Australian Merchant Surcharging Register

Where the 500 stand today

Two evidence tiers, kept deliberately separate. 100 merchants are hand-verified against their own published fee schedules and terms. The remaining 400 are machine-scanned only — an automated probe of each merchant's own site for payment-fee language, wallet support and Discover acceptance. Scanned rows are leads, not findings: they are labelled as such throughout and never counted as confirmed. All 67 fee signals the scan raised have since been reviewed by hand — 11 were real card surcharges, 53 were false positives and 3 remain unresolved.

Confirmed surcharging

Hand-verified against the merchant's own published terms. Must be removed by 1 October.

Fee signals proved false

Of 67 machine-flagged signals, 53 were delivery, finance, late-payment or markup matches — not card surcharges.

Discover likely, via Diners

Not one merchant publishes Discover acceptance. Diners Club — same network — is the only signal.

2.80%

Highest in-scope rate

Agoda's debit rate — higher than its own credit rate, and nearly three times it.

$1.6bn

Consumer surcharges ending

Treasury's estimate of annual card surcharges removed from 1 October.

0.30%

New credit interchange cap

Domestic consumer credit, down from 0.80%, effective the same day.

2.75%

Highest surviving fee

TPG's Diners Club surcharge. Its 3.02% Amex fee now goes — Amex voluntarily aligned.

500

Merchants in the register

100 hand-verified, 400 machine-scanned. All are in scope of the ban.

What hand-verification of the fee signals found The scan raised 67 fee signals across the machine-scanned merchants. Every one was reviewed against the text on the merchant's own site. 11 were genuine card surcharges and are now counted as confirmed — Alinta Energy 0.41%, Sydney Water 0.40%, City of Melbourne 0.33%, Early Settler 1%, PC Case Gear 0.8%, plus Plush Sofas, Plus Fitness, Cluey Learning, Alliance Airlines, Momentum Energy and Linkt at unpublished rates. 53 were false positives, and the pattern is worth knowing: the biggest single source was lenders' product fees — Latitude's $11.95 monthly credit card fee on interest-free plans, which reads like a card fee but is charged by the financier, not the merchant. The rest were Afterpay late fees, delivery and freight surcharges, menu and young-driver loadings, and CSS class names. Four matched the word inside an explicit denial: EastLink advertises "No Credit Card Surcharges With Us", and TerryWhite Chemmart, Red Energy and GIO each state they do not surcharge. RACV proved the reverse of a finding — no fee on Visa or Mastercard, 2.8% on Amex. 3 remain unresolved and are still marked as signals.

On the Discover column No merchant in the register publishes Discover acceptance. In Australia Discover rides the Discover Global Network, which also carries Diners Club International; acquirers such as ANZ Worldline and Windcave enable the two together, though a merchant may decline either. Acceptance is therefore an acquirer configuration, not something merchants advertise — so the column reports Diners Club as the only available indicator. The scan initially flagged 13 apparent Discover matches; all 13 proved to be platform artefacts rather than acceptance — Shopify's default supported_card_type_icons theme list, Apple Pay's supportedNetworks config, translation bundles, CVV help copy and PCI boilerplate. None were counted.

Cross-check against the RBA The RBA's own estimate is that 16% of Australian businesses currently surcharge. This register finds 23% among the country's largest merchants, concentrated almost entirely in travel, utilities and government. Large-format retail is now the clearest finding in the register: it does not surcharge. Every retail surcharge claim tested against the merchant's own published terms failed to survive verification — see the source-quality warning in the method notes.

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.

1 JAN 2025

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.

MAR 2026

RBA Conclusions Paper published

Final decisions confirmed: removal of surcharging on designated eftpos, Mastercard and Visa networks across prepaid, debit and credit.

1 OCT 2026

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.

1 APR 2027

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
American ExpressVoluntarily aligned
JCBVoluntarily aligned
UnionPayVoluntarily aligned
Commercial & corporate cards on those networksIncluded
Wallet transactions on those cardsApple Pay, Google Pay
Foreign-issued Visa & MastercardInterchange capped Apr 2027

Still surchargeable: Diners Club, PayPal, BNPL — and any fee charged independently of payment method, such as a booking or service fee, or a weekend or public-holiday loading.

Correction — American Express is in scope after all An earlier version of this register treated American Express as outside the ban and built an argument around merchants rerouting their surcharge onto it. That was wrong. The industry reference site cardsurcharge.com.au — run by Australian Payments Network as an initiative of eftpos, Mastercard and Visa — states that "American Express, JCB and UnionPay have voluntarily aligned with these reforms and will implement a no-surcharge position from 1 October 2026." It also confirms the ban reaches commercial and corporate cards, not just consumer ones. Every Amex claim in this register has been corrected; the escape hatch is much narrower than it looked, leaving only Diners Club, PayPal and BNPL.

