Check your card surcharge against ACCC/RBA cost-of-acceptance rules.
Cost of acceptance is the total cost a merchant pays to accept a card payment, expressed as a percentage of the transaction value. It includes scheme fees, interchange, acquirer fees and terminal costs charged by your payments provider, but generally excludes one-off costs like terminal rental.
Under ACCC and RBA rules, a card payment surcharge cannot exceed your actual cost of acceptance for that scheme. If your blended cost of acceptance is 1.2%, your surcharge cannot exceed 1.2% — even if you only surcharge a single rate across all cards.
No. Many AU venues apply a single blended surcharge across all card payments. If you do, the rate must not exceed the cost of acceptance of the cheapest scheme you accept. Surcharging per scheme lets you set a different rate for each scheme up to that scheme’s individual cost of acceptance.