Can I Add a Card Surcharge?

The basic rule

You are allowed to recover the cost of accepting card payments by adding a surcharge to the invoice, but the surcharge must not be excessive — it cannot exceed what it actually costs you to accept that particular card. Australia's surcharging rules, which are overseen by the ACCC, specifically prohibit charging customers more than your genuine cost of acceptance, and the rules apply regardless of how you word it on the invoice. This is general information, not legal advice.

The simplest way to keep this straight is to remember that a surcharge is a cost-recovery tool, not a profit centre. You are passing on a cost you incur, nothing more. Get the amount wrong on the high side — even by rounding up generously — and you risk breaching the rules, so it pays to base the figure on your real costs rather than a convenient round number.

Know your actual cost

Your cost of acceptance is simply what your payment provider charges you to process card transactions — typically a percentage of each sale, sometimes with a small fixed fee added on top. Crucially, different card types can cost you different amounts to accept, which means the surcharge you are permitted to pass on can legitimately differ from one card to another. A premium card may cost more to accept than a standard one, and your surcharge can reflect that.

Your payment provider's statements set all of these costs out, usually as a clear percentage. Use that figure as the ceiling for your surcharge: setting your surcharge at or below your actual cost of acceptance keeps you comfortably on the right side of the rule. If you are unsure what your true cost is, your provider can confirm it, and it is worth asking rather than guessing.

Setting a compliant surcharge

Set your surcharge to your cost of acceptance or less — never above it. If you would rather not vary the surcharge by card type, a single blended rate across all the cards you accept is acceptable, provided that blended figure does not exceed your average cost of acceptance across them. Either approach works; what matters is that the customer is never charged more than it genuinely costs you. Keep some evidence of how you arrived at the figure, in case it is ever queried by a customer or a regulator.

It is also worth reviewing the rate whenever your provider's fees change, rather than setting it once and leaving it. A surcharge that was perfectly compliant last year can quietly drift out of line if your processing costs fall and you do not update the surcharge to match — at which point you would be over-charging without intending to.

Disclose it — and decide if it is worth it

Always tell the customer about the surcharge before they pay, and show it as a separate, clearly labelled line on the invoice rather than quietly folding it into the total. Clear disclosure is both fair to the customer and expected of you under the rules, and a hidden surcharge is exactly the kind of thing that causes complaints. For where this line best sits among the rest of your invoice details, see how to state payment terms on an invoice.

Finally, it is worth stepping back and weighing whether to surcharge at all, because it is a commercial choice as much as a compliance one. Some businesses deliberately absorb their card costs to keep paying as frictionless as possible and to get paid faster, judging that the speed and ease of payment comfortably outweigh a small processing fee they would otherwise recover.