A single cent sounds like nothing. At a petrol station selling thousands of litres a day, one cent per transaction quickly turns into a serious sum. This is exactly where the abolition of the card surcharge in Australia comes in, taking effect on 1 October 2026. The surcharge that merchants were previously allowed to pass on to customers for card payments is being removed.
For many small shops, this is barely noticeable. For high-volume businesses, it's the opposite. Petrol stations, highway service centres and quick service restaurants live on thin margins and huge transaction counts. Every fee that can no longer be passed on lands directly on their own bill. And because these businesses operate across many sites, many payment processors and complex workflows, payment reconciliation becomes the decisive lever.
This article shows why the removal of the surcharge hits petrol and quick service restaurants hardest of all. You'll learn where the costs arise, which traps lurk in reconciliation, and what payment and finance teams should do now.
The Reserve Bank of Australia is abolishing the surcharge on card payments from 1 October 2026. It applies to the four-party schemes eftpos, Mastercard and Visa, covering debit, prepaid and credit in each case.
Three-party schemes formally fall outside the rule. However, brands such as American Express, JCB and UnionPay have voluntarily committed to allowing no further surcharging from the same date. The rule does not apply directly to Diners Club and buy-now-pay-later.
At the same time, the Reserve Bank is lowering interchange fees. The cap for domestic credit cards drops to 0.3 per cent, and for debit and prepaid cards to 8 cents or 0.16 per cent. For foreign-issued cards, a cap of 1.0 per cent takes effect from 1 April 2027. On top of this, large payment processors must disclose their fees and provide standardised statements.
Australia is not the first country to take such a step. In the EU and the UK, surcharges on common consumer cards have largely been abolished since 2018. The trend is clear, and it affects high-volume businesses everywhere in the same way.
The impact of a reform depends not only on the rule itself but on the structure of the business. Three factors make petrol and quick service restaurants particularly sensitive.
In short: where margins are thin and volumes are high, a small shift in fees becomes a big number. And someone has to be able to explain that number.
Petrol stations, EV charging points and highway service centres are a prime example of low-margin, high-volume business. The removal of the surcharge hits them in several places at once.
A petrol station earns little on fuel itself. The real business often sits in the shop, where snacks, drinks and accessories bring far higher margins. For many, the surcharge was a small offset for the card costs on fuel sales. If it disappears, the operator bears the fee in full, precisely where there is the least room to manoeuvre.
Alongside cash and the major card products, petrol stations also accept fleet cards and vouchers. It pays to look closely here. Corporate and commercial cards running on the Mastercard or Visa schemes are covered by the end of the surcharge. Classic fuel and fleet cards with their own network, on the other hand, run under separate agreements and remain unaffected by the rule.
In practice, this means different conditions apply at the same pump depending on the card. One card can no longer be surcharged, the other still can. Separating this mix cleanly and posting it correctly is exactly the kind of complexity that trips up manual processes.
Many stations separate the high-margin shop from the low-margin fuel. Shops are often leased or run under a franchise model. This makes representing the organisational structure in the books demanding.
When the surcharge disappears and prices or cost allocations are readjusted, payment reconciliation has to know exactly which revenue belongs to which unit. Otherwise costs shift between operator and lessee without anyone noticing.
Petrol stations often have long opening hours, and the day-end falls after midnight. As a result, the trading day shifts against the calendar day. This shift already makes it harder to match sales to incoming payments.
Add a change in fee structure on the 1 October 2026 cut-off date, and two fee regimes now meet at the boundary between two days. Without clean allocation, this is exactly where discrepancies arise.
At highway service centres and in tourist regions, many customers pay with foreign-issued cards. For these, the new interchange cap of 1.0 per cent only takes effect from 1 April 2027. For operators with a high share of tourists, the cost picture therefore changes a second time, half a year after the first transition.
Quick service restaurants combine high volume with a particularly colourful payment landscape. Here, the loss of the surcharge is just one piece of an already complex picture.
Each of these channels has its own data and its own settlement logic. When the surcharge on card payments disappears, one part of this web changes while other parts stay the same. Payment reconciliation has to be able to represent this asynchronicity.
Delivery services settle via their own commission models, not via the four-party card schemes. They are not affected by the abolition of the surcharge. Their fees and their ever-changing report formats remain a separate, labour-intensive item.
For reconciliation, this means the card side gets simpler while the platform side stays difficult. Anyone throwing both into one pot loses the overview. For many teams, reconciling delivery services is considered the hardest part of the work anyway.
Many chains operate under a franchise model. Franchisees often lack the capacity for detailed accounting. On top of that, the structure of organisational units changes frequently, for example through acquisitions or new openings.
The transition to the end of the surcharge has to run consistently across all locations. If even a single branch is configured incorrectly, wrong amounts arise. In a network of hundreds of sites, such an error is hard to spot without a structured process.
In quick service dining, many customers buy the same thing. The menu costs the same everywhere, so many transactions with identical amounts arise. This makes manual matching between sale and incoming payment even harder, because individual entries can barely be told apart.
As different as a petrol station and a quick service restaurant are, the core problem is the same. The card fee moves from a passed-on item to a full cost item. And the gap between the revenue at the till and the payment in the account has to be explained.
Four points apply to both verticals.
Where these points aren't cleanly resolved, the rolling difference grows. This is the balance carried forward day after day because sales and settlements don't match exactly. At high volume it can quickly reach large proportions and become a risk in an audit.
The transition can be prepared for. These steps particularly help high-volume operations.
Abrantix knows the payment world of retail and energy providers from hands-on experience. For petrol stations, this also includes fleet card solutions and a payment consultancy that knows exactly the special cases where standard software fails.
For payment reconciliation itself, ReconHub takes care of the job. The solution is built for merchants, independent of the payment processor, and supports all payment methods and all sales channels. That's precisely what an operation needs where pump, shop, app and delivery platform run side by side.
ReconHub breaks aggregated payments down to the individual transaction. This makes fees traceable per transaction, enables the target-versus-actual comparison against the new caps, and surfaces unexplained differences early. Automated, digital workflows also reduce audit risk, because every entry has supporting documentation.
For the small shop, the end of the surcharge is a side issue. For petrol stations, highway service centres and quick service restaurants, it is not. Thin margins, huge transaction counts, many locations and many payment routes turn a small shift in fees into a big number. And someone has to be able to explain that number.
The decisive lever is payment reconciliation. Anyone who now bears the card fee themselves has to be able to document it per transaction. Anyone wanting to use the lower caps has to check that they're passed on. And anyone with fleet cards and delivery services in play needs a solution that treats each route separately. High-volume businesses that automate this now turn the transition from a risk into an advantage.
Do you run a network of petrol stations or restaurants and want to know how the end of the surcharge will hit your margin? Talk to the payment experts at ReconHub.
Sources
Reserve Bank of Australia: Impact and Implementation, FAQs Removal of Payment Surcharges From 1 October 2026
Australian Banking Association: New Rules for Card Payments