Australian merchants paid an average of 0.88% on a domestic Mastercard credit transaction in the June quarter 2026 and 2.92% on an overseas-issued one, a gap of more than three times on the same tap.
Skai Solutions pulled the Reserve Bank's own quarterly table rather than a payment provider's blog, because from 1 October 2026 a restaurant cannot pass the fee to the customer and the number stops being a line on the docket and starts being a cost line.
The Reserve Bank collects it from acquirers and payment facilitators and publishes it quarterly in table C3. These are total merchant fees, meaning merchant service fees plus other acquiring fees, as a per cent of purchase value, net of rebates and GST.
| Card | All cards | Domestic cards | International cards |
|---|---|---|---|
| eftpos debit | 0.43% | 0.42% | not published |
| Visa debit | 0.56% | 0.48% | not published |
| Mastercard debit | 0.59% | 0.54% | not published |
| Visa credit | 1.00% | 0.85% | 2.98% |
| Mastercard credit | 0.99% | 0.88% | 2.92% |
| American Express credit | 1.36% | 1.35% | 1.65% |
Reserve Bank of Australia statistical table C3, Average Merchant Fees, June quarter 2026, series released 7 August 2026 and read 17 September 2026. Terminal rental, monthly fees and joining fees are reported separately at 0.03% of purchase value across all merchants.
Two things to do with that table before anything else. Work out your card mix, because the spread from 0.43% to 1.36% means the mix decides your number more than your contract does. Then accept that you sit above these lines: the RBA's own note on the table says larger merchants tend to pay lower fees than smaller merchants, and these are averages across all of them.
Look along the Mastercard credit row. A domestic card averages 0.88%. An overseas-issued card on the same terminal, same tap, same coffee, averages 2.92%. That is 3.3 times. Visa is 0.85% against 2.98%, which is 3.5 times.
The reason is that Australian interchange regulation caps what can be charged on domestically issued cards and has no reach over a card issued by a bank in another country. The scheme prices those transactions at what it likes and the acquirer passes it through.
Now the part that is new, and this is the only line in the whole table that moved in the year to June 2026.
| Series | June 2025 | June 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Visa credit, international cards | 2.76% | 2.98% | +0.22 |
| Mastercard credit, international cards | 2.65% | 2.92% | +0.27 |
| Visa credit, domestic cards | 0.82% | 0.85% | +0.03 |
| Mastercard credit, domestic cards | 0.87% | 0.88% | +0.01 |
| eftpos debit | 0.44% | 0.43% | -0.01 |
Same RBA series, both observations after the December 2024 change in collection coverage, so the comparison is like for like. Never compare a 2026 figure in this table with a pre-2025 one.
Domestic card costs are flat to within a rounding error. International card costs rose by roughly ten per cent in twelve months. Every venue near a hotel, an airport, a cruise terminal or a tourist strip took a cost increase this year that its suburban competitor did not, and nothing on the merchant statement labels it that way.
Total card fees for a month, divided by total card turnover for the same month. Include the terminal rental and any monthly account fee, because they are part of the cost of acceptance even though they are not a percentage. Do it across three months so a quarterly fee does not distort one of them.
A worked example, ours, with the inputs shown. Take a venue doing A$1.2m of card turnover a year with 15% of it on overseas-issued credit cards. That slice is A$180,000. At about 2.95% it costs A$5,310. Had the same slice been domestic credit at 0.87% it would have cost A$1,566. The difference is A$3,744 a year, arising on 15% of takings, and there is no contract negotiation that removes it. It is a feature of who walks through the door.
That figure is Skai Solutions' arithmetic using the RBA rates above, not an RBA figure. Substitute your own mix. If you have no idea what share of your card turnover is overseas-issued, that is the first question to put to your acquirer, and most will answer it.
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Turn on least cost routing. A contactless debit tap can be routed to eftpos at 0.43% instead of Mastercard debit at 0.59%. On A$1m of debit turnover that is about A$1,600 a year for a configuration change. Small, certain, and most acquirers will do it on request.
Move from a blended plan to interchange plus, or the reverse. Blended pricing averages your international cards into one rate, which is good for a tourist venue and bad for a suburban one. Interchange plus exposes the real cost per transaction, which is good for a suburban venue and painful for a tourist one. Your mix decides which is right, which is why you work out the mix first.
Price the terminal rental as a percentage. The RBA reports other acquiring fees at 0.03% of value across all merchants, but that is an average dominated by large ones. A fixed A$40 a month on A$25,000 of card turnover is 0.16%, four times the scheme fee difference you are chasing with routing.
Then renegotiate, with the number in hand. An acquirer responds to "we are at 1.31% and the RBA average for our mix is 0.92%" in a way it does not respond to a complaint. If none of that works, the residual is a cost of doing business, and it belongs in the overheads alongside the delivery marketplace commissions that dwarf it.
