Image Source: ABC News
From October 1, 2026, Australian businesses will no longer be able to add an extra fee to a customer’s bill simply because they paid by card, either debit or credit. The ban covers eftpos, Mastercard, and Visa, the three networks the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) directly regulates. American Express, UnionPay, and PayPal have all agreed to align on the same date. It applies everywhere a card is used: in-store, online, or through a mobile wallet.
The RBA concluded that surcharging had stopped working as intended: most customers had no way to avoid it at checkout, and many merchants were charging a flat fee with little connection to what the card actually cost to process. The underlying cost doesn’t disappear, businesses just can’t show it as a separate line item anymore. They absorb it or account for it elsewhere in their pricing.
To soften that shift, the RBA is also lowering interchange fees and tightening transparency rules so businesses can see what they’re actually being charged. A further cap on foreign-card interchange fees follows in April 2027.
What a business can actually do about it
The RBA’s guidance points to a few concrete steps: reviewing whether a business is on the right payment plan for its needs, shopping around between providers rather than assuming the current setup is cheapest, and, for anyone who wants to steer customers toward a specific payment method, offering a discount instead. That’s still allowed, even though the reverse no longer is.
Most major payment providers are already reaching out to their business customers with guidance on how the change applies to their specific platforms, and industry bodies have published their own resources for merchants navigating the transition.
Image Source: 4BC Brisbane
What this means for logistics
The RBA has been clear that business-to-business payments aren’t automatically exempt. Unless a specific card network chooses to carve out its own exemption, and that decision sits with the card networks, not the RBA, the same no-surcharge rule applies whether the person paying is a consumer or another business.
That matters for freight specifically because a lot of freight runs through exactly that kind of payment. Supplier invoices, storage and detention charges, and account settlements are frequently paid by card, and frequently between two businesses rather than a business and a consumer. Carriers, forwarders, and airlines that currently pass a card-processing fee on to customers paying by credit card are in the same position as any other business here. They need to stop doing that by October 1.
From there, it’s the same set of choices every merchant in the country is working through: absorb the cost, build it into pricing, or look more closely at where payment costs are actually coming from and whether a different provider or process could bring them down.
Freight businesses also tend to run a specific kind of payment mix that makes this harder than it looks on paper. A single carrier or forwarder might be settling invoices through credit card, direct debit, and wire transfers on any given day, often across several disconnected systems that don’t talk to each other. It’s a pattern we see often: payment, invoicing, and reconciliation handled as three separate steps instead of one connected process, no matter which of those payment methods is involved.
Australian freight businesses are looking at what the surcharge changes mean for the way they manage payments, not just at replacing one fee with another. They’re looking at the whole payment process, from how invoices are paid through to reconciliation and settlement. The surcharge change is bringing that conversation to the forefront.
For a lot of freight businesses, that closer look is landing on the same place: how much of the payment and invoicing process is still manual, and how much time that manual work adds before an invoice is actually settled. Tools like AP automation and document automation have been part of that conversation for a while, the surcharge change is just giving it new urgency.
For the full detail, including the RBA’s complete FAQ on how the ban applies to specific payment types, visit the RBA’s surcharging page.
