Where the 100 stand today
Each merchant was assessed on three questions: does it surcharge credit cards, does it surcharge debit, and can a customer avoid the fee by paying from a bank account (PayID, PayTo, BPAY or direct debit). Status reflects published fee schedules as at August 2026.
The regulatory clock
The Payments System Board's Conclusions Paper (March 2026) settled a three-part package: surcharging removal, lower interchange caps, and fee transparency. Enforcement of the no-surcharge rules sits with the card networks and payment service providers — not the ACCC.
Debit surcharges dropped on frontline government services
The ATO and other Commonwealth agencies stopped surcharging Australian debit cards — an early preview of the end state.
RBA Conclusions Paper published
Final decisions confirmed: removal of surcharging on designated eftpos, Mastercard and Visa networks across prepaid, debit and credit.
No-surcharge rules + new interchange caps
Domestic debit and prepaid interchange capped at 8c or 0.16%; domestic consumer credit at 0.30%. All card costs move into the sticker price.
Foreign-issued card interchange capped
Cross-border interchange on Australian-acquired transactions capped at 1.0%, closing the last major cost gap for inbound spend.
In scope Surcharging prohibited
Cannot carry a customer-facing card surcharge from 1 October 2026
- Visa — credit, debit, prepaidDesignated
- Mastercard — credit, debit, prepaidDesignated
- eftpos — debit, prepaidDesignated
- Wallet transactions on those cardsApple Pay, Google Pay
- Foreign-issued Visa & MastercardInterchange capped Apr 2027
Portfolio analysis
Published rates only. Merchants that surcharge but do not publish a rate card (Flight Centre, Ticketek, Luxury Escapes) are excluded from the rate charts and flagged in the register.
Payment card surcharge rates in force today
Highest published scheme rate per merchant. Every bar goes to zero on 1 October 2026.
Merchant fee schedules, August 2026. Council figure is City of Parramatta; registry figure is a representative Service NSW transaction.
Credit versus debit: the gap that disappears
Where a merchant publishes both, debit is priced at roughly a third of credit. The ATO already runs debit at zero — the shape the whole market takes in October.
Visa scheme rates where separately published; Qantas and ATO rates are scheme-agnostic.
Surcharging concentration by sector
Card surcharging is not evenly spread. Travel, utilities and government carry almost all of it; streaming, gaming, apparel, beauty and QSR are already compliant almost without exception. Select any segment to see every merchant in it and the rates they apply.
n = 100 merchants. Counts are merchant-level, not transaction-weighted.
Merchant register
All 100 merchants. Select any row for the full assessment, the bank-account alternative, and what changes for that merchant on 1 October. Sort by any column; search matches merchant, sector and fee detail.
| Merchant ↕ | Status ↕ | Credit card ↕ | Debit card ↕ | Amex / other | Fee-free bank route ↕ | Conf. ↕ |
|---|
Leakage watchlist
The reform removes a fee type, not a cost. Four routes let merchant economics survive 1 October intact — each one degrades the "no surcharge" promise if left unmanaged.
Re-badge the card fee as a service fee
A per-booking fee that applies regardless of payment method is not a card surcharge, and survives the ban untouched. Travel intermediaries already run this structure at scale.
- Webjet: $21.95–$32.95 servicing fee, plus a $12.95–$21.95 booking price guarantee fee
- Rex Airlines: 1% booking and handling fee — already labelled as a channel fee, not a card fee
- Ticketek: ~$9.95 service and delivery fee per transaction
- Hoyts: $1.80–$3.45 online booking fee per ticket
- Domino's: 10% Sunday and up to 20% public-holiday loadings, confirmed by the ACCC as unaffected
Shift the surcharge to the rails still allowed
Amex, Diners, PayPal and BNPL remain surchargeable. Merchants with existing multi-rate checkouts can keep differentiating — and the visible price gap now points away from cards entirely.
- TPG: 3.02% Amex — ten times the new credit interchange cap — and 2.75% Diners
- Dan Murphy's and BWS: 3.00% premium Amex, 1.50% standard
- Virgin Australia: 2.27% Diners, 1.27% Zip, 0.99% PayPal
- RBA consultation on Amex, BNPL and wallets opens mid-2026
Move the customer off cards altogether
Bank-account rails carry no interchange or scheme fee at all. Twenty-three of the 100 already offer a fee-free bank route, and the ban makes that the only remaining lever on payment cost.
- Superloop: withdrew direct debit for new customers and moved them onto PayTo, with cards at 1%
- Qantas, Virgin and Jetstar: PayID priced at zero against a 1.06–1.30% card fee
- Chemist Warehouse: in-store pay-by-bank QR, against $15m+ annual card cost
- PayTo online retail volumes up ~300% year on year
Raise the sticker price instead
The RBA expects this outright, and it is the only route the reform actively endorses — costs move into the advertised price rather than onto the customer who chose a card. It is also invisible: nothing at the checkout marks it.
- RBA: "the 16 per cent of merchants that currently surcharge may increase their advertised prices"
- Qantas reported to be planning an October fare rise, with 1–2% the expected order of magnitude
- Jetstar, Virgin and Rex expected to follow the same path
- Consumers see no fee removed at these merchants — only a price that quietly went up
What this means for the card product
Reading the register from a scheme's perspective, four things follow.
The price signal against cards inverts — then vanishes
Today a Qantas customer sees PayID at $0 next to a card at 1.3%. From 1 October the card side of that comparison goes to zero, and the only remaining differentiated rails are Amex, BNPL and PayPal. For the first time in a decade, Visa is the default cheap option at checkout rather than the penalised one.
Pay-by-bank keeps its advantage where it was built to win
PayID and PayTo were adopted by these merchants as a surcharge-avoidance tool, but the underlying economics — no interchange, no scheme fee — do not change on 1 October. The 23 merchants with a live bank rail keep every reason to promote it, now through discounts and loyalty rather than surcharges. Superloop went further and closed the old direct-debit path entirely for new customers.
Enforcement is a scheme obligation, not a regulator's
The ACCC has explicitly stepped back. Detecting a merchant that renames a 1.3% card fee as a "processing fee" on 2 October falls to network monitoring and acquirer contracts. The travel and government cohorts — with the highest rates and the most complex fee stacks — are where that capability gets tested first.
The interchange cut lands the same day as the revenue question
Domestic credit interchange falls to 0.30% and debit to 8c or 0.16% on 1 October, with foreign-issued cards capped at 1.0% from April 2027. Merchants lose surcharge revenue and gain acceptance-cost relief simultaneously — the net position for large merchants, already paying 0.5–1.0% on credit per ACCC benchmarks, is close to neutral. That argument is worth making to them directly.