Australia banned card surcharges on October 1. Discounts for cash are still allowed

On October 1, 2026, Australia stopped allowing businesses to add a surcharge for paying by card. The ban covers Visa, Mastercard and eftpos credit, debit and prepaid cards, and American Express, PayPal and UnionPay chose to follow. Hospitality businesses can still charge their weekend and public holiday surcharges. And businesses can still offer a discount to customers who pay another way.

How it happened

The Reserve Bank of Australia published the conclusions of its review of merchant card costs on March 31, 2026. It found that surcharging "is no longer achieving its intended purpose": consumers find it hard to avoid, the rules confuse everyone, and surcharges are often poorly disclosed. Rather than ban surcharges directly, the RBA allowed the card networks to adopt no-surcharge rules from October 1, and all three regulated networks did.

The RBA paired the ban with lower costs for businesses. It reduced the caps on interchange for domestic debit and consumer credit from the same date, and a cap on interchange for foreign cards plus new fee transparency rules follow on April 1, 2027.

What Australian businesses can still do

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's guidance draws the line plainly:

• Build the cost into prices. Businesses may raise prices to recover card costs, as long as they don't mislead customers about the reason for the increase.
• Offer a payment method discount. A discount for paying with cash or another method is allowed, disclosed before the customer orders, with the full price shown as the main price.
• Keep non-card surcharges. Weekend and public holiday surcharges in hospitality are untouched. Relabelling a card surcharge as another fee, though, may be misleading conduct.

What it means for a restaurant in Florida or Ontario

Nothing changes for you on October 1. Canada already prohibits surcharging Interac debit and Quebec bans surcharges outright, and in the United States surcharging is governed by card network rules and state law. What Australia shows is where the pressure on surcharges is heading, and why the structure of your program matters more than its name. We break down the difference between a cash discount, dual pricing and a surcharge on a separate page, and the US side is in our post on the 1% surcharge cap.