Australia's RBA Finalizes Card Payment Reform: What Global Issuers and Acquirers Need to Know

If you manage card economics in any regulated market, pay attention: Australia just locked in a full-stack reset.

The RBA published its final Conclusions Paper today (March 31, 2026). The reforms are legally binding under the Payment Systems (Regulation) Act 1998.

Here’s what landed, and why issuers and acquirers should treat it as a P&L event.

- Surcharging is banned. Effective October 1, 2026, across designated debit, credit, and prepaid card systems. The RBA is lifting its prohibition on “no-surcharge” rules, which means Visa, Mastercard, and eftpos can enforce surcharge bans on merchants. Legislation is the backstop if the schemes (networks) don’t act.

- Consumer credit interchange is capped at 0.30%. Down from a hard cap of 0.80%. Australia now aligns with the EU and UK level for consumer credit.

- Commercial credit interchange remains at 0.80%. The PSB carved out commercial cards, citing competitive dynamics with three-party networks. If you run commercial and virtual B2B card programs, this carve-out matters.

- Debit interchange is tightened. The cap drops from 10 cents (or 0.20%) to 8 cents (or 0.16%).

- Foreign-issued interchange is regulated for the first time. A 1.00% cap applies to foreign-issued card transactions acquired in Australia.

- Transparency is mandated. Large acquirers must publish merchant average cost of acceptance by card type and merchant size, and schemes must publish aggregate interchange and scheme fee data quarterly.

The RBA estimates total savings of A$2.5 billion (~US$1.7 billion) per year. Domestic reforms commence October 1, 2026, with foreign card caps and some transparency measures commencing April 1, 2027.

Why this matters beyond Australia:

Australia has been a regulatory bellwether for card payments since the early 2000s, and the sequencing here is what global teams should study. This package hits every layer of the fee stack at once: interchange is compressed, surcharging is removed, transparency is mandated, and scheme fees are explicitly on notice, with further action signaled if fee growth doesn’t moderate.

With interchange capped at 0.30% in Australia (and continuing to compress globally), the profitability levers that remain are increasingly on the cost side. Network (scheme) fees are the largest controllable cost most issuers and acquirers haven’t systematically optimized.

In Australia’s own data, scheme fees were growing 11% YoY against much smaller transaction growth. That “gap” is exactly the kind of evidence other regulators will cite.

I’ve been covering this reform in a three-part series. Parts 1 and 2 are in the comments. Part 3 isn’t live yet.