EFTPOS and paywave fees in NZ: what small shops pay and how much margin they cost

In New Zealand, a customer who inserts or swipes an EFTPOS card and chooses Cheque or Savings costs you nothing per sale at the banks; you usually pay a monthly terminal fee instead. Tapping a card or phone, or paying by credit card, goes through Visa or Mastercard and costs a merchant service fee: 0.95% for New Zealand cards on BNZ's portable terminal, 0.7% to 1.25% for New Zealand cards on ANZ's blended rates, and from 2.6% + 5c at Stripe. On an item you sell for $46 including GST that cost you $24, a 0.95% fee takes 44c of your $16 gross profit, or 2.7% of it.

The rest of this guide uses the same numbers to show what each way of paying costs, why GST makes the fee bite harder than its headline rate, what a month of fees adds up to, where surcharging stands, and how to find the rate you're really paying.

What does each way of paying cost a small shop?

These are rates that providers publish. Most bank plans aren't published at all: your rate depends on your average sale, card mix and contract, so your merchant agreement and statements are what count. The Commerce Commission's own comparison found published rates for only a few of the largest providers.

Shift4 (formerly Smartpay), a terminal provider that isn't a bank, offers either one flat rate for all Visa and Mastercard payments or a no-fee plan that surcharges customers, but it doesn't publish the rate. Ask for it in writing.

Merchant fees come out of your margin, not your sales

A 0.95% fee sounds small because it's measured against the sale. But your shop runs on what's left after the cost of the goods, and that's where the fee comes from.

Take an item that's $46 at the till: $40 plus $6 GST. It costs you $24, so your gross profit is $16, a 40% margin. The card fee is charged on the full $46, GST included, but you only keep $40 of it, so a 0.95% fee costs you 1.09% of your sales after GST. The fee carries no GST, so there's no GST to claim back on it either:

The last row comes from one formula: fee as a share of gross profit = fee rate ÷ gross margin, with both measured against your sales after GST. If you're GST-registered, that means multiplying the quoted rate by 1.15 first: 0.95% × 1.15 = 1.09%, and 1.09% ÷ 40% = 2.7%. If you're not registered, your prices carry no GST and you use the quoted rate as it is. The thinner your margin, the bigger the bite:

A dairy or bottle store working on a 20% margin gives up 5.5% of its gross profit to a 0.95% fee, and 15% to a 2.6% one. A gift shop or clothing store on 50% to 60% feels less than half of that.

A fixed fee per payment weighs most on small sales. Stripe's 2.6% + 5c is 3.6% of a $5 coffee but 2.7% of a $46 sale. If most of your sales are small, compare providers on your average sale, not the headline percentage.

What a month of fees looks like

A month of fees isn't one rate times your takings. Cash and inserted EFTPOS cost nothing per sale, tapped and credit cards cost a percentage, and the expensive cards count for more than their share of sales. Here's a shop on BNZ's portable terminal that takes $30,000 in a month:

That's $2,964 a year, or 0.95% of the shop's sales after GST. Overseas cards are 3% of takings but more than a tenth of the merchant fees. Two choices move the total most. If this shop settled its card sales to another bank, BNZ's 0.45% premium on fixed pricing would add $94.50 a month on $21,000 of card sales. And if the customers who insert their EFTPOS card started tapping instead, that $6,000 would cost another $57 a month. Put in your own takings and rates to get your number.

Why your bank deposits don't match your takings

Your POS records what the customer paid. What reaches your bank account follows your provider's rules, so the two rarely line up day by day.

• Record sales at the full amount the customer paid, and record merchant fees as a separate expense. Your sales figures then stay right when customers switch from cash to cards, and you can see what the fees cost.
• Banks often settle your card sales in full and take the fees later. BNZ charges the month's merchant service fees in one debit on the 15th of the following month, so the gap shows up once a month, not on every deposit.
• Settlement now runs seven days a week. BNZ pays next-day settlements into a BNZ account each morning, 365 days a year, and same-day settlements by the end of the day; another bank decides when you see the money. Shift4 also settles seven days a week.
• Refunds come out of the same settlement, so a day with more refunds than card sales takes money out of your account. Stripe keeps its processing fee on a refunded payment, unless the refund goes through as a reversal soon after the sale; for bank plans, check your merchant agreement.
• Disputes cost extra at Stripe: $25 for each one you receive, and another $25 if you contest it yourself (refunded if you win).

Can you add a surcharge for paywave and credit cards?

