Australian Merchant Surcharging Register

What changed since the last run

The register was last run before the ban, finishing on 11 September 2026, and confirmed 37 merchants surcharging cards. It was run again on 1 October 2026, the day the no-surcharge rules took effect: all 500 sites were re-crawled and every one of the 37 was re-read by hand on the merchant’s own pages. This section is the difference between the two.

LAST RUN · TO 11 SEP 2026

37confirmed surcharging

Mostly 0.2% to 1.3% on scheme cards, concentrated in airlines, travel agents, energy, telco, tolls and government billing.

THIS RUN · 1 OCT 2026

5still publish a card fee

25 have removed it, 1 is withdrawing credit card acceptance instead, and 6 could not be settled either way.

Card fee gone

11 say so in a dated statement; 14 have taken the fee off the page that carried it.

Fee still published

The old card fee wording was still live on 1 October. Published is not the same as charged — no test payments were made.

Not settled

2 give mixed signals across their own pages; 4 publish nothing that can be re-read.

New surcharges found

Among the merchants that did not surcharge before and could be reached. Every card-fee match in the re-crawl was read; none was a new fee.

Stopped taking credit instead

The ATO will not accept credit cards after 30 November 2026 rather than absorb the merchant fee.

86%

Of surcharger volume now fee-free

Share of the 37 merchants’ estimated card volume at merchants whose fee is gone. Built on this register’s ordinal volume estimate, not published figures.

1.29%

Highest in-scope fee still published

Budget Car Rental, on credit and debit alike.

2.00%

Highest fee still allowed

Latitude finance at Webjet. Buy now, pay later is outside the ban and is now the priced way to pay.

The 37 pre-ban surchargers, by what their own sites say on 1 October

Each merchant is counted once. Hover a segment for the merchants in it.

Hand-read from each merchant’s own fee, payment and terms pages on 1 October 2026.

The five findings that matter 1. Compliance among the largest surchargers is close to complete. Qantas, Virgin, Jetstar, Webjet, Flight Centre, AGL, Origin, EnergyAustralia, Optus, TPG, ALDI and Medibank’s ahm have all dropped their card fees. 2. The ATO chose to refuse rather than absorb. It will stop accepting credit cards after 30 November 2026, a response the pre-ban register did not anticipate. 3. Buy now, pay later is the new priced rail. Jetstar and Webjet kept fees of 1.5–2.0% on Afterpay, Zip and Latitude while taking cards to zero; Virgin and TPG went the other way and dropped fees they were entitled to keep. 4. Five merchants still publish an in-scope fee — Budget Car Rental, City of Melbourne, Diamond Energy, Plus Fitness and Alliance Airlines — and Luxury Escapes still lists 1.95% on American Express. 5. Expect complaints about fees that are legitimate. Superloop and Sydney Water bill their card fee in arrears, so a surcharge for a September payment can appear on an October bill.

What this run can and cannot show Everything here is what a merchant publishes, read on the first day. It is strong evidence where a merchant makes a dated statement, weaker where a fee has simply disappeared from a page, and it is not a test transaction: no payment was made at any checkout. A fee “still published” may already be switched off in the payment system; a fee “removed” has not been tested at the till. Price rises made to recover lost surcharge revenue cannot be seen by this method at all.

Change log

Every row whose position changed, or was re-tested, between the two runs — with what the merchant charged before, what it publishes now, and the words on its own site.

Merchant	Before the ban	Published today	Outcome	What the merchant’s own site says on 1 October

Run history

Each run is kept as a dated snapshot alongside the dashboard, so the next one can be compared the same way.

Run	Coverage	Result
Aug 2026	100 merchants, each read by hand from fee schedules and terms.	23 confirmed surcharging after six third-party tracker claims failed verification.
10–11 Sep 2026	Extended to 500. Shallow scan, 67 fee signals reviewed, then a deep crawl of 336.	37 confirmed surcharging; 418 determinations; 82 sites unreadable. The pre-ban baseline.
1 Oct 2026	All 500 re-crawled (385 reached, 292 to a payment or terms page). The 37 re-read by hand.	5 still publish a card fee. One baseline miss found and corrected (Defence Health). No new surcharges.

Where the 500 stand now

The whole register after the 1 October run. Statuses are cumulative: a row keeps its last hand-verified determination unless this run found something different. Sites that block automated reading remain not assessed rather than guessed.

