RBA Confirmed: Card surcharges will be banned from 1 October 2026 — check you're on the right rate →
An interchange fee is the portion of a card payment that goes to the customer’s card issuer (their bank), set by the card network. It’s one component inside the total merchant service fee you pay — not the whole fee. From 1 October 2026 the RBA is cutting interchange caps: consumer credit from 0.80% to 0.30%, and domestic debit and prepaid from 10c-or-0.20% down to 8c-or-0.16%.
Last updated: 30 June 2026
Interchange is the slice of a card transaction that flows to the cardholder’s issuing bank — the bank that gave your customer their card. It is set by the card networks (Visa, Mastercard, eftpos) rather than by your own payment provider, which is why no single provider can simply switch it off. When you pay a merchant service fee, interchange is one of three layers buried inside it, alongside the network’s scheme fees and your provider’s margin. Understanding interchange matters because it’s the layer the regulator is directly reshaping in 2026.
From 1 October 2026, the RBA is lowering the caps on several interchange categories. The consumer credit cap falls from 0.80% to 0.30%, and the domestic debit and prepaid cap moves from 10c-or-0.20% to 8c-or-0.16%. Commercial and business-card interchange is retained at current levels, and the previous 0.50% benchmark is abolished — which means costs on business cards could actually rise rather than fall. These are caps on one component only.
A cut to interchange caps reduces a cost input for your provider — but the saving only reaches your business if your provider passes it through. The merchant service fee itself is not capped, only interchange within it. Whether you see the benefit depends heavily on your pricing model: an interchange-plus arrangement tends to expose the change more directly than a flat or blended rate that averages everything into one number. Rates quoted here are indicative and this is general information, not financial advice.
Source: RBA Review of Merchant Card Payment Costs and Surcharging — Conclusions Paper (March 2026).
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