Surcharging

You don’t have to surcharge. It's your decision. However, if you decide to surcharge, you should consider the rules, set by the Reserve Bank of Australia, which explain that the amount you surcharge cannot exceed your Cost of Acceptance. You can refer to the guide published by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) for further information.

• The rules provide that you can set different surcharges for each card type, up to their annual average Cost of Acceptance.
• The ACCC Guide also states you may apply one surcharge rate across all cards, as long as it’s not higher than your lowest annual average Cost of Acceptance.
• For merchants who don't yet have information for a full year, the rules provide that you may be able to make good faith estimates using your monthly costs and transaction volumes to work out an annual average Cost of Acceptance.

Read the guide

For each card type, you are able to set an amount to surcharge. Make sure you use the rules to set this.

Once you've enabled surcharging, your terminal will automatically add a surcharge based on the customer’s payment method. 

Cost of Acceptance is defined in the rules as the average cost per card transaction you pay to accept each type of card. This is different for each merchant.  Your cost of acceptance will comprise your CBA costs and, if you also have other costs permitted to be included under the RBA's rules that are directly related to taking card payments you may include those too.

Your CBA merchant statement has a table titled ‘Cost of accepting payments by card type', which provides information about your CBA costs, as well as important notes in relation to that information. The rules explain that you can include certain costs that are directly related to taking card payments. You can refer to the ACCC guide for further information.

We recommend you refer to the surcharging guide published by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) titled “Card surcharges”.

Card surcharges