01 What is changing
From 1 October 2026, a business can no longer add a fee to a bill just because the customer paid by card. The small “card fee” line — usually around 1–1.5% — that pops up at the terminal on Visa, Mastercard and eftpos payments is going away.
02 The bit most people get wrong
It is tempting to read this as “the government is banning businesses from surcharging.” That is not quite what happened, and the difference matters:
- The card networks (Visa, Mastercard, eftpos) used to be stopped by a Reserve Bank rule from forcing “no surcharge” onto merchants.
- The Reserve Bank has now removed that rule. With it gone, each network has decided to prohibit surcharging itself.
- That prohibition reaches your venue through your payment contract — not through a law aimed directly at you.
The result on the floor is the same — no card surcharge from 1 October — but this mechanism is exactly why a genuine service fee is treated differently. More on that below.
Worth knowing: at the same time, the Reserve Bank is cutting the wholesale “interchange” fees behind card payments, so the underlying cost of accepting cards drops a little too.
03 What does not change: the cost of running a venue
The surcharge disappears. The cost behind it does not. Taking payments, the POS, the terminals, online and QR ordering, the kitchen screens — that technology has a real, ongoing cost. The reform changes how that cost can be recovered, not whether it exists.
04 What we are moving to: a service fee
We are replacing the old card surcharge with a Hospitality Service Fee — and it is a different thing, not the same thing with a new label.
Here is the line that matters, and it comes straight from the Reserve Bank’s own guidance: the reform only applies to a fee added because a customer pays by card. It expressly does not apply to genuine service fees or booking fees.
Charged because you tapped a card. If it only appears for card payers, that is what it is.
Charged to every customer for the service that runs the venue — however they pay: card, cash, anything.
Because the Hospitality Service Fee is the same for everyone regardless of how they pay, it is not a card surcharge. It is a fee for a service you are actually providing.
The one non-negotiable: this only holds if the fee genuinely applies to all payment methods. A “service fee” that shows up only when someone pays by card is just a surcharge wearing a different name — the ACCC has said so directly, and it counts as misleading conduct with serious penalties. Same fee for cash, same fee for card. That is the whole game.
05 The three things that keep it compliant
For the service fee to stand up, three things have to be true. Our POS handles all three automatically.
It is advertised in your prices
The fee is shown up front and built into your displayed pricing — never a surprise at the terminal. Australian Consumer Law requires the total, all-in price to be shown as a single figure, so the fee has to be visible before anyone orders.
It comes off the POS as a clear line item
The system generates it, prints it on the receipt, and applies it the same way on every transaction — transparent and consistent, not something staff add or waive at the till.
It carries a fixed flagfall
A set amount per transaction ($0.20), not just a percentage. That fixed component marks it as a genuine per-transaction service charge with its own cost basis — so it cannot be dismissed as “really just a card cost you could have baked into menu prices.”
06 Surcharge vs service fee, at a glance
| Old card surcharge — gone 1 Oct | Our service fee |
|---|---|
| Triggered by paying by card | Applies to everyone, any payment type |
| Appears only at the terminal | Advertised in your prices, up front |
| A % of the card transaction | Fixed flagfall [+ % if applicable] |
| Banned by the card networks | A genuine service fee — outside the ban |