Servos Can No Longer Add a Card Surcharge From Today. Who Pays Now?

If you tapped a card at the bowser this morning, the total on your receipt should have matched the litres multiplied by the price on the board. No extra percentage tacked on at the end. As of today, 1 October 2026, Australian businesses, servos included, can no longer add a surcharge to payments made on eftpos, Mastercard or Visa cards.

It's one of the biggest changes to how Australians pay for things in two decades. And for an industry that runs on thin margins and an enormous number of card taps, it raises an obvious question. If the surcharge is gone, where does the cost go?

What changed overnight

The Reserve Bank of Australia announced the decision on 31 March, at the end of a long review of what businesses pay to accept cards. Its revised standards took effect today, and three things happen at once.

First, surcharging ends on debit, prepaid and credit cards on the eftpos, Mastercard and Visa networks. The RBA has directed the banks and terminal providers that process card payments to remove the surcharge function, so the option should simply disappear from the machine.

Second, the fees banks charge each other behind the scenes on every tap get cheaper. These are called interchange fees, and the merchant ultimately pays them. The cap on consumer credit cards drops from 0.8 per cent of the transaction to 0.3 per cent. For debit and prepaid cards it falls from 10 cents (or 0.2 per cent) to 8 cents (or 0.16 per cent). The RBA expects its interchange changes, including a cap on foreign cards that starts in April 2027, to save businesses around $910 million a year.

Third, eftpos, Mastercard, Visa and the large payment providers will have to publish the fees they charge, so a servo owner can actually compare what they're paying.

Governor Michele Bullock's verdict, as reported by the ABC, was that surcharging no longer worked as intended and most consumers wanted it gone. By the RBA's numbers, surcharges on these card networks add up to about $1.8 billion a year, and $1.6 billion of that comes out of consumers' pockets.

Why servos are a special case

Here's what's really going on in the fuel trade. Few businesses take more card payments than a servo.

According to a submission the Australasian Convenience and Petroleum Marketers Association (ACAPMA) made to the RBA review, fuel retailers process around 310 million electronic transactions a year, and roughly 70 per cent of those are debit. The average petrol fill in its figures is 47 litres. For diesel it's 85 litres. More than 2,500 businesses run about 7,080 servos across the country, and the vast majority are small or medium operators.

ACAPMA opposed the ban. The association argued that the biggest national merchants pay card fees up to five times lower than small businesses. Take away the surcharge without fixing that gap, it warned, and smaller operators in "fiercely competitive low margin markets" like fuel would have to build a higher premium into the price of what they sell.

What most people don't realise is that the debit side of the ledger barely moves today. The headline cut is on credit, from 0.8 to 0.3 per cent. But if seven in ten servo payments are debit, the change that matters most to the average servo is a few cents per transaction off a fee that was already small. Interchange is also only one slice of the bill, with scheme fees and the bank's own margin sitting on top.

To put this in perspective

Let's run the numbers on a typical fill. The Australian Institute of Petroleum had the national average for unleaded petrol at 227.3 cents a litre on 20 September, as reported by the ABC. At that price, a 47 litre fill costs about $106.80. A 1 per cent surcharge would have added roughly $1.07, or a little over 2 cents a litre.

Diesel drivers had more at stake because the tanks are bigger. At the national average of 273.6 cents a litre, an 85 litre fill comes to about $232.60, and the same 1 per cent surcharge would have added $2.33. Farmers, tradies and anyone running a ute on diesel would notice that over a year.

Now compare that with what a smart choice of servo is worth. Recent Petrolmate checks found unleaded in Cannon Hill sitting 24 cents a litre under Northgate across Brisbane, and three servos on one road in Midvale sitting 25 cents apart. The surcharge was real money. But it was small change next to where and when you fill up.

A twenty year experiment

Australia has allowed card surcharges since the Reserve Bank's 2003 payments reforms. In 2016 the rules were tightened so a surcharge couldn't exceed what it actually cost a business to accept the card, and the ACCC got powers to chase down excessive ones. Surcharging kept spreading anyway. In the RBA's 2022 Consumer Payments Survey, 7 per cent of card payments attracted a surcharge, up from around 5 per cent in 2019, and CommBank says around 16 per cent of businesses now add one.

Today's change brings us closer to Europe. The European Union bans surcharges on debit and credit card payments, and the UK bans them on all non commercial debit and credit cards. North America has gone the other way. Most of the United States and Canada allow credit card surcharges, which is why plenty of American petrol stations post two prices on the sign, one for cash and a dearer one for credit.

So what does it mean at the bowser?

The practical upshot for your wallet is that the price on the board, and the price published by your state's official fuel price scheme, is now the price you pay when you tap Visa, Mastercard or eftpos. No more wondering whether the cheaper servo will claw it back at the register.

Costs don't vanish, though. A servo that was collecting a surcharge now has to absorb the fee or fold it into the price per litre, which everyone pays, cash customers included. ABC reporting from Mount Gambier and elsewhere in South Australia last week found small businesses weighing exactly those options, from swallowing the fees to nudging prices up. Whether any of it shows up at the pump will be hard to pick out, because wholesale prices are already moving by double digits from week to week on the back of the Middle East conflict.

One catch. The RBA's rule covers eftpos, Mastercard and Visa only. American Express isn't designated under it, though it has signalled it will follow suit, and buy now pay later services sit outside the ban altogether.

The bigger picture

Card payments are now the plumbing of fuel retail. Economist John Hawkins told the ABC that about half of Australians use no cash in a typical week, which makes the fee on every tap a fixed cost of selling petrol, like rent or wages. Today's reform shifts that cost off your receipt and into the price on the board. That's more honest, and it makes comparing pump prices matter even more, because that number is now the whole story.

What to remember

A payments rule rarely moves the price at the bowser. This one changes what the number on the board means, and that's worth knowing the next time you pull in.