Wait — why does the ban cost me money? I never kept the surcharge.
The surcharge just covered the fee you pay your provider. The ban gets rid of the surcharge, not the fee.
That $1.50 out of every $100, all year, is the big red number above. A small price rise gets it back.
Isn't the RBA cutting card fees too? Maybe I won't need to raise prices.
Partly true. From the same date, the RBA's final decision caps interchange fees: consumer credit 0.8% → 0.3%, debit 0.2% → 0.16% (or 10c → 8c fixed). Commercial/business cards stay at 0.8%. But interchange is only one slice of what you pay: your provider adds scheme fees and their own margin on top, and they decide how much of the cut reaches you.
If you're on a flat-rate provider (Square, Zeller and co.), your cost only drops when they cut their headline rate — and they haven't committed to that. Big retailers with negotiating power will capture the savings first; small merchants are the "wait and see".
So treat this calculator as your worst case. When your provider tells you your new rate, come back and re-run the numbers with it. Raising a bit less later is an easy problem to have. Being short hundreds a month from October isn't.
What about my customers who pay cash?
The calculator already accounts for them — it's why your rise is smaller than your surcharge. You only lose surcharge revenue on card sales, but you recover it across all sales, so the rise is spread thinner.
So yes — cash customers chip in a little toward card costs. That's built into the ban itself, not this tool; every business in Australia faces the same shift. If it matters to you (especially on big invoices), cash discounts remain legal — the ban stops surcharging cards, not discounting cash. Two rules keep it clean: the discount must be a genuine discount off your normal listed price, and you can't rename a surcharge as an "admin fee" or "card fee" — regulators treat that as misleading conduct.