Where the fee lands in your reporting depends on how the POS records the payment type. Our page on the Revel POS integration covers what that system passes through and what it does not.
No, and the two countries have just moved in opposite directions on the exact line that matters most here. The Commerce Commission's revised interchange limits took effect on 1 December 2025 for domestically issued cards and on 1 May 2026 for foreign-issued cards. The Commission estimated its pricing standard, decided 17 July 2025, would save New Zealand businesses about NZ$260 million a year against pre-regulation fees, and reports that interchange made up 60% of merchant service fees in 2024.
So New Zealand capped the foreign card in May 2026. Australia did not, and the RBA's own series shows Australian international card fees rising through the same twelve months. Two tourist-facing venues, one in Queenstown and one in Cairns, are now on diverging cost curves for the same transaction, entirely because of where they are.
One New Zealand action follows from that and it is worth doing this week. If your surcharge was set before December 2025, the input has fallen twice since and the surcharge almost certainly has not. Under the Retail Payment System Act a surcharge should be no more than the cost you are charged to accept the payment, so an unchanged surcharge is now very likely above cost.
The fee is only the price of a sale that sticks. When a cardholder disputes one, the money goes back and a separate fee lands on top, and the windows for answering are shorter than most operators expect. Those are set out on our page on the eftpos chargeback rules for a restaurant.
The other deduction from the same sale is the tax, and it changes with the order type rather than the card. Our page on GST on takeaway food covers why the same item is taxable eaten in and GST-free taken out.
These are national averages across every merchant in Australia, not a hospitality figure, and no regulator publishes merchant fees by industry. They are also averages across merchants of wildly different size, so a single venue should expect to sit above them rather than on them. The December 2024 break in the RBA series means older comparisons are not valid. And what changes on 1 October 2026 is who pays the fee, not what the fee is, which is covered in full on the card surcharge ban page rather than repeated here.
From 1 October 2026 a card sale carries a cost the venue absorbs. A booking taken over the phone that turns up and pays by card still carries it, so payments are not where the phone helps you. The phone helps you on the other side of the equation: the cover that never happened because nobody picked up carries no fee, no food cost and no revenue either.
At a 0.92% blended fee, a A$60 table costs 55 cents to bank. The same table lost to an unanswered phone costs A$60 of contribution against a margin that is already thin. Skai Solutions answers during service, takes the booking, and puts the cover back. That is a bigger number than anything on the merchant statement.
One line on the same invoice catches operators out: the merchant fee is charged on a card tip as well as on the meal, and the money reaches the venue before any staff member sees it. See who owns a tip and how tip pooling works in Australia.
The card rate is set partly by which category of till takes the payment, because a register plus a separate terminal and an integrated POS are billed differently. See cash register versus POS system for the published in person rates and what each option records.
Fees are what card acceptance costs when it works. What it costs when it stops is a different number, and bigger: see what to do when the EFTPOS machine is not working, which prices an hour of card outage against the Reserve Bank cash share and sets out the four fixes in the order a floor manager should try them.
The Reserve Bank publishes the benchmark by card rather than by industry. In the June quarter 2026 total merchant fees averaged 0.43% on eftpos debit, 0.56% on Visa debit, 0.59% on Mastercard debit, 1.00% on Visa credit, 0.99% on Mastercard credit and 1.36% on American Express credit. Your own number is a weighted average of those, and it sits above them, because the RBA's averages include very large merchants paying much less.
Because the interchange caps that hold domestic card costs down do not apply to a card issued overseas. In the June quarter 2026 a domestic Mastercard credit transaction averaged 0.88% and an overseas-issued one averaged 2.92%, a gap of 3.3 times on the same tap. Visa is 0.85% against 2.98%. For a venue in a tourist strip that gap is the single biggest variable in the payments line.
Take total card fees charged by your acquirer for a month, including terminal rental and any monthly account fee, and divide by total card turnover for that month. Use three months to smooth out timing. That number, not the headline rate you were quoted, is your cost of acceptance, and it is the one to take to a renegotiation.
Neither, for domestic cards. Between the June quarter 2025 and the June quarter 2026 Visa credit on domestic cards moved from 0.82% to 0.85% and Mastercard credit from 0.87% to 0.88%, while eftpos debit fell from 0.44% to 0.43%. International cards are the exception and they moved sharply: Visa credit international from 2.76% to 2.98% and Mastercard credit international from 2.65% to 2.92%.
On the published averages, yes, but less than most pitches imply. Routing a contactless debit tap to eftpos at 0.43% instead of Mastercard debit at 0.59% saves 0.16 of a percentage point, which on A$1m of debit turnover is about A$1,600 a year. Real, worth switching on, and an order of magnitude smaller than the international card gap on the same takings.
Nothing happens to the fee itself. What changes is who carries it. From 1 October 2026 the card networks' no surcharge rules mean a venue cannot pass the cost to the customer, so the fee stops being a line on the docket and becomes an operating cost that has to come out of margin or out of menu prices.