A groomer put a question to an Australian grooming group this week. She has always passed the card fee on to whoever chose to pay by card, she pays a monthly rental on the machine as well, and from October she will not be allowed to show that fee separately. So what now? Absorb it, or move the prices?
Forty-odd replies. Most of them arrived at the same answer: if one or two per cent is enough to sink the business, the card fee was never the thing that was wrong.
That is mostly right. It is also very easy to say about someone else's price list. So here is the arithmetic underneath it, including the places where the confident version of the answer skips a step.
What actually changes on 1 October
The Reserve Bank is removing the ability to surcharge on the eftpos, Mastercard and Visa networks, across debit, prepaid and credit cards. American Express, Diners Club, PayPal and buy now pay later sit outside the ban and keep their existing rules.
The fee itself does not go anywhere. What goes is your ability to put it on the invoice as its own line. Stripe, Square, Zeller and Tyro will bill you in October exactly what they billed you in September.
We have written up the compliance side separately, including what counts as a surcharge under the new rules and what does not, in what the surcharge ban means for your pet business. This post is the other half of the question, which is what you do to your prices.
The number, on a real groom
Stripe's published Australian rate today is 1.7% plus 10 cents in person, and 1.7% plus 30 cents online or against a card on file.
On a $120 groom taken on the terminal, that is $2.14.
Stripe has told Australian account holders that the domestic rate drops to 1.65% on 1 October, the same day the ban starts. On a $120 groom that is six cents. Worth having. Not the story. We went through it, and how it now compares to Square, in the Stripe rate cut post.
Now, "it's only two dollars" is exactly the line that irritates people, and fairly, because nobody experiences it two dollars at a time.
Someone in that thread did the honest version instead. Roughly $20 a day in merchant fees, five days a week, across the year, so about $5,200. That is a real number and it deserves to be in the conversation rather than waved away.
Here is the rest of it. At $2.14 a transaction, $5,200 is about 2,400 card payments. At $120 each, that is close to $300,000 going through the machine.
So both things are true at the same time. It is $5,200 a year, and it is 1.8% of what came in.
Which of those two framings is the right one to act on depends entirely on what your margin was before the fee existed. That is the actual question, and it is not a question about payments at all.
Where "just raise your prices" skips a step
It is good advice. It is also the kind of advice that lands hardest on the businesses with the least room to move.
If you put your prices up in March, going again in October is a genuinely different conversation with your regulars, and the fact that the RBA caused it does not make it easier to have at the counter. Some books are more price-sensitive than others, and a move does cost you a handful of clients. Usually fewer than feared. "Fewer than feared" is a comfortable thing to say about someone else's regulars.
And there is a version of this advice that assumes everyone has simply never done the sums, which is not true. Plenty of people have done them, know the price is too low, and are trapped between a number they cannot defend and a book they cannot afford to thin out.
What the ban does, whether or not it is welcome, is take away the line item that was quietly holding the gap together.
What an hour on your bench actually costs
The percentage is the wrong thing to work from. It tells you what Stripe takes, not what you keep.
The number that answers the question is what an hour on the bench costs you before you have earned anything. Rent, power, water, insurance, products, blades and their sharpening, equipment, software, the accountant, the phone, and your own wage as a real cost rather than whatever is left. Divide that by the hours you can actually charge for, not the hours you are open. Set-up, clean-down, the phone, check-in and check-out, and the pet you re-do are all real and none of them are billable.
That gives you a cost per productive hour. Everything else follows from it. If a $120 groom takes ninety minutes on the bench, you are working at $80 an hour of bench revenue, and the card fee on that job is about a minute and a half of your own time.
A margin on top of all that is not greed, it is the thing that pays for a broken dryer and a quiet July. If you have never set a target, somewhere in the 20 to 30 per cent range after every cost including your wage is a reasonable place to start arguing from.
If you want the longer version of that calculation, how to price dog grooming services in Australia walks through it properly, and the annual price review covers doing it on a date instead of when it starts to hurt.
The cash argument, honestly
The reply that always follows is that cash is free, so steer people to cash.
The RBA's own position in its Conclusions Paper is that "cash is no longer clearly cheaper for merchants to accept than debit or credit cards, with the cost of each cash transaction having risen as consumer use has declined".
