The card surcharge disappears on 1 October. The fee behind it moves onto your P&L.

If your cafe adds a card surcharge at the terminal, that line goes away on 1 October 2026. The fees behind it do not. They move into your cost of doing business, and unless you act before then they come straight out of your take-home. Here is what that costs on real takings, the cost cut arriving the same day, and the bigger saving that most cafe owners are sitting on without knowing it.

1 October 2026, in plain terms

From 1 October 2026 you will not be able to add a surcharge when a customer pays by eftpos, Mastercard or Visa. That covers debit, prepaid and credit cards on all three networks. The Reserve Bank of Australia settled it in the Conclusions Paper it published on 31 March 2026, after a review that began in October 2024.

Your card fees themselves do not change on that date. What changes is who visibly pays them. Today a surcharge puts the fee on the customer's receipt. From October it sits in your costs, next to rent, milk and wages.

If you do not surcharge today, this part does not touch you. The RBA estimates only 16% of Australian merchants surcharged in the 2024/25 financial year. If you are in the other 84%, skip ahead: the interchange cuts are the part you gain from, and they arrive on the same day.

Run it on your own till

Take a cafe turning over $600,000 a year with 90% of sales on card. That is $540,000 of card turnover.

The RBA's own data says a small merchant on a single-rate plan, the flat-percentage deal most small operators are on, pays around 1.4% of transaction value to accept cards. On $540,000 that is roughly $7,560 a year.

Say that cafe nets $48,000 a year. If the surcharge was covering those fees and you do nothing, from 1 October about 16% of your take-home disappears. No fall in trade. No angry customer. Just a date.

Before anything else, pull two numbers off your last twelve months: your card turnover, and the total fees your provider charged on it. Divide the second by the first. That percentage is your real cost of acceptance, and everything below turns on it.

Nobody is going to fine you, and that is not a loophole

This gets reported wrong almost everywhere, so it is worth thirty seconds.

There is no new law banning surcharges. What the RBA actually did was lift its own prohibition on "no-surcharge" rules, the rule that had stopped card networks from forbidding surcharges in the first place. The RBA expects eftpos, Mastercard and Visa to now impose no-surcharge rules of their own.

So the thing stopping you in October is your card scheme's contract, not an Act of Parliament. And the RBA said plainly that if surcharging carries on regardless, which it called counter to the spirit of the reforms, it could recommend the Government legislate a ban.

Translation for a busy owner: there is no gap to plan around. Plan around the price instead.

The other half of the deal

The RBA did not just remove the surcharge. On the same date it is cutting the wholesale fees buried inside what you pay.

• Consumer credit cards issued in Australia: the interchange cap falls from 0.8% to 0.3% of transaction value, and the weighted-average benchmark goes entirely.
• Debit and prepaid cards issued in Australia: the cap falls from 10 cents (or 0.2%) to 8 cents, or 0.16%. The 8 cent weighted-average benchmark stays.
• Commercial credit cards: unchanged, still capped at 0.8%.
• Foreign-issued cards: capped for the first time, at 1.0%, but not until 1 April 2027.

The RBA expects small businesses to gain most here, because small businesses are the ones already paying at or near the old caps while big chains negotiate their way well below them.

Now the honest caveat. Interchange is what your provider pays, not what you pay. The cut only reaches your bank account if your provider passes it on. The RBA clearly assumes some will not, which is why from 30 October 2026 the largest acquirers must publish the fees they charge merchants, broken down by merchant size, and from 30 January 2027 they must publish a measure of how much of the interchange cut they actually passed through. From 1 April 2027 your merchant statement has to carry more detail too. Diarise the first one and go and look.

The lever that is bigger than the ban

Here is the number that should change what you do this month, and it has nothing to do with surcharging.

The RBA found that a small merchant on a single-rate plan pays about 1.4% of transaction value to accept cards. A small merchant of the same size on an unblended plan, where debit and credit are priced separately instead of lumped into one rate, pays about 0.9%. Large merchants average 0.6%.

Only 19% of small merchants are on unblended plans. Four out of five are on the dearer kind.

Put your own numbers in. On $540,000 of card turnover, the gap between 1.4% and 0.9% is $2,700 a year. That is a third of the entire surcharge problem, recovered without raising a single price or losing a single customer. It is a phone call and some paperwork.

Single-rate plans are popular for a fair reason. They are simple, and the fee is predictable, which is worth something when you have twenty minutes a week for admin. Just know what the tidiness costs: about half a percent of everything you take on card, every year.

Put it in the menu price, and be uneven about it

The RBA's expectation is straightforward. Businesses that surcharge today will fold the cost into their advertised prices, the way they already do with every other cost. Most customers end up paying about the same, just in the sticker price instead of a surprise at the terminal.

So the question is not whether to reprice. It is how, and spreading it evenly is the lazy answer.

A flat 1.4% on a $4.50 flat white is six cents. Nobody charges $4.56. Round your highest-volume items up to the next sensible price point and you will usually recover more than the fee costs you, while leaving your most price-sensitive lines alone. Our guide to raising prices has wording that keeps regulars, and the break-even calculator shows what each item has to earn.

One thing you keep: discounts. The RBA has preserved a merchant's ability to offer a discount for a preferred payment method as the alternative to surcharging. A cash discount is still allowed. The difference is that it becomes a discount you choose to advertise, not a penalty the customer discovers at the counter.

What it does to what your cafe is worth

The last part outlives October.

A buyer prices your cafe on the profit a new owner would keep, your owner earnings, multiplied out. A cost that used to sit on the customer's receipt and now sits permanently in your net margin drags that profit down every year until you fix it.

The arithmetic is unforgiving and simple. Absorb $7,560 a year and, at a 2x multiple, that is roughly $15,000 off your asking price. At 3x it is about $23,000. That is not a prediction of what cafes trade at, it is just what happens when someone capitalises a permanent hit to annual profit. You can run your own figure with the valuation calculator.

Run it the other way and the same maths works for you. A cafe that reprices cleanly in September and moves off a 1.4% plan walks into 2027 with a better margin than it had in 2025, on the same trade and the same customers, and can show a buyer exactly which decision produced it. That is a far better story at the sale table than "we absorbed it".