If your salon adds a card surcharge today, 1 October 2026 matters.
From that date, Australian businesses can no longer add a surcharge because a client pays by card on eftpos, Mastercard or Visa. The ban also covers American Express credit cards and UnionPay, while PayPal follows on 5 October 2026.
For salons, spas, barbers, beauty clinics, nail salons and sole traders, the message is simple: the price your client sees must be the price they pay.
The cost of taking payments does not disappear. It just has to be absorbed into your overall pricing instead of being added at the counter.
According to the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), the no-surcharge rules apply from 1 October 2026 to:
PayPal’s no-surcharge rule starts on 5 October 2026.
You can still review your overall pricing. What you cannot do is add a separate fee just because a client chooses to pay by card. For practical guidance, it is worth checking both business.gov.au and the ACCC.
Big businesses can often spread payment costs across higher volume and wider margins. Small salons cannot.
If you are a sole trader, home salon, barber, beauty therapist, nail tech or small clinic team, every dollar has to work harder. You have limited appointments, rising operating costs and only so many hours in the day.
As Shelly Rau told Professional Beauty: “Fees cost me over $2,000 a year.”
That is exactly why this change matters. Many small operators will now need to build payment costs into pricing more deliberately, without making clients feel penalised.
This is where salon memberships become more than a retention tool. They become a smarter pricing model. Instead of relying on one-off payments appointment by appointment, you create a custom package around services your clients already use and generate recurring revenue through memberships.
With Salon Pay, your memberships are built around predictability:
That means you can build pricing more confidently, improve loyalty and remove the awkward end-of-appointment surcharge conversation.
You can read the official updates via the RBA, ASBFEO and Professional Beauty.
The surcharge ban is a compliance change, but it is also a prompt to build a more stable salon business.
Instead of chasing payment costs one transaction at a time, you can move towards predictable revenue with salon memberships, clearer pricing and a better client experience.
Salon Pay is designed for busy salon owners who want the benefits of recurring revenue through memberships without piling more admin onto the day.
If you want a simpler way to absorb payment costs and create more predictable income, Salon Pay is here to help.
Get started for Free and see how memberships could work in your salon.