Surcharging switches off on 1 October
From 1 October 2026, card surcharging is banned for Australian merchants.
If you've built a surcharge into your checkout (a flat fee, a percentage on top, anything similar) it needs to go. Here's exactly what's changing, what it means depending on how you're using surcharging today, and what we're doing about it on our end.
What's changing and when
From 1 October 2026, the RBA is lifting its ban on card networks setting their own "no-surcharge" rules — and eftpos, Mastercard and Visa are expected to use it, prohibiting surcharging on debit, prepaid and credit cards across the board. RBA, Media Release 2026-10 On our side, we're going a step further: switching surcharging off across every card type you accept through Fat Zebra, Amex included, so you're not tracking different rules network by network.
It's less a sudden move than the end point of a decade of tightening. Surcharging has roughly doubled in prevalence since 2022 RBA, Executive Summary, and a 2016 rule capping surcharges at the actual cost of accepting a payment wasn't holding up in practice. Rather than police that cap more closely, the RBA has removed the option altogether.
What it means for you
How much this changes for you depends on which side you're on: roughly 16% of merchants currently surcharge, and 84% don't RBA, Executive Summary.
If you currently surcharge, the fee disappears, so if it was covering more than the pure cost of accepting the payment, some of that difference may need to show up in your advertised price instead. That's worth deciding deliberately over the next few weeks, rather than in the last week of September. It's also worth knowing the RBA's own expectation here: prices may move up a little at first, but the view is that customers pay about the same in the short term and less over time RBA, Executive Summary — and separately, 76% of consumers say they want surcharging gone altogether, while only 13% say they're reliably told about one before they pay RBA, In Brief. A clean, predictable price is more likely to land as a relief than a loss.
If you don't currently surcharge, this changes very little for you operationally — there's no fee logic to remove. If anything, it's a mild net positive: smaller merchants tend to benefit most from these reforms, because they're the ones already paying fees closest to the caps that are falling RBA, Media Release 2026-10.
What Fat Zebra is doing
For anyone on Fat Zebra, the practical impact is small — we're switching surcharging off automatically on 1 October. Any amount configured in your account, or passed through the API, resets to zero. That part isn't something you need to action.
What you need to do
The one thing that does need your attention is anything outside of Fat Zebra. If your own website, checkout, or point-of-sale system adds a surcharge separately, that logic has to come out before 1 October 2026. Otherwise, a customer could still see a surcharge on your page after we've already switched ours off. If you're not sure whether that applies to you, reach out to your account contact, and we'll check your setup with you directly.
Our take
We don't think this is a loss for merchants. Surcharging put merchants in an awkward spot: pass the fee on and risk feeling like you're charging customers extra for the privilege of paying you, or absorb it and watch it eat into margin on every transaction. It rarely felt like a fair trade from the customer's side either — it just felt like the price moved between the shelf and the till.
Take the fee off the table, and what's left is the stuff that actually drives outcomes for merchants: how fast checkout is, how rarely it breaks, and how quickly you get help when it does. Those are harder to fake than a surcharge line, and a better place to compete than working out the "right" percentage to pass on.
This wasn't decided in a vacuum: the review drew more than 260 written submissions and well over a hundred consultation meetings from across the payments industry RBA, Conclusions Paper, and it fits a pattern that's been building for a while: friction is steadily getting engineered out of paying for things, one annoyance at a time. Saved card details, one-tap checkout, instant refunds — surcharging was always the odd one out, a small tax on the moment a customer had already decided to buy. Losing it isn't really a payments story. It's a small step in the same direction as everything else.