You will also see a figure quoted saying cash costs merchants 3.9% against 1.8% for cards. Worth knowing where it comes from before you repeat it: it is BCG research from August 2024, and it reached the RBA inside Mastercard's own submission to this review. Mastercard has an obvious interest in that conclusion. Someone in the thread called it out on exactly those grounds, and they were right to.
You do not need the contested number, though, because you can work your own out. Time yourself for a fortnight: counting it, reconciling it, keeping it somewhere safe, banking it, and sorting out the day it does not balance. If that comes to twenty or thirty minutes a week, then at $80 an hour of bench time you are looking at somewhere between $1,300 and $2,000 a year, depending on how you count your weeks and whether you value the trip to the bank at zero.
That is the same order of magnitude as the card fees you were trying to avoid. It just never appeared on a statement, so it never felt like a cost.
None of which means cash is bad. It means "free" is not the right word for it, and a decision made on the word "free" is being made on the wrong information.
How much to actually move
Recovering $2.14 on a $120 service is a 1.8% rise. Call it $122.
Except the fee then applies to the new price too, so at $122 you land about 17 cents short of where you were. This is the part where people talk themselves into precision they do not need. Round instead. $125 covers it with room, and $125 is a price a customer can hold in their head, which $122 is not.
If you are registered for GST, remember that a $5 rise is not $5 in your pocket. Around 45 cents of it belongs to the ATO. Our note on GST-inclusive pricing has the detail.
Before you decide the whole street will notice: the RBA says only around 16 per cent of merchants surcharge at all today, and it expects smaller merchants specifically to raise headline prices in response to the ban, putting the aggregate effect on prices at about 0.1 per cent. The customer who was paying a card fee at your counter has not been paying one at most of the other counters they visit. They are considerably less attuned to this than you are.
And if you take deposits or pre-payments online, check that side too. The online rate carries a 30 cent fixed fee rather than 10, which matters more on a $25 daycare day than on a $250 stay.
Doing it inside Petboost
Plain disclosure before this section: we build Petboost, payments run through it, and we would rather you took them through us. Read the rest of this with that in mind. It is also the answer to the question the post is about, which is why it is here.
Petboost connects to a Stripe account in your own name, so Stripe bills you directly at its published Australian rates and the October reduction reaches you without us in the middle. Card payments at the counter run on the Stripe WisePOS E terminal, ordered through your dashboard, and the payment lands against the appointment rather than needing to be matched to it afterwards.
For the pricing job itself, Services, then Pricing Assistant, then Build Fees Into Pricing. It takes your card processing fee and your Petboost booking fee separately, rather than as one blended number, shows you the before and after on every service, lets you set the rounding, and applies the lot in one go. Configure, preview, review, apply.
While you are in there, turn off Settings, Pricing and Payments, Pass Stripe fee to customer, because that toggle is what puts the surcharge on the invoice and it needs to be off before 1 October. Then run Update Existing Bookings, which finds appointments already in the diary that are still sitting on the old prices.
There is also Magic Pricing, in beta, which reads 90 days of your own appointment data and suggests per-service adjustments based on what each service actually earns per hour rather than a flat percentage across the board. If your price list has drifted unevenly, and most have, it is a more useful starting point than moving everything by the same amount.
If you are not on Petboost, the same job is doable anywhere. Square, Zeller and Tyro are all reasonable terminals and Square in particular is still marginally cheaper than Stripe on in-person rates. The work is the same either way: turn the surcharge off, and move the prices to cover it. The difference is whether you edit the price list by hand.
Before 1 October
Turn the surcharge off, everywhere it exists. The terminal, your invoice template, the booking page, the sign at the counter and the price list on your website.
Work out your cost per productive hour, properly, once. It answers this question and about six others.
Decide what each service should be, then move it, and round to something a customer can remember.
Tell people in advance rather than at the counter. Almost every complaint about a price rise turns out to be a complaint about finding out at pickup.
Then check the bookings already in the diary, because those were taken at the old numbers.
Sources
Further reading
Disclaimer: general information only, not financial, tax or legal advice. Stripe rates are taken from Stripe's Australian pricing page and its notification to Australian account holders, verified on 8 September 2026 and subject to change. RBA figures are taken from the March 2026 Conclusions Paper. Worked examples use a $120 service and a 90 minute bench time purely to make the arithmetic visible, and your own figures will differ. If anything here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it.