What the 1 October surcharge ban actually costs a venue

Everything written about the surcharge ban so far has been written for cafes. Fair enough, that is most of the businesses affected. But if you sell tickets through a booking platform, your exposure is a completely different size, and nobody has written that version.

What actually changes

From 1 October 2026, Australian businesses cannot add a surcharge for eftpos, Mastercard or Visa.

Renaming it does not get you out of it. The ACCC has spent years going after fees that appear late in a checkout, across travel and ticketing, and it has won. Calling it a booking fee and showing it on the third screen is the thing they already prosecute.

This is how I read the published rules as an operator, not legal advice. Check your own position properly.

Why is it worse for us than for a cafe?

A cafe surcharging one and a half percent on a five dollar coffee loses seven cents a transaction. Annoying, survivable.

The percentage booking platforms are a different animal. FareHarbor sits around six percent. Peek Pro's booking fee is reported at up to six to eight, varying per booking. Xola charges a partner fee at checkout. Every one of them sold the same line: it costs you nothing, because the fee sits at checkout and your customer covers it.

From October the fee has nowhere to sit. It does not disappear. It lands on you.

Work out your own number

Twelve months of online bookings, times whatever your platform takes. Write down the annual figure, not the monthly one.

Almost nobody has looked at it that way. On a single booking it looks small. Over a year it is usually a staff member, a room refit, or your entire marketing budget.

At forty thousand a month on a seven percent platform, that is $2,800 a month and $33,600 a year. At a hundred thousand a month it is $84,000.

If you are on a flat fee, do the sum anyway. You are probably paying under a thousand a year and it is worth seeing the gap.

The annual cost calculator runs the same sum in your browser.

What can you do about it?

Put your prices up by the percentage. Legitimate, and some will. Two problems. Everything is already expensive for your customers, and the venue down the road might not do it.

Absorb it. Which is what most people will end up doing, mostly by not deciding.

Stop paying a percentage. Flat fee platforms have always existed. The reason people did not move is that the fee never felt like it came out of their pocket. From October it does.

I build one of those, so weigh that accordingly and check the maths yourself.

Four things worth doing before October

Work out your real annual figure.

Open your own checkout on a phone and see whether a card or booking fee is showing.

Email your platform and ask, in writing, what they intend to do on 1 October. Keep the answer.

If you are going to move, start now. Changing booking systems in late September is how you lose a school holiday period.

Why I have been on a flat fee for a decade

I have run venues on a flat-fee platform for years, not because it was the best software on the market but because every alternative wanted six to eight percent of a business I had already built.

That decision looked conservative at the time. Plenty of operators moved to the percentage platforms because the software was better and the fee did not feel like it came out of their pocket. From October, it does. If you made that trade, this is the month it comes due.

More on the deadline itself is on the surcharge ban page.