Card surcharge ban: what Australian salons must do

For years, the last line of many Australian salon transactions read something like "card surcharge 1.5%". Since 1 October 2026, that line is gone. Under the Reserve Bank's reform of merchant card payment costs, businesses can no longer add a surcharge when a client pays with an eftpos, Mastercard, Visa or American Express card, whether debit, credit or prepaid, in person or online.

If your hair salon used to pass on 1.5% to 1.9% at the terminal, this guide covers what you actually have to do: what exactly is banned and what is still allowed, how to fold the cost into your menu without a client revolt, how the ban interacts with deposits and no-show fees, and who enforces it (the answer is not who most owners expect). Every rule here was checked against the ACCC and Reserve Bank's own pages in October 2026. And since the price a client sees online must now be the whole price, it is a good moment to make sure your menu lives somewhere clients can actually book it: a free online booking page for hair salons, with 0% commission, shows every service at its real, final price.

What exactly is banned from 1 October 2026

The ban covers card payment surcharges on the four networks that handle almost every card tapped in an Australian salon. The ACCC's business guidance on card surcharges states it plainly: "Businesses can no longer charge a surcharge for payments made using Visa, Mastercard, American Express or eftpos credit, debit or prepaid cards from 1 October 2026" (checked in October 2026).

Two details worth knowing behind that sentence:

It is not an Act of Parliament; it is the card networks' own rules. On 31 March 2026 the Reserve Bank announced its package of card payment reforms, removing surcharging on the designated eftpos, Mastercard and Visa networks from 1 October 2026 (checked in October 2026). The networks then wrote "no surcharge" rules into their scheme rules, which flow into your merchant agreement. American Express is not regulated by the RBA in the same way but chose to remove surcharging from the same date.
It covers every way the card is used. Tap, insert, online payment, card stored on file for a deposit: if the payment rides one of those four networks, no surcharge may be added. There is no small business exception and no minimum transaction carve-out.

The same reform also lowered the caps on domestic interchange fees from 1 October 2026, which is the part that works in your favour: the RBA notes that "small businesses should benefit the most because they tend to pay fees closer to the existing caps". A further phase arrives on 1 April 2027, when a cap on foreign card interchange and new payment cost transparency requirements take effect; the RBA says those later changes are timed to give the payments industry room to implement them. So the ban itself is fully in force now; only the transparency plumbing phases in later.

What is still allowed (and where to be careful)

The rules are narrower than the headlines suggest. In the ACCC's words, "these rules only apply to card payment surcharges. Businesses may still charge other fees or surcharges that are not based on how the consumer pays."

Public holiday and weekend surcharges survive. A salon that opens on a public holiday and charges a disclosed surcharge to cover penalty rates is not caught by the ban, because the surcharge applies however the client pays. The ACCC confirms hospitality-style weekend and public holiday surcharges "are not covered by the Reserve Bank of Australia's rules". The usual price display obligations still apply: disclose it clearly before the client books or pays, and remember that under the Australian Consumer Law a fee that can be calculated in advance belongs in the displayed total.
Genuine service fees unrelated to payment method survive too, with one large caution: the ACCC warns that businesses "shouldn't try to avoid the 'no surcharge' rules... by describing a card payment surcharge as another type of fee or charge", and that doing so may be misleading conduct. Renaming your 1.5% card surcharge a "till fee" or "processing levy" that mysteriously only appears on card payments is exactly what that sentence is about. If a fee would vanish when the client pays cash, it is a card surcharge wearing a costume.
Discounts for other payment methods are allowed. You may offer a discount for paying by cash or PayID, as long as it is disclosed before the client books or pays, the displayed price is the full undiscounted price, and the discounted price is not made more prominent. In practice, very few salons bother: a two-tier till slows down checkout and confuses the booking page.
Other payment types sit outside these rules. The ban names four card networks. Whether you can pass on costs for anything else, such as a buy now, pay later service, depends on that provider's own contract terms, and most of those contracts prohibited surcharging already. Check your agreement rather than assuming.

