No more card surcharge on quote deposits and invoice payments

From 1 October 2026, Visa, Mastercard, eftpos and American Express no longer let businesses in Australia add a surcharge when a customer pays by card. The rule applies to the day the customer pays, not the day you sent the invoice. Cooledge has already made the change for you.

What's New

• Quote deposits paid online when your customer accepts a quote are charged at the deposit amount.
• Invoice payments on the online payment page are charged at the amount owing. That includes invoices you sent before the change, so there is nothing to resend.
• Taking a card payment yourself from an invoice in the portal or the mobile app charges the exact amount.
• The payment methods line on your quotes no longer mentions a surcharge. If you had never changed it, or it still matched our original wording, we have updated it for you.

How It Works

There is nothing to switch on. If you wrote your own payment methods line, or mention a card surcharge anywhere else you have typed it (your terms, your bank transfer or cash instructions, your message templates), update that wording in Settings → Quote Preferences, Settings → Invoice Preferences or Settings → Templates.

Stripe processing fees still apply to each card payment. If you take a lot of card payments and want to cover that cost, build it into your prices, for example with the Unit markup and Materials markup in your catalogue settings (on the Materials tab of each system) or in your Price List. The ACCC warns against relabelling a card surcharge as a different fee. Read the ACCC guidance on card surcharges.

More detail is in Stripe Payments.

Why It Matters

Your customers see one price and pay that price, and your payment pages are ready for 1 October without you changing a thing.