Credit Card Surcharges End 1 October: A Personal Trainer Checklist

From 1 October 2026, an Australian business cannot add a card surcharge. If you charge a client extra for paying by Visa, Mastercard, eftpos or American Express, that has to stop. It covers every way you take money: your booking page, invoices, payment links, card reader, and the memberships already running.

What does not stop is the cost of taking the payment. Your processing fee carries on. So does any fee your software takes from each client payment, and no part of this reform touches that.

I am a CPA. Cut my teeth in public practice with small businesses and 20+ years building financial software.

General information, not financial or legal advice. Rates checked 8 September 2026 against each provider's own published pages, linked throughout. Your quoted rate may differ from a published one. Confirm anything that affects your own agreement with your provider or a registered tax agent.

What the card surcharge ban changes for a training business

The Reserve Bank has lifted its ban on "no-surcharge" rules, so from 1 October the Visa, Mastercard and eftpos networks will use them to stop Australian businesses surcharging. American Express is not RBA-regulated in the same way but has agreed to the same date. Credit, debit and prepaid are all covered. The ACCC tells businesses to strip surcharge wording from signage, websites and apps, so online and in person are both in.

Nothing carves out memberships you set up months ago. A renewal processed on 2 October is a card payment made on 2 October. The RBA has also confirmed that an invoice issued in September but paid in October cannot carry a surcharge, so if you invoice in arrears, check what is unpaid.

The card networks and your payment provider enforce this, not a regulator, but the ACCC still acts on businesses that mislead clients about prices.

What the ban leaves alone, according to the RBA's FAQ and the ACCC:

• Weekend and public holiday surcharges, booking fees and service fees, provided they are genuine and not a card surcharge wearing a different name.
• Discounts for paying by cash or PayID. Still allowed, and the RBA suggests them as the way to steer people.
• Your prices. You can raise them to cover payment costs, as long as you are straight with people about why.

One line in that FAQ matters more to gyms than the rest of the reform: the RBA does not regulate surcharges on payment methods that are not cards. Bank direct debit, how most Australian gym memberships are collected, sits outside this ban. More on that below.

Who pays what, and which fee actually stops

Four different fees turn up in a training business. Only one of them ends on 1 October. The example below is for illustration only: a solo trainer with 40 clients on a $200 monthly membership, so $8,000 a month gross.

Read the third row against the second. The fee the law removes is the one your client was paying. Depending on your provider, the biggest fee in that table may be theirs, and nothing in the reform touches it. Plenty of providers charge nothing here, which is why it is worth checking. From 1 October that $240 stops arriving from clients and comes out of your margin.

What a session and a membership actually cost you

Here is a $100 session paid online by card through your own Stripe account. Stripe's standard rate is 1.7% + 30c until 30 September and 1.65% + 30c from 1 October. The surcharge row uses 3%, a common "pass on fees" setting.

If you were surcharging, you are about $2.90 a session worse off, or roughly $290 a month across 100 sessions. If you never surcharged, the change is a five-cent raise. That is money after payment fees only, before GST, rent, insurance and everything else.

What the processors themselves charge

The same $100 payment across the providers an Australian trainer meets. Every figure includes GST, because not all of them quote it that way.

Rates as published on each provider's own website on 8 September 2026, linked above. They change without notice and vary by product, volume and negotiated agreement, and some are promotional. This is a guide to help you ask better questions, not advice about which provider suits you, so confirm your own rate before deciding anything.

Stripe sits at the cheaper end of that list without being the outright cheapest, and once you are a multi-site gym you can usually negotiate with any of them.

What matters more day to day is whose account the money lands in. REPley connects a Stripe Standard account, so it is yours. You log in with your own credentials, and if you leave us you take the account, the history and the client cards. Not every platform works that way, so it is worth knowing which kind you are on before you need to move.

Two things catch people out. Rates are per product, not per company, so a provider's gateway rate and its terminal rate are different numbers. And not everyone puts GST in the advertised figure, so PayPal's 2.9% is nearer 3.19% once it leaves your account.

In Australia, memberships are usually cheaper by direct debit

Through Stripe here, bank direct debit is 1% + 30c capped at $3.50 against 1.65% + 30c on a card. Same fixed fee, lower percentage, so it is cheaper at every amount and the cap helps on the big ones. A $200 membership costs $2.30 to collect instead of $3.60.

Worth checking rather than assuming, though. Some fitness billers charge a flat fee per debit instead, which beats a card on a $200 membership and costs more than one on a $20 class pass. And there is a catch in that arrangement, two sections down.

The card surcharge ban does not stop some software charging transaction fees

Plenty of coaching software takes a cut of every client payment on top of the card cost. That cut is charged to you rather than added to your client's bill, so it is not a surcharge and 1 October does not touch it.