Who enforces the ban, and what happens if you keep surcharging

Here is the part most coverage gets wrong: the ACCC does not enforce the no-surcharge rules. Its own page says so twice: "We don't enforce the 'no surcharge' rules for card networks", and "the card networks or payment service providers are responsible for enforcing these rules, not the ACCC". The old excessive-surcharging regime, which the ACCC did police, ended on 1 October 2026 along with the surcharges themselves.

So the practical enforcement path runs through your merchant agreement. A salon that keeps adding a card surcharge is breaching its contract with its payment provider, and the consequences come from the provider or the network: warnings, remediation demands, and ultimately the ability to stop processing your payments, which for a salon taking most of its revenue by card is a far bigger threat than a fine. The networks' joint information site, cardsurcharge.com.au, run by Mastercard, Visa and eftpos, is the reference point for the scheme rules themselves.

The ACCC and state consumer protection agencies do stay in the picture on one flank: misleading pricing. Dressing a surcharge up as another fee, or telling clients a large price rise is "because of the surcharge ban" when it also covers other costs, is Australian Consumer Law territory, and that the ACCC does enforce.

One more thing it is not: a price freeze. The ACCC is explicit that "businesses can continue to recover the cost of accepting card payments by incorporating that cost into their overall pricing". You are free to reprice; you are just not free to single out card payers.

Your post-ban checklist: six places the surcharge still hides

If your salon surcharged before October, the fee probably lived in more places than the terminal. Work through all six:

The terminal or POS settings. Surcharging is usually a merchant-side setting, and providers did not necessarily switch it off for you. Open your dashboard or call your provider and confirm it is disabled, including any "dynamic surcharge" feature.
Online payments. If you take deposits or prepayments through a payment link or online checkout, check that no card fee is added there either; the ban covers online card payments too.
The printed menu and till signage. Remove every "card payments incur a surcharge" line and sticker. A sign describing a fee you can no longer charge is both pointless and a misleading-pricing risk.
Your booking page and website. Any terms text mentioning a card surcharge needs the same edit, and your displayed prices must be the full amount payable.
Your Google Business Profile and socials. Old posts or FAQ answers mentioning the surcharge linger in search results; tidy the ones clients still find.
Your cancellation policy wording. If your policy said card-paid deposits attract a processing fee, that clause is dead. More on deposits below.

Now the money question. The cost of accepting cards has not disappeared; it has moved inside your prices. The good news is that the arithmetic is smaller than the anxiety, because the surcharge only ever applied to card payments, while a menu rise spreads across every sale.

A worked example, with every figure deliberately fictional and the method the point. Say your salon turns over A$300,000 a year and 80% of it is paid by card, so A$240,000 of card takings. At a 1.5% surcharge you were recovering about A$3,600 a year at the terminal. Recover the same A$3,600 through the menu and it is A$3,600 over A$300,000 of total sales: a 1.2% rise across the board. On a A$65 cut, that is 78 cents. On a A$180 colour, A$2.16. Round to tidy numbers and your A$65 cut becomes A$66, which more than covers it.

The ACCC's own guidance uses a hair salon as its worked example: a salon charging A$60 for a haircut with a 1.0% card surcharge folds the cost in and the haircut becomes A$60.60. Its example then adds the one legal trap in this exercise: if the salon actually raises the cut to A$65 because energy and wages went up too, it "must not tell consumers that the price increase is due to the changes to card payment surcharging", because that would be misleading. Blame the ban for the 60 cents, not for the five dollars.

Three practical rules for the increase itself:

Do it once, cleanly, with notice. A small rise with four to eight weeks' notice lands better than cents appearing silently. Most regulars will not blink at under 2%.
Re-run your full cost floor while you are at it. If you are touching the menu anyway, make sure the new prices carry all your current costs, not just the terminal fees. Our guide to pricing hair salon services in Australia walks through the chair-hour maths in detail, including the GST-inclusive display rules that make Australian menus all-in by law.
Watch your actual card costs fall. The same reform cut domestic interchange caps, so your merchant service fee should drift down, and from April 2027 the transparency rules are designed to make providers easier to compare. Diarise a rate review: the ban is also a decent excuse to shop your terminal around.

