You can pay your BAS on a credit card with no fee until 30 June 2027. Here is what that is worth, and the month it costs you double

Yes, you can still pay the ATO with a credit card, and for the first time there is no card fee on top. The fee stopped on 1 October 2026, when card surcharges were banned across Australia, and the ATO will keep taking credit cards until 30 June 2027. After that it is third-party providers, with their own fees. Three quarterly BAS payments fall inside that window. The float is worth a few hundred dollars a quarter if the cash is already in the bank, and it costs you about double the ATO's own interest rate if it is not.

The short version, in three dates

1 October 2026. The ban on card surcharges started, and the ATO's card payment fee went with it. Its payment page now says, in full: "Card payment fees do not apply to payments." Until the end of September it passed its bank's fee on to you: 0.98% on a domestic Visa credit card, 0.94% on a domestic Mastercard, 1.45% on American Express and 2.03% on an overseas-issued Visa or Mastercard.

30 November 2026. The date the ATO originally picked to stop taking credit cards altogether. It announced that on 1 October, two months out, on the grounds that it "would not be appropriate for the cost of credit card merchant fees to be transferred to the community". The Commissioner put the cost at almost $200 million a year in merchant fees and said the card companies had been asked for a lower rate and "declined to offer a sufficiently low rate". This date is now dead.

30 June 2027. On 9 October the government stepped in with transitional funding and the ATO extended credit card acceptance to 30 June 2027. After that you can still pay by card through a third-party provider, and the ATO's own advice is to "carefully consider relevant fees, charges and processing timeframes" before you do.

So for nine months the Commonwealth is paying your card fee. That is the whole event. Whether it is worth anything to you depends on one habit, which is the point of this page.

Who actually uses this

Not many people. The Commissioner's statement says credit cards were 2.3% of ATO collections in 2024-25, that more than 60% of that by value came from privately owned and wealthy groups and from public and multinational businesses, and that around 5% of small businesses paid tax by credit card that year. The Treasurer's release repeats the 5%.

The extension was sold as relief for small business. On the ATO's own numbers most of the money goes to businesses a good deal larger than yours, and most of the small businesses using it were paying a fee of nearly 1% for the privilege, which suggests they were doing it for the float or the points rather than from hardship.

The three BAS payments that fit inside the window

If you report quarterly, the ATO's due dates are fixed: 28 October for the July to September quarter, 28 February for October to December, 28 April for January to March and 28 July for April to June. If you lodge online you may get an extra two weeks on three of them, but not on the February one, because that date already includes a month's extension.

That puts three BAS payments inside the fee-free window: the one due 28 October 2026, the one due 28 February 2027 and the one due 28 April 2027. The June quarter BAS, due 28 July 2027, misses it. If you pay monthly, every statement from October 2026 to the one due in June 2027 is in, and the June statement, due 21 July 2027, is out. Your income tax bill is in the window if its due date falls before 30 June 2027.

What the float is really worth

Take a cafe with a $24,000 BAS due on 28 February 2027. A year ago, paying that on a domestic Visa credit card cost $235.20 in ATO card fee ($225.60 on a Mastercard). From 1 October it costs nothing extra. That is the part of the story the points forums are excited about, and it is real.

The float is the other part. Pay on the due date and the money does not leave your account until the card statement is due. How long that is depends on your card and where in the cycle the payment lands, so the number below is an assumption to make the arithmetic readable, not a benchmark: say 45 days interest-free. If that $24,000 would otherwise have come out of a fully drawn overdraft at, say, 10%, the float is worth $24,000 x 10% x 45 / 365, which is about $296. Three BAS payments, call it $900 across the window, plus whatever your points are worth to you.

If the cash would have sat in a business account earning little or nothing, the float is worth close to nothing. The fee saving only exists against paying by card last year, not against paying by BPAY from cash, which was always free. For most owners we work with, this is a few hundred dollars, not a strategy.

The month you cannot clear the statement

This is where the arithmetic turns around. Pay $24,000 of BAS on a credit card, fail to clear the statement in full, and the card issuer charges you interest at the card's purchase rate. The Reserve Bank's September 2026 figure for the average standard credit card rate is 21.24%; its average for low-rate cards is 13.49%.

The ATO's own general interest charge for late payment, for the October to December 2026 quarter, is 11.51%, compounding daily.

On $24,000 for one month:

• Standard credit card at 21.24%: about $425 of interest.
• ATO general interest charge at 11.51%: about $230.
• Low-rate card at 13.49%: about $270.

There is a wrinkle. Since 1 July 2025 the ATO's interest charge is not tax deductible, which the earlier briefing on ATO interest covers in full, while interest on money borrowed to pay income tax in a business is generally deductible under the ATO's long-standing ruling IT 2582. Ask your accountant whether that extends to your card and to which liabilities. Even if it does, at a 25% company rate the standard card's $425 only comes down to about $319 after tax, still well above the $230 the ATO would charge you. Only a low-rate card gets close.

So the rule is simple. A credit card is a fine way to pay tax you already have the cash for. It is one of the dearest ways in the country to pay tax you do not. If you are short, a payment plan with the ATO, with its non-deductible 11.51%, is cheaper than revolving the same money on a standard card, and the ATO says it will set one up online for debts of $200,000 or less.

If your payment plan runs off a credit card

The 1 October release said the ATO was writing to everyone with a payment plan linked to a credit card, and that direct debits from a credit card would fail after the cut-off, pushing the plan into arrears or default. The small business newsroom page, last updated 15 October, still carries the old 30 November wording in its body under a banner that says 30 June 2027. Do not wait to find out which date the system applies to you. Move the plan to a direct debit from a bank account now. It takes a few minutes in Online services for business and removes the risk entirely.

After 30 June 2027

Third-party providers will still let you pay the ATO on a credit card, for a fee. The ATO's extension release tells you to check "relevant fees, charges and processing timeframes" and to verify any provider's credentials before you share information or pay, because the gap between a tax office that takes cards and one that does not is exactly the kind of space scams move into. A percentage fee on a $24,000 BAS is a few hundred dollars again, which is the whole float gain handed back. Unless the points genuinely pay for that, the credit card route for tax ends for you on 30 June 2027 too.

Tax on a card, through a buyer's eyes

When you sell, a buyer's accountant will ask for your ATO running account, the statement of everything you owed and when you paid it. Lodged on time and paid on time, every quarter, is one of the cleanest transferable signals a small business can show, because it says the business generates its own tax from its own cash without the owner propping it up. That record does not care whether the payment came by BPAY or by card.

What a buyer does notice is card debt that never goes to zero. A BAS paid on a credit card and then revolved shows up as a tax liability that has moved to a card statement at 21%, and any buyer who reads bank and card statements side by side will see it, and will price the business on the cash flow it actually throws off, not the one the profit and loss suggests. The nine-month fee holiday changes none of that. Take the float if the cash is there. If it is not, the ATO just told you, in writing, what its own money costs, and it is cheaper than the card.