08/09/2026
☕ WHY YOUR MORNING COFFEE (and many other things) MAY COST MORE FROM 1 OCTOBER
There’s a big change coming to the way businesses can recover the cost of card payments, and I think it’s important consumers understand what it actually means.
From 1 October, businesses will no longer be able to add a surcharge when you pay using a card.
Sounds like a win for consumers, right?
But here’s the part that’s easily missed…
The cost of processing your card payment hasn’t magically disappeared.
The business will still be charged fees for accepting your card payment. Simple example👇
☕ Today: Your coffee is $6.00.
Pay cash → $6.00
Pay by card → perhaps $6.10 or $6.12, depending on the processing cost and surcharge.
The person choosing to use the payment method that creates the additional cost pays that cost.
☕ From 1 October:
The cafe can no longer add that card surcharge.
But the cafe is still paying to process all those card transactions.
That cost now has to be absorbed by the business, or built into the prices of the products it sells.
So that $6.00 coffee might become $6.10.
Pay by card → $6.10
Pay cash → $6.10
And that’s the part I think deserves more discussion.
The surcharge may disappear from the EFTPOS receipt, but the cost itself hasn’t disappeared.
It has simply moved.
Merchant fees can add up to thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars every year.
They are a genuine cost of doing business, just like wages, electricity, insurance, rent and ingredients.
And ultimately, business costs have to be reflected somewhere in the price of goods and services.
There are reforms being introduced at the same time which are intended to reduce some card-processing costs for businesses, and hopefully they do.
But businesses will still pay to accept cards.
So when you notice prices changing after 1 October, particularly at cafes, restaurants and small businesses where lots of relatively small transactions are made, understand there is more behind it than simply “the business putting its prices up”.
For the customer, the surcharge disappears.
For the business, the processing cost remains.
And for the banks and payment providers collecting merchant fees, it’s largely business as usual.
The difference is that the cost will now be spread across ALL customers, including those who choose to pay cash. ☕💳💵
