The Card Surcharge Ban: What Changes in Your October Close

October 2026 is the first month Australian businesses close without card surcharges. Plenty has been written about checkout pages and pricing. Less about the books, where one account should go quiet, one comparison stops being like for like, and a few September leftovers can trip up the reconciliation.

What changed on 1 October

The Reserve Bank announced on 31 March 2026 a package of reforms: removing surcharging on eftpos, Mastercard and Visa cards, lowering interchange caps, and increasing transparency over fees. The RBA did not ban surcharges directly. Its implementation timeline says that from 1 October 2026 it would lift its prohibition on "no-surcharge rules", which lets the card networks ban surcharging themselves.

According to the RBA's FAQ, the networks are introducing those rules from 1 October 2026, and they apply generally to all credit, debit and prepaid cards on those networks. The same page says American Express, UnionPay and PayPal have also decided to remove surcharging, and that PayPal's rule takes effect from 5 October 2026. Processors have followed. Stripe's support note says it disabled surcharging in Australia across online and in-person card payments from 1 October.

Two things did not change. Businesses can still offer discounts for particular payment methods, as the RBA FAQ confirms. And some buy now, pay later products sat outside this already: the RBA's surcharging chapter notes that some BNPL products are not subject to price regulation and do not allow surcharging.

On the same date, the caps on domestic interchange fell, while the new cap on foreign-issued cards follows on 1 April 2027, according to the RBA's media release. The RBA's interchange chapter sets them out:

Surcharge income should now be zero

If you surcharged, you probably had a revenue account for it, fed by a Shopify app, an invoicing setting or a payment gateway option. The RBA's plain-English summary puts the share of Australian businesses that surcharge at 16 per cent, so this applies to a minority of brands, but those brands need to look.

For card payments taken on or after 1 October (5 October for PayPal), that account should hold nothing. A balance means something in the chain is still adding a surcharge. Stripe's note lists the places to look: checkout or point-of-sale logic that calculates a surcharge, surcharge parameters still passed through an integration, and surcharge settings in third-party software connected to the processor.

The test is mechanical. Filter the account for October and check every line's transaction date. Lines dated before 1 October are legitimate settlement lag. Lines dated after it are a configuration problem to fix and raise with whoever owns the checkout. Renaming the fee does not help. Stripe's note says a fee that applies only when a customer picks a particular card method may still count as a surcharge.

Month-on-month comparisons are no longer like for like

Businesses that surcharged had to decide whether to build card costs into their prices. Where they did, revenue moves from one line to another. That shift can look like growth.

Here is an illustrative month for a store that surcharged 1.5% on card payments and then raised prices by the same amount. The figures are not drawn from any real business, and the processor rate is an assumption.

Check it: 100,000.00 + 1,500.00 = 101,500.00, and 1.75% of 101,500.00 is 1,776.25 in both months. Customers paid the same, the processor charged the same, and the business earned the same. Yet sales rose 1.5% and the surcharge line disappeared.

Anyone reading October's management accounts should see that explained, not inferred. A short note on the pack does it. If you track a "net card cost" metric (fees less surcharge income), it jumps in October from $276.25 to $1,776.25 without any change in the underlying cost. Retire it and track fees as a percentage of total card volume instead, which reads 1.75% in both months.

Did your fees actually fall?

Lower interchange caps reduce what acquirers pay card issuers. Whether they reduce what you pay depends on your pricing. If you pay interchange plus a margin, you would expect the cut to show in your fee lines from October. If you pay a flat or blended rate, your rate is whatever your agreement says. The RBA's implementation chapter notes that providers "will retain the ability to offer pricing models that blend debit and credit card fees together." Stripe's note says only that "your existing Stripe agreement remains in effect."

So measure it rather than assume it. For each processor, take total fees from October's payout reports and divide by total gross card volume. Do the same for September. Use the payout reports rather than the fee account in your ledger, because a plugged or misdated fee entry will distort the result.

Two dates give you a benchmark. Acquirers must publish a measure of interchange pass-through for each of the first four quarters after the reductions, the first due by 30 January 2027 for October to December 2026. And from the first full statement period starting on or after 1 April 2027, merchant statements must break out domestic and foreign-issued cards, and card-present and card-not-present.

Leftovers from September

Open invoices with a surcharge line. Wholesale and B2B invoices raised in Xero or QuickBooks before 1 October may still include a card surcharge. The RBA FAQ warns that if a card payment is made on or after 1 October, surcharging may no longer be available, even if the invoice was issued earlier. If the customer pays the invoice less the surcharge, do not leave the difference sitting as a part-paid balance. Clear it with a credit note against the surcharge line, and agree the GST coding of that credit note with your accountant.

Refunds on surcharged orders. A September order returned in October may carry a surcharge. Whatever your refund policy says about surcharges, book the surcharge part of the refund back against the account it was originally credited to, not against sales. Otherwise October sales are understated and the old surcharge account never clears. The RBA's surcharging chapter notes instances of consumers not being refunded surcharges on returned products, calling it an increasing problem with the growth in online commerce, so expect customers to ask.

Checks for your October close

• Surcharge income is zero for card transactions dated on or after 1 October, and on or after 5 October for PayPal.
• Any residual surcharge lines are traced to September transactions settled in October, or to a setting that has since been switched off.
• The management pack explains any revenue movement caused by repricing.
• Effective fee rates are calculated per processor from payout reports, for September and October.
• Open invoices with surcharge lines are cleared by credit note where the surcharge was not paid.
• Refunds of surcharged orders reverse against the original surcharge account.

Bringing it back to your close

The surcharge change is small in each transaction and easy to miss across a month, which is why it deserves a deliberate check this close: one account that should go quiet, one comparison that needs a note, and one rate you can now measure for yourself.

Measuring it starts with payouts broken into parts that add back to the deposit. That decomposition is what we built Vert to do for Shopify Payments, Stripe, PayPal and Afterpay, with a balanced journal drafted for your approval in Xero. If you would like to see it on your own October payouts, join the pilot.