The story went up on Perth's main community forum on Tuesday morning and had sixty replies within the hour.

A customer said they were in Bentley, saw a barber shop advertising haircuts at $20 on the sign outside, and went in. Before anything else, the woman at the front desk asked: card or cash? Card, they said. That'll be $28 — and here's the ATM, over there in the shop.

Eight dollars to tap. On a twenty dollar haircut. That is a surcharge of 40 per cent.

Everything Perth has not independently verified the account, and we are not naming the business on the basis of a single customer's post. But the reaction told its own story, because almost everyone replying had a version of it — the cafe with the $1 minimum, the takeaway with the handwritten sign, the tradie who adds "card fee" to the invoice without ever saying what it is.

All of which is about to become a historical curiosity.

What changes on 1 October

The Reserve Bank has concluded it is in the public interest to remove surcharging entirely, and from 1 October 2026 merchants will no longer be able to apply a surcharge to designated debit, prepaid and credit card payments on the eftpos, Mastercard and Visa networks. American Express has said it will adopt the same change.

The ban is being implemented through the rules of the card networks themselves, which means it binds every business that accepts those cards — no enforcement campaign required, no exemption for small operators.

What is not covered: Diners Club, PayPal and buy-now-pay-later services.

The surcharge ban travels with a set of interchange reforms that cut the underlying cost of accepting cards in the first place. Debit and prepaid interchange fees are being capped at 8 cents per transaction, consumer credit card interchange at 0.3 per cent, and foreign-issued cards at 1.0 per cent from 1 April 2027. The RBA's estimate is that the package could save consumers and businesses up to $1.8 billion a year.

What the rules say until then

Between now and the end of the month, surcharging remains legal — but only within limits that a great many businesses appear not to know about.

A surcharge must not exceed the business's cost of acceptance: what it actually costs them to take that card. That figure can include the fees paid to their payment provider, terminal rental and maintenance, and certain related costs such as fraud prevention — but the business has to be able to verify those costs per transaction.

In practice, cost of acceptance for a small Australian business sits somewhere around half a per cent to one and a half per cent, depending on the card and the provider. On a $20 haircut, that is somewhere in the range of ten to thirty cents.

A surcharge is called excessive when it exceeds that cost, and excessive surcharging is unlawful. It is also an ACCC enforcement priority, backed by $2.1 million in dedicated funding. The penalties are not nominal: infringement notices of up to $126,000, and in more serious cases court-imposed penalties of more than $1.3 million.

Surcharges also have to be clearly disclosed before the sale. A price on a sign outside that turns into a different price at the terminal is the specific practice the ACCC has been warning businesses about.

What a business can still do

This is worth saying plainly, because the ban is not a price control.

A business that is genuinely losing money on card fees is free to raise its prices. If the haircut needs to be $21, the sign can say $21. What it cannot do, from October, is advertise one number and collect another depending on how you pay.

That is the entire point of the reform. It is a transparency measure, not a margin squeeze. The complaint the RBA acted on was never that businesses charge what they need to charge — it was that surcharging let the advertised price stop being the real price.

If it happens to you before October

• Ask before you order or sit down. The surcharge has to be disclosed up front. Asking is not rude; it is the mechanism working.
• Ask what the fee is for. A business charging a surcharge should be able to say what it costs them to accept the card.
• Keep the receipt. It should show the surcharge as a separate line.
• Report it. The ACCC takes reports of excessive surcharging through its website, and has said it is actively looking at small-business practice in this area.
• After 1 October, it is simply not allowed on eftpos, Mastercard or Visa. If you are surcharged on one of those cards after that date, the business is breaching the card network's rules.

There will be a period of confusion — signs that don't come down, terminals that aren't reprogrammed, businesses that genuinely haven't heard. Two weeks is not long, and a lot of very small operators are about to discover a rule change that has been in the payments press for a year and nowhere else.

But the direction is settled. From the first of October, the price on the sign is the price.

Photo: Nenad Stojkovic via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0). File photograph; not the business described in this article.