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A blended rate is a single average percentage charged across all your card types, regardless of whether each card is cheap or expensive to accept. It’s simple and predictable, but it hides the cost differences between debit, credit and premium cards by averaging them into one number. That contrasts with interchange-plus pricing, which breaks the interchange out and shows a separate visible margin.
Last updated: 30 June 2026
A blended rate charges the same percentage whether a customer pays with basic debit or a premium rewards credit card. The provider takes the range of underlying costs and blends them into a single average, so you pay one consistent figure on every transaction. The appeal is obvious: predictable, easy to budget, and simple to quote. The trade-off is that it tells you nothing about which cards are actually cheap or expensive for your business to accept.
Against interchange-plus, a blended rate wins on simplicity and loses on transparency. Interchange-plus passes through the real interchange and adds a fixed, visible margin, so you can see exactly what each layer costs — and any interchange reduction, including the 2026 cuts, tends to flow through more directly. A blended rate can absorb such changes into the average, meaning you might not see a benefit unless the rate itself is renegotiated. Simplicity has a price in visibility.
You can derive your effective blended rate straight from a statement: take total card fees and divide by total card turnover for the period, then express it as a percentage. That single figure is, in effect, your real blend — and it’s the same calculation as cost of acceptance. Comparing it against indicative benchmarks of roughly 1.37% in-person and 1.78% online helps you judge whether your blend is competitive. Figures are indicative and this is general information, not advice.
Source: RBA Review of Merchant Card Payment Costs and Surcharging — Conclusions Paper (March 2026).
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