Card Surcharge Ban in Australia: What WooCommerce Stores Need to Change

Australia’s card surcharge ban took effect on 1 October 2026. From that date, businesses can no longer add a separate fee when a customer pays with a Visa, Mastercard, eftpos or American Express card, online or in store. If your WooCommerce store added a card fee at checkout, that fee needs to be gone, and every line of text that mentioned it needs to be gone too. This post covers what the new rules say, where surcharges usually hide in a WooCommerce store, what you can still charge, and how to check your own checkout.

What changed on 1 October 2026

The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) finished its review of merchant card payment costs and surcharging in March 2026. The main decision was to lift the RBA’s own prohibition on “no-surcharge” rules, which allowed the card networks to ban surcharging themselves. The details:

• eftpos, Mastercard and Visa each introduced no-surcharge rules from 1 October 2026, covering credit, debit and prepaid cards.
• American Express and UnionPay removed surcharging from the same date. PayPal’s no-surcharge rule applies from 5 October 2026.
• The rules apply to online payments as well as in-store payments. The RBA considered separate rules for in-person and online transactions and rejected the idea because it would “continue to enable drip pricing”.
• Interchange fees fell on the same day. The cap on domestic consumer credit cards dropped from 0.8 per cent to 0.3 per cent of the transaction value, and the debit and prepaid cap dropped from 10 cents (or 0.2 per cent) to 8 cents (or 0.16 per cent). A 1.0 per cent cap on foreign-issued cards follows on 1 April 2027.
• The card networks and payment providers enforce the no-surcharge rules through scheme rules and merchant agreements. The ACCC does not enforce them, but it does enforce the Australian Consumer Law, including the rules on misleading pricing.

The amounts involved are not small. The RBA estimates that around 16 per cent of merchants surcharged designated card payments in 2024/25, and that total surcharges came to about $1.8 billion, with about $1.6 billion of that paid by consumers.

How surcharges end up in a WooCommerce checkout

WooCommerce has no built-in surcharge setting. Every card fee we have come across on an Australian store came from one of four places:

• A payment gateway plugin with its own surcharge option. Some gateways calculated the fee on their side and have now switched it off. Stripe, for example, has disabled surcharging for Australian payments online and through Stripe Terminal.
• A fee extension. Payment Gateway Based Fees from the WooCommerce Marketplace, and similar plugins, add a fixed or percentage fee when a particular gateway is selected at checkout.
• Custom code. A few lines hooked to woocommerce_cart_calculate_fees that call add_fee when the chosen payment method is a card gateway. These snippets live in the child theme’s functions.php, a code snippets plugin or a small custom plugin, and they are easy to forget about.
• Pricing rules inside a POS or ERP integration that pass a card fee through to the website along with the product data.

One point from Stripe’s notice applies to every gateway. Stripe says it “won’t automatically remove surcharge-related code, disclosures, or pricing” from systems you or a third party operate. Switching the fee off at the gateway does not remove a fee plugin, a code snippet, or a line of checkout text that still says a 1.5 per cent surcharge applies to credit cards.

Where to look: a WooCommerce surcharge checklist

• Payment gateway settings. Go to WooCommerce, Settings, Payments, then open each enabled gateway. Look for surcharge, fee, convenience fee or cost recovery options and turn them off.
• Fee and checkout plugins. Check the plugin list for anything with fee, surcharge or payment in the name, and check whether it still adds a fee for card gateways.
• Custom code. Search the child theme and any snippets plugin for add_fee and woocommerce_cart_calculate_fees. Remove or disable any rule tied to a card gateway.
• Payment method titles and descriptions. The text under each payment option at checkout comes from the gateway settings. Remove any mention of a surcharge.
• Order emails and invoices. Email templates and PDF invoice plugins sometimes carry a footer line about card fees.
• Content pages. Shipping and payments pages, FAQs, terms and conditions and product descriptions often still state the old surcharge.
• Point of sale. If your store syncs with a POS, the terminal surcharge is a separate setting managed by your payment provider, not by WooCommerce. Confirm it is off there as well.
• Past orders. Leave completed orders as they are. They record what the customer actually paid at the time.

Use the checker below to see where a particular fee stands under the rules now in force.