Card fee still published

Down from 37 before the ban. Wording still live on the merchant’s own site on 1 October.

No card surcharge published

Includes the merchants that removed a fee for 1 October and those that never had one.

Partly verified or unread

Sites that could not be read to a payment or terms page, including four former surchargers.

500

Merchants in the register

All in scope of the rules. The first 100 were read by hand; the rest by crawl with every fee match reviewed.

$1.6bn

Consumer surcharges ended

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

0.30%

Credit interchange cap, now in force

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

385

Sites reached on 1 October

Of 500. The rest blocked the crawl, mostly with HTTP 403, and keep their earlier status.

Discover likely, via Diners

Unchanged from the last run. No merchant publishes Discover acceptance; Diners Club is the only signal.

Baseline run · what full hand-verification found All 500 merchants have now been verified by hand. The register was built in two passes: a first review of the 67 fee signals the shallow scan raised, then a deep crawl of the remaining 336 merchants that followed each site's own navigation into its payment, fees and terms pages. That deep pass reached a payment or terms page for 187 merchants and found three further surcharges the shallow scan had missed — Budget Car Rental at 1.29% on credit and debit alike, Tango Energy with a published card rate card (Visa and Mastercard 0.60%, Amex 0.75%, waived on the Victorian Default Offer), and Diamond Energy at 0.60%. It also resolved the three rows left open earlier: GloBird Energy answers its own FAQ with "No, we won't charge you extra just for paying by credit card. That would be wrong"; Lowes' only surcharge is on freight; Tango turned out to be real. 82 merchants remain unread — their sites hard-block automated access even with a second user agent and a slow retry pass, and no claim is made about them in either direction.

Baseline run · what the first pass of hand-verification 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 Before the ban the RBA estimated that 16% of Australian businesses surcharged. This register found 37 confirmed surchargers among 500 large merchants and billers — about 7% — concentrated in travel, utilities and government, and none in large-format retail. Large merchants were always less likely to surcharge than small ones, so the small-business experience of 1 October is not what this register measures.

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.

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 · IN FORCE

No-surcharge rules + new interchange caps

Domestic debit and prepaid interchange capped at 8c or 0.16%; domestic consumer credit at 0.30%. American Express, JCB and UnionPay adopted a no-surcharge position the same day.

30 NOV 2026

ATO stops accepting credit cards

The tax office’s response to the ban: credit card payments end, debit and bank transfers continue.

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. The first chart sets each pre-ban rate against what the merchant publishes now; the second shows the payment fees that survive because they sit outside the rules.

Card fees before the ban, and what is left of them

Bar length is the highest scheme rate each merchant published before the ban. Colour is what its own site says on 1 October.

Fee gone

Still published

Not settled

Credit cards withdrawn

Baseline rates from the September 2026 run; outcomes read from merchant sites on 1 October 2026. Merchants that surcharged without publishing a rate are in the change log but not on this chart.

Payment fees still published after the ban

Found on the sites of merchants that took their Visa, Mastercard and eftpos fees to zero. Buy now, pay later and PayPal are outside the rules. American Express is not a designated network; its no-surcharge position is voluntary.

Buy now, pay later and finance

American Express

PayPal and other

Jetstar fees and charges, Webjet payment fees and Luxury Escapes terms, read 1 October 2026.

Surcharging concentration by sector

Where each sector stands on 1 October. Before the ban every confirmed surcharger sat in travel, utilities, government, big-ticket retail, insurance or ticketing; the few rows still publishing a card fee sit in the same sectors. Select any segment to see every merchant in it.

Card fee still published

Partly verified / not assessed

No surcharge — verified

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 its position after 1 October. Rows that changed since the last run carry a tag under their status. 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 removed a fee type, not a cost. Before the ban this register named four routes by which merchant economics could survive it. Day one shows which were actually used — and adds a fifth that was not predicted.

Route 1 · Rename — not seen on day one

Re-badge the card fee as a service fee

None of the 37 introduced a new fee under another name on the pages read. The method-agnostic fees that already existed simply carry on. A renamed fee would show first at checkout, which this run did not test.

