Credit card fees have dropped. Is your business seeing the savings?

If you take cards at the counter, most credit card taps should now cost you less than they did a year ago. The government promised to ban in-store card surcharges by May 2026, but that deadline passed without a new law. While surcharging is still legal, the Commerce Commission has cut the cap on the biggest part of your card fees for NZ credit cards, and introduced one for cards issued overseas.

With costs still rising and many businesses holding off on big decisions, some respite might come from one line on your merchant statement. But there are a few things you need to check to see whether your provider has passed the savings on.

Credit and overseas cards now cost less to accept

Every time a customer taps a credit card, part of what you pay goes to the bank that issued the card. That payment is the interchange fee, and it makes up about 60% of the merchant service fee you pay your provider, according to the Commerce Commission. Scheme fees, processing fees and your provider’s margin make up the rest.

Interchange is the part the Commission regulates, and it has changed the caps in two stages, cutting them for NZ credit cards in December and introducing them for cards issued overseas in May.

Source: Commerce Commission final decision, July 2025, and its June 2026 draft decision on commercial credit cards.

For in-person payments on NZ credit cards, that’s a cut of more than half in a single step. Overseas cards had no limit at all until May, which makes a real difference if you work with tourists. Contactless debit, the everyday bank card your customers tap, keeps the 0.20% cap it has carried since before regulation began, and in-person EFTPOS, where the card is inserted or swiped, doesn’t cost you anything extra per transaction.

According to its final decision, the Commission expects the new caps to cut interchange by a further $100 million a year, and merchant service fees by around $90 million once providers pass the reductions through.

Commercial and corporate credit cards could be next, after the Commission proposed in June 2026 capping their interchange, estimating savings of $40 million a year for businesses, with a final decision expected later this year.

How much a café could save under the new caps

For a café, card fees are one of many costs putting pressure on cash flow, and the mix of cards customers use decides how much the new caps help. Say the café takes $40,000 a month in card payments: $26,000 on contactless debit, $10,000 on NZ credit cards and $4,000 on overseas visitors’ credit cards. Each card type carries its own interchange cap, which sets how much of each amount the café pays in interchange every month, before and after the changes:

• Contactless debit ($26,000): 0.20% before and after, so $52 a month either way.
• NZ credit cards ($10,000): $80 a month at 0.80%, now $30 at 0.30%.
• Overseas credit cards ($4,000): these weren’t capped before May, and the Commission recorded in-person rates of 1.10% to 2.40%. That’s between $44 and $96 a month, now $28 at the new 0.70% cap.

Even at the lower end of that range, the café’s monthly interchange falls from $176 to $110, saving $66 a month, or around $800 a year. These figures are illustrative and cover interchange only, so the provider’s other charges sit on top.

About two-thirds of the café’s card sales are on contactless debit, which saw no change, so its entire saving comes from the smaller share of sales on NZ and overseas credit cards.

For the café, $800 a year is the kind of gain that disappears into a monthly total unless the owner goes looking for it.

Why your fees may not have dropped yet

Two businesses can have the same card mix, the same sales and the same provider, and only one of them will have seen its fees fall in December. The difference is the pricing plan.

The Commission describes two common types of pricing plan. A blended plan charges you a single rate, or a few rates, across card types, which makes your costs easy to predict, but your rate only moves if your provider moves it.

An interchange plus plan charges you the actual interchange on each transaction, plus processing fees and your provider’s margin, so a lower cap flows straight through to your statement.

The Commission based its $90 million estimate on providers passing through about 90% of the interchange cut, as they did after the first caps in 2022, and it is monitoring merchant service fees to check. The government is watching too, with Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister Cameron Brewer saying it wants to see what the interchange cuts have done for merchants as it works out the ban’s next steps.

If you’re on a blended plan, the savings may be sitting with your provider until you ask for them.

Five things to check on your merchant statement

Pull up your November 2025 statement and your most recent one, then work through these.

1. Which pricing plan you’re on. Your statement or merchant agreement should say whether you pay a blended rate or interchange plus. If you can’t tell, that’s the first question for your provider.
2. Your effective rate. Divide your total merchant fees for the month by your total card sales. Compare November 2025 with January 2026 to see the credit card change, and April with June 2026 if you serve overseas visitors.
3. Your card mix. Your statement should break down sales by card type. The larger your share of credit and overseas cards, the more your effective rate should have moved.
4. Everything outside interchange. Scheme fees, terminal rental and processing charges aren’t covered by the caps, so check none of them rose around the time interchange fell.
5. Your provider’s answer. If your effective rate hasn’t changed, ask your provider whether the December and May caps have been applied to your account, and when you’ll see them. If the answer doesn’t satisfy you, shop around, as the Commission encourages businesses to do.

If you’re spring cleaning your business this season, add your merchant statements to the list.

Checking your surcharge against your new costs

The bill to ban surcharges on in-store EFTPOS, Visa and Mastercard payments passed its first reading in September 2025 but has since stalled, and there’s no date for it to become law. For now, surcharging is legal and whether you add one is your call.

The cost a surcharge is meant to cover has fallen, and the Commerce Commission’s guidance on making and accepting payments says it would expect in-person surcharges to “reduce toward 1% or lower for most businesses”.

If you surcharge, compare your surcharge percentage with what those card payments actually cost you. Your statement may break down fees by card type, and if it doesn’t, your effective rate (total merchant fees divided by total card sales) is a rough guide, especially if you surcharge every card.

If your surcharge is higher, the Commission’s guidance is that it should only cover the extra cost of the payment, so it should come down. It also says you should keep at least one way to pay without a surcharge, leave in-person EFTPOS surcharge-free, and make sure customers can see the surcharge before they choose how to pay.

Make the most of the busy season

With the end-of-year rush ahead, a rate still set at last year’s levels will cost you the most right when more cards are going through your terminal.