What you can still charge

• Build the cost into your prices. The ACCC's example is a $60 haircut with a 1 per cent card surcharge becoming $60.60. If you also raise prices for other reasons, you must not tell customers the increase is only because of the surcharge change.
• Offer a discount for another payment method. Discounts for cash, PayID or bank transfer are allowed. The displayed price must be the full price, the discounted price must not be more prominent, and the discount must be disclosed before the customer orders.
• Charge fees that are not tied to the payment method. Booking fees, service fees, weekend and public holiday surcharges are not covered by the card network rules. The minimum total price must be displayed as a single figure that includes any fee you can calculate up front.
• Do not rename the surcharge. The ACCC says a business that describes a card surcharge as another type of fee "may be engaging in misleading conduct". Stripe adds that a fee applied only to a particular card method may still be treated as a card surcharge.

Review your merchant fees as well

Lower interchange caps mean the wholesale cost of accepting cards fell on 1 October 2026. Whether that reaches your store depends on your pricing plan. A store on a flat blended rate may see no change until it asks. The RBA is also requiring eftpos, Mastercard, Visa and large acquirers to publish the fees they charge, and acquirers will have to publish a measure of how much of the interchange cut they passed on to merchants, with the first publication due by 30 January 2027. If your rate has not moved, ask your provider why, and compare quotes. If you process a meaningful volume through a card gateway, this review is worth an hour of your time.

How to check your WooCommerce checkout in ten minutes

1. Add a product to the cart and go to checkout. Select each enabled payment method in turn and watch the order totals. Any line that appears for one method and not another is a payment method fee.
2. Place a small test order with a real card, or use the gateway's test mode, then read the order confirmation email and the order in WooCommerce. Look for fee lines.
3. Search your code. In the child theme and any code snippets plugin, search for add_fee. Your host's file manager or an SFTP client can search across files.
4. Read the payment method descriptions at checkout, then your shipping, payments and FAQ pages.
5. Log in to your payment provider's dashboard and confirm surcharging is off for both online and terminal payments.

If you find a fee you cannot trace, it is usually custom code. That is the same kind of checkout work we cover in our posts on card testing attacks on WooCommerce and authorise now, capture later payments for weighed products.

Frequently asked questions

Does the card surcharge ban apply to online payments?

Yes. The no-surcharge rules from eftpos, Mastercard and Visa cover online (card-not-present) payments as well as in-store payments. The RBA specifically decided against separate rules for online transactions.

Can I still surcharge American Express or PayPal payments?

No. American Express and UnionPay removed surcharging from 1 October 2026, and PayPal's no-surcharge rule applies from 5 October 2026.

Can I charge a service fee on card payments instead?

No. A fee that only applies when the customer pays by card is still a card surcharge, whatever it is called, and the ACCC has said this may be misleading conduct. Fees that apply to every order regardless of payment method are allowed, but the displayed price must include them.

Can I offer a discount for bank transfer or PayID?

Yes. Payment method discounts are allowed. Show the full price as the main price, do not make the discounted price more prominent, and disclose the discount before the customer pays.

What about buy now pay later?

The 1 October rules came from the card networks, American Express, UnionPay and PayPal. Buy now pay later providers were not part of that change, and the RBA says it will consider them in its next review. Check your BNPL provider agreement before adding or keeping any fee.

How we can help

We build and maintain WooCommerce stores for Australian retailers, including payment gateway setup and checkout customisation. If you are not sure whether your store still applies a card fee somewhere, we can check the gateway settings, plugins, code and content in one pass as part of an ecommerce audit, or remove it for you through our WooCommerce development service. Contact us and tell us which gateways you use, and we will take it from there.

Sources

• RBA: Review of Merchant Card Payment Costs and Surcharging, frequently asked questions
• RBA Conclusions Paper, chapter 2: Surcharging
• RBA Conclusions Paper, chapter 3: Interchange Fees
• RBA: In Brief, Merchant Card Payment Costs and Surcharging
• ACCC: Card surcharges, changes from 1 October 2026
• Stripe: Australia is removing card surcharges, what Stripe users need to know
• WooCommerce Marketplace: Payment Gateway Based Fees