Flight Centre: Online Booking Fee and Travel Expert Service Fee continue; card surcharge removed in terms dated 1 October
Webjet: booking and servicing fees still apply alongside “no payment fees” on cards
Ticketek: per-transaction service and handling fee continues
Origin, Optus, Vodafone, Alinta: over-the-counter Australia Post fees remain — a channel fee, not a card fee

Route 2 · Reroute — in use

Keep a fee on the rails still allowed

Buy now, pay later is where the fee went. Two travel merchants took cards to zero and kept a payment fee on instalment providers. Others dropped fees they were entitled to keep.

Jetstar: Afterpay 1.66% and Zip 1.77% per booking; every card fee free
Webjet: Afterpay 1.5%, Zip 1.5%, Latitude 2.0%, split payments 0.2%
Luxury Escapes: 1.95% on American Express and 0.95% on PayPal still listed
Virgin Australia: “will not apply a payment surcharge to any payment method” — its Diners, Zip and PayPal fees are gone too
TPG: Amex and Diners surcharge wording no longer in its terms

Route 3 · Rerail — price signal gone, cost incentive intact

Move the customer off cards altogether

Bank rails no longer win on price at the checkout: where PayID sat at $0 next to a 1% card fee, both now read “fee free”. The merchant’s own saving from a bank payment is unchanged, so expect promotion by other means.

Jetstar and Webjet: PayID and cards now listed side by side at no fee
Superloop: PayTo stays the default for customers who joined after 12 February 2026; eftpos-only and prepaid cards not accepted
ATO: steering credit card payers to debit and bank transfer; says it does not yet offer PayID

Route 4 · Reprice — not observable here

Raise the sticker price instead

The route the reform endorses, and the one a published-fee monitor cannot see. No price comparison was run, so nothing here confirms or rules out a price rise at any merchant.

ahm: “Your premium hasn’t changed — it’s just the surcharge that’s come off” — the only merchant to say so
Qantas: reported before the ban to be planning a fare rise; not verified in this run
ABC News (28 September) reports major banks raising card fees and trimming rewards as credit interchange falls from 0.8% to 0.3%

Route 5 · Refuse — new, and the one to watch

Stop accepting the card

Not on the pre-ban watchlist. The ATO states that “after 30 November 2026, you will no longer be able to use a credit card to make payments to the ATO”, because “it would not be appropriate for the cost of credit card merchant fees to be transferred to the community”. It puts credit cards at about 2.3% of tax payments in 2024–25, more than 60% of them from privately owned and wealthy groups and from public and multinational businesses. Debit cards continue. For a biller that cannot raise its price, refusing credit is the remaining lever — which makes other government agencies, councils and utilities the cohort to monitor next.

What this means for the card product

Reading day one from a scheme’s perspective, four things follow.

The price signal against cards is gone where it was strongest

Before the ban a Qantas customer saw PayID at $0 beside a card at 1.3%. On 1 October Qantas, Virgin, Jetstar, Webjet and Flight Centre all show cards at no fee, and 25 of the 37 pre-ban surchargers have removed theirs. At Jetstar and Webjet the comparison has flipped: the card is free and buy now, pay later costs 1.5–2.0%.

Opportunity: card is now the unpenalised default at the largest travel and utility checkouts.

Credit acceptance, not price, is the new exposure

The ATO’s decision shows what a biller does when it can neither surcharge nor reprice: it stops taking credit. Debit is unaffected, so the loss is credit volume specifically — and, on the ATO’s own figures, skewed to large and wealthy payers. No other merchant in the register has announced the same, but the logic applies to any agency or council that treated the surcharge as cost recovery.

Risk: watch government and council billers for the same move before 30 November.

Eleven merchants need an acquirer conversation

Five still publish an in-scope fee, two contradict themselves across their own pages, and four former surchargers publish nothing that can be checked. Enforcement sits with the networks and acquirers, not the ACCC, so these are the first follow-ups. Budget Car Rental, at 1.29% on credit and debit, is the clearest. Separately, arrears billing at Superloop and Sydney Water will generate complaints about fees that are legitimate.

Action: use the “Needs follow-up” filter in the register as the working list.

The interchange cut landed, and the cost moved to cardholders

Domestic credit interchange fell to 0.30% and debit to 8c or 0.16% on the same day, with foreign-issued cards capped at 1.0% from April 2027. Merchants lost surcharge revenue and gained acceptance-cost relief together. The other side of that is reported by ABC News: major banks raising card fees and trimming rewards and insurance. That is outside what this register measures, but it is where the product pressure now sits.

Narrative: the checkout got simpler; the value proposition of the card is where the cost shows up.