Your card fees were cut twice. Nobody was required to tell you.

Two cuts to card fees have already happened, on 1 December 2025 and again on 1 May 2026. Together they are meant to take about $90 million a year off what New Zealand businesses pay to accept cards. Whether any of it reached your till depends entirely on how your merchant fees are priced, and nobody had to tell you either way. Here is how to find out, in about ten minutes, from statements you already have.

Do this first, it takes ten minutes

Your merchant service fee is what your bank or payment provider charges you to accept a card. It is one of the few costs in a cafe you can cut without asking anything of a customer or a staff member.

Pull four merchant statements: October 2025, February 2026, March 2026 and June 2026.

For each one, do a single sum:

• total fees charged, divided by total card sales, times 100.

That is your effective rate. October against February brackets the first cut. March against June brackets the second.

If the number barely moved, the cut did not reach you. Your card mix wobbles month to month, so do not read too much into a couple of basis points, but a rate that is flat across both dates is a rate nobody adjusted.

What was actually cut

Interchange is the slice of your card fee that your provider pays to the customer's bank. It is the biggest single piece: the Commerce Commission puts it at about 60% of a typical merchant service fee, roughly $600 million of the $1 billion a year New Zealand businesses pay to accept Mastercard and Visa.

The Commission capped it lower. Here is what changed for the cards that come across a cafe counter.

From 1 December 2025, on New Zealand-issued cards:

• Personal credit, in person: 0.80% down to 0.30%. This is the big one.
• Personal credit, online: 0.80% down to 0.70%.
• Contactless debit: 0.20%, unchanged.
• Debit inserted or swiped: 0.00%, unchanged.
• Debit online: 0.60%, unchanged.

From 1 May 2026, on cards issued overseas:

• Personal credit, in person: previously unregulated and running anywhere from 1.10% to 2.40%, now capped at 0.70%.
• Debit, in person: previously 0.60% to 2.40%, now capped at 0.60%.
• Online, personal credit 1.50% and debit 1.40%.

So on your New Zealand credit card takings, half a percentage point of cost came out of the system. On $100,000 a year of in-person credit sales that is $500. Not life changing on its own. But it is pure margin, and it repeats every year, and you did nothing to earn it.

The overseas cards are the bigger prize, and almost nobody is talking about them.

The tourist card is where the real money moved

If you trade anywhere visitors go, a chunk of your counter is foreign-issued plastic. Those rates were not regulated at all until 1 May 2026.

An in-person overseas credit card that was costing 2.40% in interchange is now capped at 0.70%. That is 1.70 percentage points, or $1,700 on every $100,000 of those takings. Even at the friendly end of the old range, 1.10%, the cut is 0.40 points.

You will not see this on a blended plan. It is invisible unless you go looking, and it lands hardest on exactly the operators who have been quietly subsidising visitor traffic for years.

Why yours may not have moved

There are two ways your fees can be priced, and only one of them passes a cut through by itself.

Unblended, sometimes called interchange plus. Interchange is itemised, so when the cap falls your bill falls automatically, the following month, without a conversation.

Blended, a single flat rate on everything. Your provider absorbs the cut. Your rate is whatever you agreed, until you renegotiate it.

Small merchants are far more likely to be on a blended rate. The Commission's own numbers assume acquirers hand back 90% of the interchange saving, which is how it gets to $90 million a year of lower merchant service fees. That assumption was challenged during consultation, citing a UK regulator's review which found acquirers "generally did not pass through the savings" and that pass-through "differed significantly depending on a merchant's pricing plan (which depends largely on merchant size)".

Read that last clause again. Merchant size decides your pricing plan, and your pricing plan decides whether you got the cut. A cafe is at the wrong end of that sentence unless it asks.

The Commission has said it will monitor merchant service fees "to ensure that interchange savings are being passed through to merchants". Monitoring is not a refund. The phone call is yours to make.

If you surcharge, your number is out of date

The Commission's guidance on surcharging is short and it has not changed: an appropriate surcharge "should be no more than your additional cost for accepting that particular payment method", you must show it clearly before the customer pays, and you must offer at least one way to pay that is not surcharged.

Here is the problem. That guidance, published in July 2023, used typical rates of 0.7% for contactless debit and 1.5% to 2% for domestic credit. Plenty of cafes set a sign off numbers like those and never touched it again.

Since then the in-person credit interchange cap has dropped half a point. If your cost fell and your surcharge did not, you are no longer recovering a cost. You are charging a margin on payments, on a sign that says otherwise.

One more line from the same guidance, worth pinning to the wall: there is no merchant service fee for cash, for Eftpos, "or where a debit card is inserted or swiped through your terminal". Insert and swipe cost you nothing. Contactless debit costs 0.20%. That is a real difference, though in a cafe with a queue out the door, tap is faster and speed is worth more than 20 basis points. Know the trade-off; do not blindly optimise the wrong end of it.

The card in the tradie's wallet is still uncapped

Business and corporate credit cards were left out of both cuts. Domestically they still run 0.45% to 2.20%, and on overseas-issued business cards 1.85% to 2.35%.

That matters if you do office catering, corporate orders or standing accounts, because those are exactly the customers paying on a company card. Your most reliable revenue can be your most expensive to collect.

The Commission published a draft decision on 4 June 2026 proposing to cap them. It says New Zealand businesses pay about $125 million a year in interchange on commercial cards, and that caps would cut that by about $40 million a year. Feedback on submissions closes at 12 noon on Thursday 6 August 2026, and a final decision is expected later this year.

Until then, an invoice paid by bank transfer costs you nothing and a company Visa can cost over 2%. On a $2,000 monthly catering account that gap is worth having.

Is the surcharge ban actually happening?

Short answer: not yet, and it has been sitting still for a long time.

The Retail Payment System (Ban on Merchant Surcharges) Amendment Bill was introduced on 15 September 2025 and passed its first reading the next day. The Finance and Expenditure Committee reported it back on 12 November 2025. Since then, nothing. As at 3 August 2026, Parliament's own record shows no date against the second reading, the committee of the whole House, the third reading or Royal assent.

So there is no ban on in-store surcharges in New Zealand. Plan for it, do not wait for it.

When it does arrive, every cent that currently sits on the customer's receipt moves into your prices. Knowing your true effective rate before that happens is the difference between repricing deliberately and repricing in a panic. Our guide on raising prices without losing customers is the version of that conversation worth having early.

Why a small line matters more than its size

Say you find $1,800 a year. It is not a dramatic number next to wages or rent.

It behaves differently, though. A price rise risks volume. A roster cut risks service. Renegotiating a fee risks nothing, and it drops straight to net margin in the month it happens.

At exit it behaves differently again. Buyers value a cafe on owner earnings times a multiple, so a permanent cost reduction is worth several times its annual value in the sale price. Better still, it is easy to prove: twelve months of merchant statements at a lower rate is a run-rate saving anyone can see, not an add-back you have to argue for across the table.

The reverse is the part that should sting. A buyer who spots an uncompetitive merchant agreement will not pay you for the saving. They will renegotiate it themselves the week after settlement and keep it.