Visa Surcharges: 2026 RBA Reform

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Author: Max Cookson Last updated: June 2026 Reading time : 9 min

The surcharge that’s about to disappear

I’ve spent the last six months telling punters that something genuinely material is about to change in how they pay at Australian bookmakers. The Reserve Bank’s Payment Systems Board finalised in March 2026 a reform that takes effect on 1 October 2026: the abolition of surcharging on eftpos, Mastercard and Visa transactions, including credit, debit and prepaid. Australian consumers currently pay around AU$1.2 billion a year in card surcharges across the broader economy, and a slice of that has been quietly hitting wagering deposits.

The change isn’t dramatic – most Australian bookmakers don’t surcharge Visa Debit deposits in the first place – but it formalises the rule, eliminates the few residual cases where surcharges did appear, and changes the broader pricing dynamics in ways that will eventually trickle through to punters. Whether that means cheaper deposits or higher promotional spend depends on how operators respond, and the answer isn’t yet clear.

So this piece explains what the reform actually does, where Visa surcharges sat in Australian betting before October 2026, and what the post-reform landscape probably looks like for ordinary punters.

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Surcharging in the pre-October 2026 landscape

Surcharging is the practice of charging the customer a fee at the point of sale to cover the merchant’s card-acceptance costs. The classic example is the cafe that adds 2.5% to your coffee if you pay by Mastercard. Before the RBA reform, surcharging was permitted in Australia subject to caps based on the merchant’s actual cost of acceptance, with explicit rules requiring the surcharge to be no higher than what the merchant actually paid the acquirer.

For Australian bookmakers, surcharging on Visa deposits was rare but not unheard of. Most major operators absorbed the cost of card acceptance as a customer-acquisition expense – pushing surcharges to punters at the point of deposit was bad for retention, and the volumes were high enough that the absorbed cost was manageable. A handful of smaller operators surcharged on certain deposit methods, and a few applied surcharges only on specific card types like premium credit (which the credit ban subsequently made moot anyway).

Where surcharges did appear, they were typically in the 0.5% to 1.5% range for Visa Debit, which translated to AU$2.50 to AU$7.50 on a AU$500 deposit. Not transformational money for any individual punter, but enough to nudge the price-conscious customer toward PayID or another rail. The 2025 RBA consultation paper estimating AU$1.2 billion in annual card surcharges across the Australian economy demonstrates the aggregate scale, even though wagering was a small slice of that total.

What the RBA’s March 2026 conclusion paper actually decided

The RBA’s Payment Systems Board released its final position in the “Review of Merchant Card Payment Costs and Surcharging – Conclusions Paper” in March 2026, with implementation set for 1 October 2026. The headline decision was the elimination of the no-surcharge rules waiver – meaning that from 1 October, merchants cannot pass on card-acceptance costs to customers as a separate surcharge on eftpos, Mastercard or Visa transactions, regardless of whether the card is credit, debit or prepaid.

“Removing surcharging would make card payments simpler, more transparent and help to increase competition in the card payments system,” the RBA wrote in the media release accompanying the consultation paper. The Bank also estimated that around 90% of Australian businesses would be better off under the proposed policies once interchange and scheme-fee changes were factored in. The combination of eliminated surcharges and lower interchange caps was intended to net out positively for both merchants and consumers.

What the reform does not do is eliminate the underlying merchant-service-fee that card-acceptance generates. The cost of accepting a Visa transaction still exists; it just can’t be itemised and pushed to the customer. Merchants absorb the cost into their pricing, and over time the cost-pricing equilibrium shifts depending on how merchants reprice their goods or services.

Interchange cap changes that travel alongside the surcharge ban

The surcharge change isn’t standalone. It’s bundled with reductions in the maximum interchange fees that issuers can charge acquirers for card transactions. Lower interchange means lower merchant cost, which makes the absorbed-cost model more sustainable for merchants. The RBA’s view is that the package – no surcharging plus lower interchange – produces a net benefit, with around 90% of businesses ending up better off.

For wagering operators specifically, interchange has been a meaningful cost. Card payments value in Australia hit AU$1.1 trillion in 2025, and the interchange fees on the slice of that flowing through betting deposits were running into significant aggregate dollars across the industry. Lower interchange caps reduce that cost, which gives operators more headroom on customer-facing pricing or on promotional spend.

Visa remains the dominant card scheme globally – over 52.8% of all banking cards in circulation and more than 3.3 billion cards in 2026 – and the interchange changes apply uniformly across the schemes the RBA covers. There’s no scenario where the reform creates a competitive advantage for one card brand over another at the merchant level; the structural changes hit Visa, Mastercard and eftpos equally.

Effect on bookmaker pricing decisions

The post-reform pricing landscape for Australian betting depends on how operators choose to spend the savings. Two scenarios are plausible.

The first is that operators absorb the residual cost of card acceptance and keep the punter-facing experience identical to today’s no-surcharge norm. The interchange savings go to the operator’s bottom line, the customer sees no change in pricing, and the reform’s impact on punters is limited to the small minority who’d been paying surcharges at the few operators that applied them.

The second is that operators redirect the interchange savings into customer acquisition – bigger promotional offers, more aggressive sign-up bonuses, more frequent deposit-match incentives. This is the more likely outcome for a competitive market like Australian wagering, where there are over 90 licensed online bookmakers competing for a relatively fixed customer base. The savings get channelled into marketing rather than retained, and the punter-side benefit shows up as more attractive promotions rather than lower fees.

A third, smaller possibility is that operators tighten margins on certain product categories – exotics, in-play markets where the operator has more pricing power – to claw back some of the cost they’ve absorbed elsewhere. This is harder to detect from the customer’s side because the underlying odds aren’t transparent enough to compare against a counterfactual.

Effect on the end punter

For the average Australian punter, the practical impact of the reform on Visa betting deposits is small but positive. The few surcharged deposits that existed before 1 October 2026 stop being surcharged. The promotional landscape gets marginally more competitive. The structural friction around payment costs gets smoother as the no-surcharge norm becomes universal.

What it doesn’t do is fundamentally change the calculus between Visa Debit and PayID, the two main rails for licensed Australian wagering. Both rails were already free at most operators before the reform; both stay free after. The choice between them remains driven by speed, convenience, and the specific verification flows of each operator rather than by surcharge differentials.

The longer-term implications are more interesting. With surcharging gone and interchange falling, the cost gap between card and instant-payment rails narrows. PayID still has structural advantages – no MCC routing, no scheme fees, no chargeback risk – but the differential cost to the operator becomes smaller, which may slow the operator-driven push toward PayID that defined 2024 and 2025. Sportsbet’s March 2025 decision to retire bank transfer in favour of PayID was partly cost-driven; if the cost differential shrinks, future operator decisions may go differently.

Where this leaves Visa for Australian betting in 2026 and beyond

The RBA reform reinforces Visa Debit’s place in the Australian wagering payment mix. The surcharge concern, where it existed at all, is gone. The interchange cost is lower. The credit ban removed the regulatory ambiguity that hung over credit cards specifically, leaving debit Visa as a clean, well-supported, low-friction rail. The combined effect is that Visa is structurally well-positioned for the post-reform landscape.

Learn how interchange fees affect betting costs.

The 2026 reform is one of the more meaningful payment-systems changes in Australia in a decade, and its impact on a specific niche like wagering deposits is a useful test case for how the broader rules work in practice. For the deeper picture of how the underlying interchange mechanics affect bookmaker costs, my piece on interchange and scheme fees on Visa betting transactions covers the cost-stack in detail.