Industry reference The authoritative public explainer for these changes is cardsurcharge.com.au, published by Australian Payments Network as "an initiative of eftpos, Mastercard and Visa". It carries the definitive scope statement — that surcharging on eftpos, Mastercard and Visa ends on 1 October 2026, that American Express, JCB and UnionPay have voluntarily aligned, and that the rules cover in-store, online and wallet transactions on commercial and corporate cards as well as consumer ones. It also sets out what remains permitted: booking or service fees, and weekend or public-holiday loadings, where these apply to all customers independently of payment method. Separate FAQ tracks are published for consumers, businesses and payment providers — the business track is the one to point merchants at, since it tells them to work through their acquirer, PSP, gateway or POS provider rather than acting alone.

Note for product planning The enforcement gap matters. The ACCC has confirmed it will not police the new rules — the card networks and their acquirers will. That makes scheme-side monitoring, merchant education and complaint intake a Visa operational responsibility from day one, not a regulator's.

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.

Credit card

Debit card

Visa scheme rates where separately published; Qantas and ATO rates are scheme-agnostic.

Surcharging concentration by sector

Card surcharging is not evenly spread. Every confirmed surcharger sits in travel, utilities, government, big-ticket retail, insurance or ticketing — apparel, beauty, gaming and streaming carry none. The middle band is scanned-only: fee wording was found, but whether it is a card surcharge is unresolved. Select any segment to see every merchant in it.

Confirmed surcharging (verified)

Fee signal found (unverified)

No surcharge detected

n = 500 merchants. Counts are merchant-level, not transaction-weighted. The middle band is scanned-only and unverified.

Merchant register

Opens on the top 50 merchants by estimated MSV, listed A–Z — one button extends it to all 500. Reorder by estimated merchant sales volume with the dropdown, or sort by any column. Select a row for the full assessment, the bank-account alternative, and what changes on 1 October. Filter by evidence tier using the chips: verified rows carry a rate, scanned rows only a signal.

How the wallet column was built Wallet support was detected directly from each merchant's own site, not taken from secondary sources. Apple Pay is the most reliable signal: any site offering Apple Pay on the web must host a domain-association file at a fixed path, and that file was probed on every domain. Shop Pay is inferred from Shopify storefront markers, since Shop Pay is available wherever Shopify Checkout runs. Google Pay is weaker: it usually initialises inside the checkout behind authentication, so it is under-detected here and its count is a floor, not a total. Click to Pay is not crawl-detectable at all, and this column says so rather than guessing. The scheme-owned checkout — built on EMVCo's Secure Remote Commerce standard and backed by Visa, Mastercard, Amex and Discover — loads inside the authenticated checkout flow. Tested against Domino's, publicly named by Mastercard as a live Australian Click to Pay merchant, an automated crawl returned nothing. A scan-populated column would therefore have been false negatives end to end, so this one is populated only from merchants the card networks have publicly named. Australian adoption runs through acquirers including Fat Zebra, Adyen, Windcave, Gr4vy and Merchant Warrior, so real coverage is certainly far wider than the single row shown here. Throughout, a badge means support was confirmed; its absence means not detected, which is not the same as absent, and blocked sites are marked "not assessed".

On the MSV estimate Ranking uses an estimated annual Australian consumer card sales volume per merchant. It is an ordinal estimate, not a published figure: anchored on reported Australian revenue where a company discloses it, then adjusted for the share plausibly transacted on cards by consumers. Vehicle manufacturers are marked down heavily because new-car purchases rarely settle on a card, while fuel retailers rank high because almost all of their volume does. Use it to order the register and to judge which rows matter most — not as a market-sizing input.

Merchant ↕	Status ↕	Credit card ↕	Debit card ↕	Amex / other	Fee-free bank route ↕	Wallets ↕	Discover ↕	Evidence ↕

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.

Route 1 · Rename

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

Route 2 · Reroute

Shift the surcharge to the rails still allowed

This route has narrowed sharply. American Express, JCB and UnionPay have voluntarily aligned with the reforms and adopt a no-surcharge position on the same date, so the obvious escape hatch closes. Only Diners Club, PayPal and BNPL remain surchargeable.

TPG: 2.75% Diners survives — but its 3.02% Amex fee now goes
Virgin Australia: 2.27% Diners, 1.27% Zip, 0.99% PayPal all survive
Wotif and Accor: Diners becomes the only card fee either can still apply
Dan Murphy's, BWS, EnergyAustralia, RACV: entire Amex differential removed
RBA consultation on BNPL and wallets still opens mid-2026

Route 3 · Rerail

Move the customer off cards altogether

Bank-account rails carry no interchange or scheme fee at all. Twenty-three of the hand-verified 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

Route 4 · Reprice

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.

Opportunity: reclaim the 23 checkouts where a fee currently steers customers away.

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.

Risk: displacement continues without the visible fee that made it obvious.

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.

Action: instrument the 23 in-scope merchants before, not after, the date.

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.

Narrative: acceptance cost falls as the surcharge disappears — for most, it nets out.