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TL;DR: 1st October. No more shitty surcharges.
this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2026
33 points (97.1% liked)
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Yes and no; you won’t be paying an additional line item - but the stores are still going to be incurring merchant fees and will be passing that cost onto consumers one way or another.
This will just incentivise some businesses to just increase their prices 1-2% regardless of payment method.
Everything costs money when you run a business. You need to consider all of those things when setting a price. Cash has more overhead, so a surcharge for another payment method makes no sense.
True, everything costs money when you run a business.
But for small businesses (usually the kind that charge a surcharge), I question the statement that cash has a higher overhead than EFT/credit cards. Maybe I’m thinking small, and just expect a cafe owner (for example) to just deposit cash at an ATM on their way home - rather than pay for an Armaguard lock-up etc.
I normally estimate the break-even point at half an hour of the manager's wage since that's how long it takes to count down 2 registers and go to the bank.
extra insurances costs to cover cash being stored, staff theft, robbery with staff being held at knife point, need to arrange change so a bank visit is necessary for that etc etc
Even medium businesses that deal with large items.
An industrial reseller may purchase an engine, lathe or other component from a wholesaler/importer and then onsell to an industry. 2% of a $50k sale is still $1000.
Agreements are made on tenders where the differences are fractions of a percent and an extra months credit.
That will either eat into margins or if the bloke down the road offers it at $49k, cost the sale!
In which case, maybe there are too many resellers. There is no such thing as goodwill any more.
Those merchant fees will also be reduced. Or more accurately the cap on what the banks can charge them has been lowered.
The surcharges are annoying, but in a way that annoyance is good - because it is a regular reminder that the bank is taking a slice of your money each time. Without that surcharge notification, the bank is still taking a slice of your money, but you don't get told about it.
Part of the changes being made are to reduce what the banks can charge - and that surely is a good thing, since without intervention, banks would have the power to charge basically anything. Curtailing the power of banks is a good thing.
But the part of the change that prevents stores from having a 'user pays' system for their transaction fees is less clear cut. It's good from a simplicity point of view, but it does actually further entrench card use - and thus reliance on card-processing companies. Again, these companies could go on to charge unreasonable fees at any time unless carefully watched by the government. It would be much better if we weren't embedding complete reliance on particular private companies into our society.
nice! I love when the government does good shit, but then they do shit like the under 16 social media ban, and I wonder what the fuck they're smoking.
This is good on paper, but all it means is retailers will add the fee on to the price, increasing prices across the board.
that's true. When they pass things like this, the expectation is prices will go down. Prices never go down. it just means the retailers will get more of the profits :/
LINE MUST GO UP!
And the government knows prices will go up, and they’re happy cause they make more money in tax.
Your $5.08 coffee with surcharge will now be $5.20 without
Bingo - and even for people who pay cash who previously wouldn’t have to pay a surcharge.
The fee incurred by the merchant will also be reduced by way of the bank's fee to them being capped.
Sure, but any merchant fee will just be added on to the price of products now, so everything will be priced higher.
Look in all honesty you are probably right.
Is this only for retail?
I couldn't find any mention about paying bills, eg NBN, phone, utilities, electricity, a bunch of government departments all charge fees for paying bills via various payment options.