position on buy now, pay later. The RBA describes some BNPL products as not allowing surcharging. This post does not cover Afterpay’s or Zip’s merchant terms, so check your agreement before you charge anything extra for these.

What happens if my store keeps surcharging?

The ACCC does not enforce the card networks’ rules. The card networks’ FAQ says a provider or bank may contact businesses to remove non-permitted surcharging and that they may be subject to penalties. Neither the RBA nor the ACCC page I read sets out a penalty, so ask your provider. Misleading price claims are a separate matter under the Australian Consumer Law.

Should I put up my prices?

Not by reflex. Work out your blended card cost from your own statements, check what absorbing it does to your margin, and decide. If you raise prices, use the gross-up formula, avoid blaming the rise on this change if other costs moved too, and watch conversion rate against a baseline. This is general information, not legal advice.

Keep reading

• How to build a Shopify unit economics spreadsheet, step by step
• How to run a checkout leakage audit on Shopify
• The Shopify Black Friday checklist

Is your checkout losing buyers who were ready to pay?

Card costs now sit inside your prices, which makes every sale lost at checkout matter more. Part of your cost per customer is how many visitors buy. Book a free 30-minute diagnostic: we look at where your store loses buyers after the click, using your own numbers, and tell you what to fix first. We do not run ads or email. No pitch. No email gate. If your checkout and tracking are what you want looked at, see how our Shopify CRO service works.