Card Surcharge Ban in Australia: What Workshop Owners Need to Know Before October

The card surcharge ban in Australia comes into effect from October, and it’s going to change what you’re allowed to charge customers for paying by card.

Here’s why it matters and what to sort out before then.

If you’d rather talk it through than figure it out solo, book a free workshop payments consult and we’ll help you work out where you stand.

Understanding The Surcharge Ban

The Reserve Bank of Australia has decided card surcharges are being scrapped entirely, not just capped. If you currently add any card fee, no matter how small, this ban is what’s stopping that from October.

From October, merchants can’t pass on any card surcharge at all, not even one that matches the real cost. The RBA’s logic is straightforward: card surcharges had gotten a bit out of hand for some businesses, and they want fairer, more transparent pricing across the board.

For workshops, this isn’t some far-off corporate regulation that won’t touch you. If you take card payments, this applies to you.

As James Mitchell, Workshop Software’s CEO, puts it: “The surcharge doesn’t disappear on 1 October. The line on the invoice disappears. The cost is still yours, and if it isn’t in your labour rate by then, you’ve just handed yourself a pay cut.” His view is that most owners are approaching this the wrong way. “A lot of owners are treating this as a compliance job. It’s a pricing job.”

What Counts As A Card Surcharge

A card surcharge is any extra fee you add on top of the bill specifically because the customer paid by card A card surcharge is any extra fee you add on top of the bill specifically because the customer paid by card rather than cash or bank transfer. That can be:

• Flat fees added to credit card payments
• Fees for debit card transactions
• Any “processing fee” or “card fee” line item on an invoice

From October, none of these are allowed anymore, regardless of the amount. This covers eftpos, Visa and Mastercard. Amex, BNPL and Diners Club aren’t covered by the ban, so surcharging those separately is still your call.

What This Means Day-to-Day in Your Workshop

Once the ban kicks in, you can’t surcharge card payments at all, not even to recover the real processing cost. That cost becomes something you either absorb as a cost of doing business or build into your base pricing, the same way you would with rent or parts. You’ll need your actual numbers to work out which makes sense for your workshop.

A few things worth doing now rather than in a panic come October:

• Pull up every fee you’re currently charging on card transactions and work out where it came from
• Ring your payment provider and ask for a proper breakdown of their fees, not just the headline rate
• Get your front-of-house team across the change so nobody’s caught flat-footed when a customer asks

Customers are paying more attention to this stuff too. Workshops that get ahead of it and price things fairly tend to build more trust with the people walking through the door.

Will This Hit Your Bottom Line?

Maybe, if you’ve been relying on surcharges to cover more than just the processing cost. Worth having an honest look at your numbers here rather than guessing. “If a 1.5% surcharge was the only thing making a job profitable, the surcharge was never the problem”, says James.

A few ways workshops are handling it:

• Building the real cost of card processing into your labour rate instead of surcharging separately
• Looking at loyalty or membership perks to offset any margin pressure
• Bundling services so pricing feels less nickel-and-dimed overall

This is also a good excuse to shop around for payment providers instead of just accepting whatever rate you signed up for years ago. A lot of workshops are locking in a flat, predictable rate (WorkshopPay customers are sitting on a fixed 0.9%, which you can lock for good before it disappears), so there’s no guesswork about what you’re actually absorbing or building into your pricing.

If you want to protect your margin, the most direct lever is to raise your prices somewhere else in the business (or find costs to trim in the meantime).

Getting Your Payment Setup Sorted Before October

If you haven’t looked at your payment processing setup in a while, now’s the time. A few practical steps:

1. Audit what you’re being charged. Every payment channel, every fee, laid out plainly. James’s advice here is blunt: “Take what card fees cost you last year, divide it by your billable hours, and that’s the number you need to find in your rate before October. For most workshops it’s small. Ignoring it is what makes it expensive.”
2. Call your provider. Ask directly what their processing costs are, so you know exactly what you’re absorbing. “It’s also the best excuse you’ll get to look at what you’re actually paying to accept a card,” James says. “Most workshops have never once asked.”
3. Shop around if the numbers don’t stack up. You’re not locked in forever, and better terms exist.
4. Update your systems to remove card surcharging altogether, rather than leaving an old surcharge line switched on.

If you’re planning to fold this cost into your pricing, your labour rate is the obvious place to start, so it’s worth knowing what your workshop should actually be charging before you land on a number.

Do the audit now, have the conversation with your provider now, and you’re sorted before anyone else has even started.

Or skip the legwork altogether. Book a free consult and we’ll walk through your payment setup with you.