RBA Confirmed: Card surcharges will be banned from 1 October 2026 — check you're on the right rate →
Generally, accepting cards is a commercial choice rather than something the RBA forces on a business — the regulator’s 2026 changes concern surcharging and interchange, not a requirement to take cards. In practice the bigger pressures are customer expectations and how much cash use has declined in your market. The surcharge change also matters, because from October 2026 you can no longer pass eftpos, Mastercard or Visa card costs to customers via a surcharge.
Last updated: 30 June 2026
The RBA’s 2026 package is about the cost and surcharging of card payments — it caps interchange and restricts surcharges on eftpos, Mastercard and Visa. It is not a rule compelling businesses to accept cards in the first place. Which payment methods you offer is generally a commercial decision, shaped by your customers and your market rather than dictated by the payments regulator.
In practice, the real pressures are customer expectations and the steady decline of cash. A business that refuses cards may simply lose sales to one that doesn’t, particularly where customers rarely carry cash. Set against that is cost: from 1 October 2026 you can no longer recover eftpos, Mastercard or Visa card costs through a surcharge, so the merchant fee on those cards sits with your business. Weighing convenience and reach against that absorbed cost is the heart of the decision.
If you keep accepting cards, the 2026 changes make it worth tightening how you pay for them — checking least-cost routing, your pricing model and your cost of acceptance. If you’re considering cash-only or cash-incentivised approaches, note that cash or bank-transfer discounts remain allowed, since the ban targets surcharges rather than incentives. Whether any specific business type, licence condition or industry rule requires card or electronic acceptance is outside the scope of this page, so confirm anything specific with the relevant authority. This is general information, not legal advice.
Source: RBA Review of Merchant Card Payment Costs and Surcharging — Conclusions Paper (March 2026).
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