Money, 7 min read

What booking fees really cost a dog daycare

By the PackDay team. Checked against the sources listed at the end.

Card fees, booking fees and platform fees all come out of the same takings. Here’s how to tell them apart, what changed with card surcharges in October 2026, and how to work out what you really pay.

Two fees that look alike

When a client pays for daycare by card, two different kinds of fee can be taken from that payment. It helps to keep them apart in your head, because they behave very differently over time.

Card processing fees, sometimes called merchant service fees, are what your payment provider charges to move the money. They bundle together the interchange fee paid to the bank that issued the card, the scheme fee paid to the card network, and the provider’s own margin. Every business that takes cards pays these in some form.

Booking or platform fees are charged by your software company. They are usually a percentage of each booking, or of each payment taken through the system. Some providers fold them into a single “payments” rate, so they look like card fees. They aren’t. They are a charge for using the software, and they grow every time your business grows.

A flat monthly subscription costs the same whether you have a quiet July or a packed December. A percentage fee quietly rises with every new client, every price increase and every extra day a dog attends.

What changed with surcharging on 1 October 2026

Until recently, Australian businesses could add a surcharge to card payments, as long as it didn’t exceed what it cost them to accept that type of card. The ACCC enforced that rule.

The Reserve Bank of Australia finished its review of merchant card payment costs and surcharging in March 2026. The changes that took effect on 1 October 2026 are:

• Businesses can no longer surcharge debit, prepaid or credit cards on the eftpos, Mastercard and Visa networks.
• American Express also removed surcharging from the same date.
• The caps on interchange fees for Australian-issued cards were lowered. For consumer credit cards the cap fell from 0.8% to 0.3%. For debit and prepaid cards it fell from 10 cents or 0.2% to 8 cents or 0.16%.
• The old “no more than your cost of acceptance” surcharge rules no longer apply to these cards, because surcharges on them are gone.

More changes are already scheduled. Card networks and large payment providers must start publishing their fees, with the first reports due by 30 October 2026. Standardised fee information on merchant statements, and caps on interchange for foreign cards, start on 1 April 2027.

You still have options. The ACCC says you can offer a discount for a cheaper way to pay, such as cash or PayID, as long as the full price is shown prominently and the discount is clearly disclosed. You can also raise your prices to cover card costs, as long as you don’t mislead people about why. The new rules apply only to card payment surcharges, not to other fees.

What this means in practice: every fee on a card payment now comes straight out of your margin, unless you build it into your prices. The RBA expects lower interchange caps to help businesses, especially small ones, which are usually charged the highest costs. Whether you see that saving depends on your plan and your provider. The RBA suggests checking you are on the best plan and shopping around.

What a 1.3% booking fee adds up to

Here is an example. Say your software takes a booking fee of 1.3% of every payment it processes. This is on top of your card processing fees, not instead of them.

The numbers are illustrative, but the pattern is real. Double your takings and you double the fee, even though the software is doing the same job it did last year. At $60,000 a month, that example fee alone would cover a lot of casual shifts.

Questions to ask any software provider

Before you sign, or before your next renewal, ask these questions and get the answers in writing.

• Do you take a percentage of payments or bookings? If so, how much, and is it on top of card processing fees?
• Who processes the payments? Can you choose your own payment provider, or are you locked in to theirs?
• What do text messages cost? Is there a monthly allowance, and what happens when you go over it?
• Do you charge per staff login, per location or per client? Ask what the bill would look like if you added two staff and a second site.
• Can you export all your data at any time, free? That means clients, dogs, vaccinations, bookings, packages and notes, in a standard format such as CSV.
• How long is the contract? What does it cost to leave early, and how much notice do you need to give?
• How do price rises work? How much notice do you give, and how often have prices gone up in the past few years?
• Are there other fees? Ask about setup, onboarding, payouts, refunds and chargebacks.

If a provider can’t give you a straight answer to any of these, treat that as an answer.

How to work out your own effective rate

Your effective rate is the total you pay in fees, as a percentage of the money you take by card. It’s the only number that lets you compare providers fairly, because it includes everything, not just the headline rate.

1. Get one full month’s merchant statement from your payment provider, plus the invoice or payout report from your booking software.
2. Find your total card takings for the month. Use the gross amount, before any fees are taken out.
3. Add up every fee for that month. Include transaction fees, terminal rental, minimum monthly fees, chargeback fees, payout fees and any booking or platform percentage.
4. Divide your total fees by your total card takings, then multiply by 100. That’s your effective rate for the month.
5. Repeat for two or three more months. Fixed fees make quiet months look more expensive, so an average is more honest.
6. Compare the result with the rate you were quoted when you signed up.

Here is a worked example with made-up numbers. Card takings for the month are $30,000. The payment provider charged $310 in transaction fees and $40 in terminal rental. The booking software took $390. Total fees are $740. $740 divided by $30,000, multiplied by 100, gives an effective rate of about 2.47%.

If your effective rate is well above your headline rate, look for the extras: monthly minimums, separate fees for certain cards, or a software percentage you had forgotten about. From April 2027, standardised merchant statements should make this easier to see.

Try the calculator on our home page with your own numbers.

Sources

• Reserve Bank of Australia: Review of Merchant Card Payment Costs and Surcharging: Conclusions Paper (media release, 31 March 2026)
• Reserve Bank of Australia: Review of Merchant Card Payment Costs and Surcharging: non-technical summary
• Reserve Bank of Australia: Conclusions Paper, 2. Surcharging
• Reserve Bank of Australia: Conclusions Paper, 3. Interchange Fees
• Reserve Bank of Australia: Conclusions Paper, 8. Impact and Implementation
• Reserve Bank of Australia: Conclusions Paper, Frequently Asked Questions
• ACCC: Card surcharges