Australia bans card surcharges from 1 October 2026: what it means for your invoices

If you’re an Australian freelancer or consultant who surcharges card payments, or who has ever considered it, this is the one to read now. From 1 October 2026, the Reserve Bank of Australia’s ban on card surcharging takes effect, and it applies to your invoices whether your client is a household or a business.

What’s changing

The RBA announced the reform in March 2026: from 1 October 2026, merchants can no longer add a surcharge to designated debit, prepaid or credit card payments across EFTPOS, Mastercard and Visa. Amex, JCB and UnionPay have confirmed they are removing surcharging from the same date.

That covers the obvious case - a card surcharge line on an invoice or a checkout page - but it also covers passing on the fee any other way that amounts to the same thing: a “card processing fee,” a differential price for card versus bank transfer, and similar workarounds.

There is no general B2B exemption

This is the detail that catches consultants out, because a lot of the coverage of this change is written for retail. Business-to-business invoices are not exempt. Whether a card payment is exempt from the ban is a matter for the card network’s own rules or for a specific law or regulation, not a blanket carve-out for invoicing between businesses. None of the schemes has flagged a general B2B exemption. If you invoice a client’s company and they pay by card, the same rule applies as if they were a consumer.

There’s also no small-business size threshold. It doesn’t matter if you’re a sole trader with one client or a firm with fifty - the removal applies the same way.

What this means if you currently surcharge

If any of your invoice templates, payment links, or Stripe checkout pages currently add a card surcharge, that needs to come off before 1 October 2026. Concretely:

• Remove any surcharge line item from invoice templates.
• If you take card payments through a payment link or gateway, check the provider’s own surcharging feature is switched off, not just hidden from your template.
• Reprice if you need to. If the card fee genuinely mattered to your margin, the honest fix is to build it into your day rate or your flat retainer fee, not to look for a workaround that still functions as a surcharge.

Why this barely touches Quivva users

This is a good moment to say plainly where Quivva sits on payments: it doesn’t process card payments for client invoices, and isn’t going to. At the invoice sizes typical for a fractional exec or independent consultant - a few thousand to tens of thousands of dollars a month - card processing fees are a real cost with no offsetting benefit, which is exactly why bank transfer is already the default the way most consultants get paid. Quivva generates your bank details on every invoice from your settings, so there’s nothing to migrate.

If you’ve been surcharging because a client insisted on paying by card, this change gives you a clean reason to move that client to bank transfer instead. Fewer fees for you, one less compliance detail to track, and it works the same whether the client is in Sydney or overseas.

The two-week checklist

With the deadline close, here’s the short version:

1. Find every place a card surcharge appears - invoice templates, payment links, checkout pages, contracts.
2. Remove it, or fold the cost into your headline rate if it matters to you.
3. Confirm any payment gateway’s built-in surcharging toggle is off, not just unused.
4. If a client only pays by card because it’s convenient for them, this is a good prompt to move them to bank transfer.