The same illustration: 40 clients on $200 a month, so $8,000 a month gross in memberships, plus $1,000 a month of program sales.

* These are the fees the software takes, on top of card processing and on top of whatever you pay for the software itself. Card processing is separate and applies to every row, ours included. FitPros describes its commission as applying to "program sales", which is its wording rather than ours, so that row is calculated on the $1,000 of programs rather than the $8,000 of memberships. Its public pages do not describe recurring memberships at all, so read the row as the cost of selling programs rather than of billing a roster. Trainerize charges a flat monthly add-on, so it does not grow as you do. PushPress and Momence take their percentage on every payment, and Momence's own pricing page stacks a 5% transaction fee and a 4% service fee on its free plan, before card processing. Mindbody publishes its 20% marketplace fee and its A$30 cap on its own Australian pricing page, but not its processing rate, which it says depends on the plan you choose. That is why half its row is a number and half is a question for their sales team. Every figure here was read from the provider's own website on 8 September 2026 and can change without notice. Treat it as a guide for asking better questions rather than advice, and confirm your own rate with them.

Free plans are worth reading closely. Software given away still has to earn, and where that is a percentage of each payment, it grows as you do while a subscription does not. On this roster the two free plans work out at $5,000 and $8,600 a year. Double the roster, double the fee. For a coach starting out with few payments that can still be the better deal. Do the sum on your own numbers.

None of these fees is illegal and all of them are disclosed somewhere. Ask what the number is before you build a business on it, and keep the answer in writing.

For the full picture, including subscriptions, add-ons and what each platform costs at your client count, see the cost comparison page.

The fees your clients can still be charged

If your memberships run through a fitness billing company on bank debit, your members can still be charged fees after 1 October. That is not a loophole. Bank debit is outside the ban.

Ezidebit says on its own pricing page that "all transaction fees can be paid by the business or passed down to your customers", and its article on the reform tells merchants that admin and dishonour fees are unchanged, because the reform covers transaction surcharges only. PaySmart's product disclosure statement sets out an admin fee of $0 to $15 per transaction on bank debit, charged to the member on top of their instalment, plus a percentage on card and a reversal fee up to $15.90.

Worth knowing before a member asks why their $60 a fortnight came out as $61.95 when the news said surcharges were banned. The ban covers cards, their membership is a bank debit, and the fee is your biller's rather than yours. An easier conversation to have before it happens.

The rate on a website may also not be your rate. Ezidebit's published prices apply to clients using its own portal, and its product disclosure statement permits maximums well above them: up to $2.60 per bank debit, up to 4.70% + $1.30 on eCommerce, a $44 chargeback fee, and a minimum monthly fee of up to $75, topped up when your transaction fees fall short. For a trainer with fifteen clients, that minimum can cost more than every transaction fee combined. None of which is necessarily what you pay. It is what the document allows, and you cannot know which without reading it.

I use REPley. What do I need to do?

Nothing.

There is no surcharge setting in REPley to switch off, because there has never been one. Checkout sends Stripe your package price, plus GST where you charge it, and nothing else. Your subscription is the only thing we charge you. Your clients pay Stripe's standard rate straight from your own Stripe account, and we take nothing per payment: no surcharge, no transaction fee, no commission, no per-client charge, no monthly minimum, no lock-in.

The October rate cut needs nothing from you either. Stripe's own page on it says "No action is needed at this time, and these changes will automatically apply to your business or your connected accounts". Your domestic rate becomes 1.65% + 30c on the day.

We are Australian and the software is built for how you get paid here: AUD prices, GST tax invoices carrying your ABN, BECS Direct Debit beside card at checkout, BAS-ready exports, and software support in your own time zone.

If you want to be thorough, here is your whole checklist. Three things, about ten minutes.

1. Read your own package wording, using the three places further down. This is the only step that is genuinely yours rather than ours.
2. If you took payments somewhere else before us, disconnect the old platform in Stripe. How to do that is in the next few lines.
3. If you sell memberships, switch on BECS Direct Debit under Settings, then Payment methods in your Stripe Dashboard. A $200 membership costs $2.30 to collect instead of $3.60 by card.

Not connected to Stripe yet? The setup guide takes about ten minutes, and if you connect before 1 October nothing changes for you on the day.

If you took payments somewhere else before REPley

Worth ten minutes. Old software can still be connected to the same Stripe account, and while it is, it can charge your clients and take its cut.

Sign in at dashboard.stripe.com with the email you used to connect Stripe to REPley. If you cannot remember it, use the forgotten-password link rather than creating a second account, which would hold none of your history.