Yes, for now. Surcharging in-store card payments is still legal in New Zealand, but the Commerce Commission expects it to be done appropriately: tell customers about the surcharge before they pay, offer at least one way to pay without one, and charge no more than the extra cost of that payment method, which for most businesses is the merchant service fee. EFTPOS shouldn't be surcharged at all, because it doesn't cost you extra per sale. The Commission says it expects in-person surcharges to fall toward 1% or lower for most businesses. A surcharge that misleads customers can be reported to it.

If you do surcharge, GST applies to it. Inland Revenue treats a card surcharge as part of the price of what you're selling, so on a standard-rated sale the surcharge includes 15% GST, which you pass on to Inland Revenue.

A ban is planned but not law. The Retail Payment System (Ban on Merchant Surcharges) Amendment Bill would stop surcharges on in-store EFTPOS, Visa and Mastercard payments, tapped, inserted or by phone, one month after it receives Royal assent. It was meant to be in force by May 2026, but it stalled for lack of political support, and it was still waiting on the Order Paper when Parliament rose for the 7 November 2026 election. The minister says National still wants a ban. Whether it goes ahead is up to the next Parliament, so watch for news before you build a surcharge into your plans.

The other way to recover card costs is your prices. If tapped and credit cards are 70% of your takings at 0.95%, fees cost about 0.67% of takings, so prices about 0.7% higher cover them.

What a surcharge really covers has also shrunk. Interchange is the part of the fee your provider pays the card's bank, and the largest part of what you pay. On 1 December 2025 its cap for New Zealand personal credit cards used in person fell from 0.80% to 0.30%. The caps on debit cards stayed where they were: 0.20% for a tap and 0% when the card is inserted. Caps on overseas cards (0.70% for credit, 0.60% for debit, in person) followed on 1 May 2026, and New Zealand business credit cards will be capped at 0.70% in person from 22 April 2027.

Is a payment method worth accepting? Work out the break-even

A payment method costs you its fee and earns you the sales you'd lose without it. The break-even uses the same formula: the share of that method's sales that must be extra business = fee rate ÷ gross margin, after the 1.15 GST step if you're registered.

Take Amex at BNZ's 1.30% on a 40% margin: 1.30% × 1.15 ÷ 40% = 3.7%. If at least one Amex sale in 27 would otherwise walk out the door, accepting it pays for itself. And a customer you turn away usually has another card, so what Amex really costs you is the gap to that card: 0.35 points at BNZ.

Overseas cards at 2.35% need 6.8% of those sales to depend on you taking them. For a shop in a tourist town, where a visitor with only a foreign card has no other way to pay, that's an easy call. Visa and Mastercard as a whole are easier still: at 0.95%, only 2.7% of those sales need to depend on them, and they now carry three in four electronic payments.

How do you find the rate you're really paying?

The Commerce Commission's method: divide the month's merchant service fees by your Visa and Mastercard sales. That's your effective rate. Add terminal rental if you want the full cost of taking cards. If your statement splits fees by card type, do it for each one and you'll see which costs you most.

Then check that the interchange cuts reached you. The Commission says banks passed on 90% of earlier cuts automatically and asks businesses to contact their bank to make sure the December 2025 cuts were passed on. If your rate is the same as a year ago, ask.

Ask about interchange-plus pricing too, where you pay the actual interchange plus a fixed margin. The Commission says it's often cheaper for most businesses, though less predictable. At BNZ's listed 0.5% + interchange for New Zealand cards, a tapped personal debit card costs at most 0.70% and a personal credit card used in person at most 0.80%, because interchange is capped.

Let your POS do the sums

We found no New Zealand rule that requires a certified cash register, so the POS you use is your choice. What Inland Revenue does require is records of your cash and non-cash sales, kept for at least seven years, and since April 2022 it has been an offence to supply or possess software that hides or deletes sales.

If you run your counter on an iPad, DingPOS can estimate the fees for you. In Settings → Payment Methods, give each payment method its processing fee: a percentage, a fixed amount per transaction, or both. Add separate methods for inserted EFTPOS (no fee) and tapped or credit cards (0.95% on BNZ's portable terminal, or 2.6% and $0.05 at Stripe), so the free payments stay free in your numbers. Merchant fees generally carry no GST, so enter the rate as quoted. If your provider keeps its fee on refunds, as Stripe does, turn off “Percentage fee returned on refunds”. The Payment Methods card on Stats then shows the estimated fee and net received for each method. DingPOS doesn't process payments or read your provider's statements, so these figures are estimates from the rates you enter, and your statement shows the actual amount.

Setup is covered in Can DingPOS track card and mobile payment fees?. Fee tracking is on the Standard plan and up (compare them on Pricing), and you can try everything free for 30 days.