Average EFTPOS fees in Australia: what each industry actually pays

The average EFTPOS fees in Australia sit somewhere between 0.9% and 1.7% blended, and that range is so wide it’s almost useless.

Which is half the problem, honestly. It’s very hard for a small business to work out what it actually costs them, let alone whether the number on their statement is any good.

So let’s do something nobody else seems willing to do and go through it industry by industry, with the rates we actually see.

First, why there is no single average

What you pay depends on a lot more than most people think:

• What industry you’re in
• Your average transaction size
• Whether your terminal is bundled with a point of sale
• How much volume you do — a corporate doing serious numbers gets a different conversation
• Your card mix: premium credit, plain debit, international
• Whether you’re selling overseas, or sitting under a backpackers taking foreign cards all day
• Your risk profile

And I’ve honestly just scratched the surface there.

Risk deserves its own mention. If you’re an online FX trading platform there’s a lot more risk in that than a butcher with a terminal. Gambling — MCC 7995 — a lot of banks simply won’t touch. Travel has a hell of a time finding a bank that will support them at all.

So when someone asks what the average EFTPOS fee is in Australia, the truthful answer is that there isn’t one. But there are typical ranges by industry, and knowing yours is the difference between accepting a rate and negotiating one.

Small food and beverage: 1.2% to 1.4%

Cafés, restaurants, bakeries. Independent operators, not the chains.

You’re almost never going to sit under 1% here, and that’s not your provider being greedy. There are fixed costs in scheme fees and some interchange that don’t shrink just because your transaction is small. A café doing $12 orders or a bakery selling $6 muffins has those fixed cents spread across a tiny sale, which pushes the percentage up whether anyone likes it or not.

So expect 1.2% to 1.4%.

If you’re over 1.4% and you’re not doing genuinely tiny average transaction sizes, there is definitely room to shop around.

Now, if you’re a $400,000 café with a $15 average transaction, you can’t really dictate much below 1.2%. You might find a provider who’ll go under it, but it’ll be hard work. That’s not anyone being unfair — it costs real money to put a merchant on, service them, and run the systems behind them. Nobody wants to earn $50 a year off a customer. Businesses have to be profitable, for their owners and for their shareholders if they’re listed.

Do a lot of volume and they’ll take a thinner margin, because the dollars are bigger. That’s the whole trade.

Food and beverage with a POS bundle: 1.4% to 2.2%

This is the one worth paying attention to, because it sits above the normal range entirely.

The common bundles here are Oolio, Square, Lightspeed. They’re all really expensive, and often you’re paying SaaS fees on top.

I get that it’s annoying to change point of sale. But they know they’ve got you. That’s the point of the bundle. The only way to break their grip is to move point of sale — and plenty of point of sale systems these days let you choose your payments provider, and a lot of those offer far better rates.

Brokers have partnered with POS companies specifically for this. Eftpos Choice is one, Eftpos House another. They can generally beat the bundled deal comfortably. And you’re not waiting three days for your Square settlement either.

I’ve seen 2.2% with Square. So call the bundled range 1.4% to 2.2%, and if you’re at the 1.4% end you’ve probably got a SaaS fee sitting underneath it.

The other thing merchants tell me is that they stay with Square or Stripe because of the funding. Fair enough — but Tyro does funding, and a number of the banks do it too, and they’ll look at your merchant turnover to support it. You’re not as stuck as you think.

Pubs: under 1%, and stop going to your bank

Pubs are big businesses. Plenty turn over $5 million, plenty more do $10 million, and a lot have a bottle shop attached.

They’re in a pickle right now, because a lot of them either bundled their point of sale or run a high surcharge — and from 1 October they cop that surcharge themselves, across a very large sales base.

A decent-sized pub with no point of sale bundle should be under 1%. If you’re not, you need to give us a call.

And if you’re a group — four or five pubs, $30 to $50 million across the lot — there is enormous room to move. A broker will happily say “I’ll earn X and I’m happy with that”, and you end up with a genuinely good rate. For those businesses, shopping around isn’t optional. It’s vital.

If you’re a pub group with a bundled point of sale, get out of it. Every day your staff get more used to that POS is another day down the drain that you could have been saving money.

And don’t go to your bank. They don’t know point of sale, they can’t help you with it, and they’ll be useless. You need a third party who does payments and point of sale, or you won’t get the advice or the solution you need. The days of your bank giving you the best advice are over — which is its own conversation.

Pubs do meals too, so the average transaction is much larger than a café’s, which is exactly why there’s room to move.

It’s not only the rate

Here’s where a lot of comparisons fall over. For pubs and restaurants, pay at table and tipping matter as much as the number.

Some merchants simply won’t go without tipping — because once staff are making an extra $100 or $200 a week in tips, shift and staffing problems disappear. That’s worth more than a few basis points.

A bank rang me about this recently: “Dave, help us out here.” Their customer’s point of sale wouldn’t integrate the tipping function and wouldn’t budge, and there were seven restaurants riding on it. That’s a merchant saying I need tipping or I’m going somewhere else, and meaning it.

Pay at table is the same. Not a big deal for a ten-table restaurant. Enormous for a pub with tables spread outside — it’s staff efficiency and customer satisfaction in one feature.

So yes, ask what your EFTPOS fee should be. But also ask what you’re actually getting. The full list of what sits outside the rate is here.

High average transaction size: 0.90% or under

Mechanics. Flooring. Jewellers. Carpenters and electricians selling to consumers rather than to trade.

Average transaction sizes here run from a couple of hundred dollars up to one, two, three thousand. Mechanics usually sit around $200 to $500, more if they’re boutique.

If those businesses are turning over a half-decent amount — call it a million — they should be looking at 0.90% or under. Turn over less and it might creep up a bit.

These are the businesses that can get a much better price in the market, and most of them don’t. Here’s why.

The banks bundle everything, a bit like insurance. They look at the book and say: right, the book earns this much. And just as a good driver subsidises a bad driver, a high average transaction business doing solid volume ends up subsidising a low average transaction business inside the same portfolio.

So if you’re on a blended 1.4%, you’re carrying the bakery whose real cost is 1.7% because they’re selling $5 muffins.

It’s the insurance fallacy. Don’t subsidise them. Go and get a rate that matches your business, your transaction sizes, your card mix.

One caveat: this only holds if you’re selling to consumers. If your customers are trade paying on business cards, your costs are going the other way — commercial credit interchange stays at 0.80% while consumer credit drops to 0.30% on 1 October. A trade supplier can genuinely end up worse off.

Online, and the high-risk end

Ecommerce doesn’t sit neatly in any of the above, because the card mix drives it. A WooCommerce store selling into Australia looks nothing like one selling half its volume overseas — and from 1 April 2027, foreign-issued card interchange is capped at 1.0%, which changes that maths again.

And the genuinely high-risk categories — FX platforms, gambling, travel — aren’t priced off a range at all. They’re priced off whether anyone will take you. That’s where a broker earns their keep: not shaving 10 basis points, but finding you a home when three banks have already said no.

I’m not going to publish a number for either of those, because there isn’t an honest one. They’re quoted case by case, and anyone giving you a headline rate for high risk is telling you what you want to hear.

The short version

The one thing certain about average EFTPOS fees in Australia is that the number on your statement has more to do with who sold it to you than what it costs to process. The only way to find out is to compare, and to ring your current provider and ask them to do better — because a lot of them will, and some of these payment companies, excuse the French, take the piss.

Run your numbers through the calculator, or see what the panel actually charges.