The fee did not disappear. It moved to you.
For years, most Australian venues have quietly passed the cost of card payments to customers as a surcharge, that small percentage added at the terminal. It worked because the fee never really touched your margin. The customer absorbed it.
From 1 October 2026 that stops. The Reserve Bank's ban means you can no longer surcharge on Visa, Mastercard or EFTPOS. The fee does not go away, it simply moves from the customer's bill onto yours. Whatever you currently recover through a surcharge becomes a direct cost of doing business, every transaction, every week, forever.
The calculator above shows your number. Here is what it looks like across a few typical venues, using a 1.5% surcharge as the example:
None of this is a penalty for doing badly. It is a levy on your turnover, and the busier you are, the more it takes. The one lever you still control is the rate itself, because the provider you are with sets it. Many venues are on legacy arrangements that are expensive by 2026 standards, and October is the forcing event to fix that.
The October 2026 surcharge ban makes it worse.
Until now, many venues have passed the card fee to customers as a surcharge, effectively making the customer pay it rather than the venue. This ends on 1 October 2026.
The Reserve Bank of Australia has confirmed a ban on card payment surcharges for consumer eftpos, Mastercard and Visa transactions. From that date, surcharging is illegal. Square's 1.6% fee becomes a direct operating expense you absorb. If you have been offsetting Square's fees through surcharging, your effective POS cost just increased to 1.6% of all card revenue with no way to pass it on.
What zero-commission actually means.
Foodhub, Impos, OrderMate and Lightspeed all charge a flat monthly subscription rather than a percentage of sales. On Foodhub's model, there is no per-transaction commission at all, you pay a setup fee (which MarginCompare can get waived) and then nothing per sale.
Take a venue on $40,000 of card payments a month at a 1.5% surcharge. From October that is about $7,200 a year absorbed straight off the margin. Move to a provider with a lower effective rate and a large part of that cost goes away. Exact pricing is quote based in Australia, Foodhub and Lightspeed do not publish it, so the honest way to size your saving is to get a real quote. That is what we do, free.
The setup cost and switching effort is real. Moving POS systems takes a few days of setup, staff training and menu migration. But at $6,520 per year, that effort pays for itself in under 6 weeks of fee savings.
How we can help.
MarginCompare has a commercial relationship with Foodhub, one of Australia's leading zero-commission hospitality POS providers. That means we can negotiate exclusive terms on your behalf: waived setup fees, extended onboarding support, and in some cases preferential hardware pricing.
The process takes under 2 minutes. Tell us about your venue, we brief Foodhub, negotiate the opening terms and introduce you when we have their best deal confirmed. You show up to one conversation with everything already on the table.
Disclosure: Foodhub is a preferred supplier. We receive a fee when venues sign up through our introduction. Square, Lightspeed and other products mentioned are independently reviewed with no commercial relationship. The calculator above uses publicly available Square Australia pricing.