Open Settings, then Team and security, then Authorised applications. Everything listed there can create charges on your account. Disconnect anything you no longer use.

That is the whole job in Stripe. Do not go hunting for a surcharge switch, because there is not one to find. In Australia a surcharge is built into a platform's code, so it belonged to the old software rather than to your Stripe settings.

I use other software. What do I need to do?

Ask them, in writing. A written answer is the only one that binds them, and two things make it harder than it should be.

Most larger coaching platforms are headquartered overseas, so an Australian rule change reaches their support queue slower than it reaches you, and the deadline is yours rather than theirs. And a surcharge switched off at checkout does not always come off memberships already running.

Send this as one message. A provider who has done the work will answer inside a day.

1. What is my card processing rate, and what else do you charge on each payment?
2. Is any client card surcharge switched on in my account, under any name? Ask by what it does rather than what it is called. Zen Planner calls it Flex Fees, WodBoard has a charging transaction fees option, and elsewhere it turns up as a convenience, processing or admin fee.
3. Will you remove it by 1 October, or do I have to? Does that cover memberships and payment links already running?
4. On a $100 session, what does my client pay from 1 October, and what do I receive?
5. What can my clients still be charged, including on bank debit?
6. Is there a monthly minimum, an account fee, or a term I am locked into?
7. Whose Stripe or merchant account is it, and can I take it with me if I leave?

Read your own words, whoever you are with

This is the only step about you rather than about software, and nobody else can do it. A client meets your wording in three places:

1. Your packages. The name, the description, and the public description a client reads at checkout. In REPley that is Business, then Packages.
2. Your storefront and everything outside it. Your own website, your socials, and anything printed or stuck on a gym wall.
3. Your agreements and invoices. Membership terms, waivers, and any note that rides along on an invoice.

A line like "3% surcharge applies to card payments" has to come down before 1 October. Renaming it an admin fee is not a fix, and the ACCC has said businesses that do that may be engaging in misleading conduct.

For most trainers this is a two-minute read. There is no surcharge or percentage field in REPley to switch off, so with us it is a wording job rather than a settings job.

The full checklist before 1 October

Written for a trainer on any software. If you are with us, the three steps in your section above are your version of this. Worth bookmarking either way.

1. Trace one payment, end to end. Take a client payment from last month and line up three numbers: the price you advertised, what the client was actually charged on their receipt, and what reached your account. In Stripe, open Payments, click the payment, and the fee breakdown sits under the amount. In PayPal it is Activity, then the transaction, then the fee line. Any other provider has the same thing somewhere, and if you cannot find it, that is your first question for support. If the client paid more than your advertised price, the difference is a surcharge. If you received less than the price minus your processor's published rate, something else has taken a cut.
2. List every way a client pays you. Booking page, storefront, payment links, invoices, card reader, and the memberships that renew on their own. The checkout for new clients is the one everyone fixes first and the one that matters least.
3. Check what is unpaid. An invoice you sent in September cannot be surcharged if it is paid in October.
4. Do the sum on your real volume. The surcharge you lose, then separately what your software takes per payment. For some trainers the second number is the bigger one, and it is the one that gets the least attention.
5. Decide on price. Absorb it, lift your rates, or move memberships to direct debit. Check the notice period in your own membership terms before you change a recurring price.
6. Fix the wording, then trace another payment. Clear the surcharge lines from the three places above, then buy something from yourself and repeat step one. The client should pay exactly your advertised price, and what lands in your account should be that price minus your processor's rate and nothing else. Check the first October membership renewal the same way.

The short version

The surcharge ban is good for your clients and roughly neutral for you, unless you were surcharging. The fees that shape your margin are the ones no reform is touching: a cut of every payment, an add-on for billing, a commission on a client the platform introduced, a monthly minimum. All of them are legitimate ways to charge for software. They are just easier to miss than a line on a receipt.

Work out what your software takes from a $100 session. If it is more than the processor's own rate, you now know what the rest is buying.

BuildStability is your subscription plus Stripe's standard rate, direct to your account, and nothing else. Start a free trial, connect Stripe, and trace one payment yourself.

Related reading: the hidden costs of fitness software and accounting software for personal trainers in Australia.

Rates and rules checked 8 September 2026: RBA, Removal of payment surcharges from 1 October 2026 · ACCC, Card surcharges · Stripe, Updates to card pricing in Australia from October 2026 · Stripe, Collect surcharges · Ezidebit pricing · PaySmart PDS · PayPal AU merchant fees · Square AU pricing · PushPress pricing · FitPros free software. Every rate above came from the provider's own published pages on that date. Rates change without notice and vary by product, volume and negotiated agreement, and promotional rates apply in some cases. General information only, not advice about which product suits your business, so confirm your own before deciding anything.