Remember GST while you reprice: your displayed prices are GST-inclusive, so the new numbers on the menu are the final numbers, and if you are registered, one eleventh of the rise is the ATO's, not yours.

Deposits, no-show fees and the ban

The surcharge ban does not touch your no-show protection, but it is worth being precise about the boundary, because the two get muddled.

Deposits are unaffected. A deposit is part of the service price paid early, not a fee based on payment method. You can keep taking them, by PayID, bank transfer or card.
No-show and late-cancellation fees are unaffected. A properly disclosed cancellation fee compensates you for a lost slot and applies however the client would have paid. It is not a card surcharge. The design rules that make such fees enforceable under the Australian Consumer Law have not changed; our guide to cancellation policies and deposits for Australian salons covers them end to end.
What you can no longer do is add a card fee on top of either. "A$20 deposit, plus 1.7% if paid by card" is now a breach. The deposit is A$20 however it arrives, and the processing cost is yours to price into the service.

Where your booking software fits

Software will not reprice your menu for you, but it is where the new prices have to live, because the first price most clients now see is on your booking page, not your wall. Two things matter: updating prices should take a minute, not a support ticket, and the page should never show a price the till will not honour.

With ViteUneCoupe, the free plan gives your hair salon unlimited online bookings with 0% commission, always, a personalised booking page listing every service with its real price and duration, a client database and staff calendars; editing a price is immediate, so the online menu never lags the one at the basin. To be equally clear about what it does not do: ViteUneCoupe does not process payments, take deposits or connect to your EFTPOS terminal, so your payment provider handles the money side, and reminders are by email rather than SMS. The Standard plan, from 29 € excluding tax per month with no commitment, adds confirmation, reminder and thank-you emails plus ICS calendar sync; as a European company we bill in euros, so the card statement amount moves with the exchange rate and any foreign transaction fee is set by your bank. An anti no-show bank-card hold is coming soon in a Standard + Anti No-Show plan at 49 € excluding tax per month. If you are weighing it against the rest of the market, our comparison of hair salon booking software for Australia checks every vendor's price at the source, and the real cost of salon software in Australia adds up what each option takes over a year, card fees included.

Frequently asked questions

Can I still charge a card surcharge in my salon in 2026?

No. From 1 October 2026, surcharges on eftpos, Mastercard, Visa and American Express cards are banned for debit, credit and prepaid cards, in person and online. There is no small business exemption and no minimum transaction exception. You remain free to build card acceptance costs into your service prices.

Are public holiday or weekend surcharges still legal for salons?

Yes. The ban only covers surcharges based on how the client pays. A disclosed surcharge for opening on a public holiday applies to every client regardless of payment method, so it is outside the Reserve Bank's rules. It must still be shown clearly before the client books or pays, in line with the ACCC's price display guidance.

What happens if a salon keeps surcharging after 1 October 2026?

Enforcement runs through the card networks and your payment provider, not the ACCC: continuing to surcharge breaches the scheme rules in your merchant agreement, and the provider can require you to stop and ultimately cut off your card processing. Separately, disguising a card surcharge as another fee, or misleading clients about why prices rose, can breach the Australian Consumer Law, which the ACCC and state agencies do enforce.

Do deposits and no-show fees count as card surcharges?

No. A deposit is an early part of the service price, and a properly disclosed no-show or late-cancellation fee compensates you for a lost appointment; neither depends on how the client pays. What is banned is adding a card processing fee on top of them, for example an extra percentage when a deposit is paid by card.

How much should I raise prices to cover the lost surcharge?

Less than the old surcharge rate, because the rise spreads across all sales instead of only card payments. A salon that surcharged 1.5% on 80% card takings only needs roughly a 1.2% menu rise to recover the same amount. Re-run your full cost calculation while you are at it, and do not attribute a larger increase to the ban: the ACCC treats that as misleading.

Card surcharge ban in Australia: what your hair salon must do now