Ship this one first
10 · Regulation — time-critical
From 1 October you can’t surcharge. That cost doesn’t disappear.
It lands on you, unless you reprice. And repricing properly needs your real blended card cost, per channel — which means payments and POS have to be the same system.
“Everyone’s talking about it. Nobody’s actually worked out what it does to their menu.”Composite of operator language found across review sites and forums
Why it happens
This is a live, dated Australian regulatory change, and most venues have not modelled it. It’s a software problem because working out the menu uplift required to absorb a per-transaction cost means knowing your actual blended card cost by channel — which you can only know if the payments and the sales are in one place.
What we'd do about it
Count what you’re actually paying, across everything
Most operators have never added it up. Subscription, per-terminal, per-module, the integration fee, the processing spread. Start there.
One number, with the working shown
Click the consolidated figure, drill to the venue, to the shift, to the transaction. A dashboard isn’t the same as a number you’d bet on.
Make the till suggest, so your staff don’t have to remember
Modifiers, upsells and combos prompted at the point of order. The nineteen-year-old on their third shift lands the upsell because the screen asked, not because they were brave.
The objection this page has to beat
“You’re a POS company. Of course you want my payments too.”
So lead with the problem, not the product. Give away a repricing calculator that takes their real card mix and outputs the uplift required — free, no signup, no email. Publish your effective rate. Prove least-cost routing is on by default. Earn the payments conversation by being the one who explained the reform first.
What we can actually stand behind
Every claim below is labelled by how solid it is. The grey ones are where we looked and found nothing credible — those stay off the page rather than getting rounded up into a statistic.
- Independent
Surcharging on eftpos, Mastercard and Visa ends from 1 October 2026. Interchange caps on domestic-issued cards fall from the same date; a cap on foreign-issued card interchange applies from 1 April 2027.
Reserve Bank of Australia, Review of Merchant Card Payment Costs and Surcharging - Independent
The reforms are projected to save merchants around $910 million a year in interchange.
Reserve Bank of Australia - Independent
9.6% of Australian hospitality businesses closed in the twelve months to April 2025. Food and beverage services ranks highest in Australia for insolvency rate, arrears, and ATO tax debt defaults over $100k.
CreditorWatch - Vendor study
Scheme fees themselves are not being cut — the RBA is pushing transparency, not reduction.
Industry reading of the RBA paper