Card payment surcharge rules for Merchants

If you choose to apply a surcharge to a particular type of card payment, you cannot charge a fee that is above your cost of accepting payments for that card type.

The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) have clearly defined what costs can be included in the cost of acceptance calculation and the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission (ACCC) have monitoring and enforcement powers to ensure that all merchants do not excessively surcharge.

Your cost of accepting card payments covers all fees charged on your merchant statement, plus any fees that are separately charged by the bank, including:

• UnionPay fees,
• Stationery and authorisation fees

If you accept American Express, you will need to refer to your American Express statement to find your cost of accepting card payments for that card type.

You can recover the following costs when applying a card payment surcharge:

• Merchant service fees charged by an acquirer or payment facilitator on a card transaction.
• Payment terminal rental and maintenance costs paid to the merchant’s acquirer, payment facilitator or payment service provider.
• Fraud-related chargeback fees paid to the merchant's acquirer or payment facilitator.
• Gateway or fraud prevention services fees paid to the merchant’s acquirer, payment facilitator or payment services provider.
• Cost of insurance for forward delivery risk, where that risk arises because you accept card transactions. This typically applies to agents (such as travel agents) who pay an external party to insure against the risk that the agent will be liable to a customer for the failure of a principal supplier (such as an airline or hotel) on payments accepted via cards.

If you would like to include additional eligible costs, you will need to provide invoices, contracts, or statements to support your calculation.

St.George Bank does not issue American Express cards, so we cannot see their fees and charges levied. We recommend that you contact American Express directly.

St.George Bank will provide you with your cost of acceptance for each card type in your June monthly statement, but it is up to you to determine what surcharge you would like to apply. You may wish to include additional eligible costs that are not billed by St.George Bank to calculate your final cost of acceptance.

Yes. You can have one surcharge for each card scheme or type, but it must reflect the lowest cost for that card scheme.

For example, if the cost of accepting card payments for Visa Debit was 0.80% and Visa Credit was 1.30%, then the highest surcharge that could be applied across all Visa payment cards would be 0.80%, which is the lower of the two Visa Debit and Visa Credit rates.

Yes. You can apply a surcharge as a fixed dollar amount or as a percentage. Please keep in mind that you cannot charge a fee that is above your cost of accepting payments for that card type. It is up to you to determine if a fixed dollar amount is suitable for your business.

In some cases, you may find that the surcharge you’ve requested wasn’t applied and a lower rate was applied. This may happen when you’re processing contactless transactions, such as Visa payWave or Mastercard® PayPass™, where you’ve set different surcharge rates for credit and debit card types in the Mastercard card Scheme and/or for credit and debit card types in the Visa card Scheme. If your terminal can’t determine the card type, from the information contained on the card during the transaction processing, the surcharge will revert to the lower rate that you’ve set for the credit and debit card types.

To update any surcharge rates that are automatically applied to card payment transactions on your terminal, please contact the Merchant Helpdesk on 1300 650 977, We’re available 24/7. To update your online payment gateway, please contact your third-party payment gateway provider.

To activate surcharging, contact your Linkly accredited POS vendor (for On Premises integration) or contact Linkly (for cloud integration).

The rules permit you to validate your payment costs once a year, and you set your surcharge for the next year based on that information.

You will need to review your surcharge by 1 September each year based on your June yearly statement.

The ACCC may ask you to produce evidence of your cost of acceptance to justify the amount that you are surcharging customers. The evidence may include your annual cost of acceptance statement provided by St.George Bank. If you have included additional costs in your calculation you will need to keep invoices, contracts or other statements to justify these.

If the ACCC considers that your surcharges are excessive they may issue you with an infringement notice and require you to pay a penalty. Failure to comply with the infringement notice may also result in the ACCC initiating court proceedings against you.

If you need to refund a customer, you should refund the cost of the purchase, including any surcharge applied to the original sale.

Yes. You will need to fully disclose any surcharges to your customers. The RBA guidelines advise that you need to prominently disclose the terms of any surcharge. This would include displaying signage in your business.