Public holiday surcharge in a café: what's legal, how to show it, and whether it covers the wages

Yes, your café can add a public holiday surcharge, and you don’t need a second menu to do it. Australian rules let cafés, restaurants and bistros show one notice stating the percentage and the days it applies. That notice must be at least as prominent as the most prominent price on the menu. Card surcharges ended on 1 October 2026, but day-based surcharges did not.

That covers the legal side. The harder question is whether your surcharge actually pays for the day. With Christmas Day, Boxing Day, New Year’s Day and Australia Day all due in the next 14 weeks, now is the time to work it out properly, before the rosters go up and the menus go to print.

Can a café legally charge a public holiday surcharge?

It can. Normally, Australian Consumer Law requires a business that quotes part of a price to also show the total price as a single figure. Before 2013, that tripped up a lot of cafés: a note at the bottom of the menu saying “10% surcharge on public holidays” wasn’t enough, and the ACCC issued infringement notices to prove it.

The law was changed in 2013 to carve out hospitality. According to the ACCC’s price display guidance, restaurants, cafés and bistros that charge a surcharge on certain days don’t need a separate menu or a separate column of surcharged prices. They do need to:

• State the surcharge and the days, along the lines of “A surcharge of 15% applies on public holidays”.
• Make it prominent. The notice must be at least as prominent as the most prominent price on the menu. If your menu has no prices on it (a chalkboard of specials, say), the notice still has to be conspicuous.
• Tell people before they order. The surcharge applies to food and drinks, so it needs to be visible wherever customers choose what to buy.

There’s no legal cap on the percentage. The limits come from your customers and from your own sums.

How do you show the surcharge so it complies?

Picture the most eye-catching price on your menu, perhaps the big brekkie at $26 in bold. Your surcharge line needs to be at least that size and weight. A grey footnote in 7-point type under the allergen key is what gets venues into trouble.

A practical checklist for the holiday period:

1. Printed and digital menus. Put the notice near the top or beside the prices, not just at the very bottom.
2. The counter and the door. A sign at the register and at the entry helps takeaway customers who never see a printed menu.
3. QR menus and online ordering. Add the notice to the ordering screen, not only to a PDF menu buried a click away.
4. Delivery apps. If you sell through an app on public holidays, check how the platform shows day surcharges. Some venues simply raise app prices for the day rather than relying on a notice.
5. The POS. Set the surcharge to trigger only on the days you’ve named, and print it as a separate line on the receipt so customers can see it.
6. Pre-sold set menus. For a Christmas Day lunch sold in advance, the cleanest approach is a single all-in price per head. The day-surcharge carve-out is written for menus at the venue, and an all-in price leaves nothing to argue about.

Keep the wording exact. If your notice says “public holidays”, charge it only on days that are actually public holidays where you trade.

What changed on 1 October 2026, and does it affect holiday surcharges?

This is the part many owners are mixing up this year. After its review of card payment costs, the Reserve Bank decided to remove surcharging on debit, prepaid and credit cards on the eftpos, Mastercard and Visa networks, effective 1 October 2026. Since then, you can’t add a card fee at the terminal on those cards.

The ACCC’s guidance is clear that the change doesn’t reach fees that aren’t based on how the customer pays, and it names hospitality weekend and public holiday surcharges among them. So a 15% public holiday surcharge is still fine. A 1.5% card fee on top is not.

What has changed is your cost base. Card fees you used to pass on now sit inside your prices every day, including public holidays. If you used to rely on the card surcharge to soften a heavy Sunday, factor that lost revenue into the sums below rather than quietly loading it into the holiday surcharge. A day surcharge is easier to defend when it’s plainly about the day.

Which days are coming up, and which ones count?

The holiday season lands unevenly this year, according to the Fair Work Ombudsman’s 2026 list:

Date	Day	What it is
25 December 2026	Friday	Christmas Day (national)
26 December 2026	Saturday	Boxing Day
28 December 2026	Monday	Additional public holiday for Boxing Day in most states and territories
1 January 2027	Friday	New Year’s Day
26 January 2027	Tuesday	Australia Day

Three things to check for your state. First, whether Monday 28 December is a public holiday where you trade. Second, whether your state has evening part-day holidays on Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve, as some do. Third, any local holidays. If you’re charging on a day that isn’t a public holiday in your state, your “public holidays” notice no longer covers you. Add the dates to the seasonal trade planner now so the rosters, the POS and the cash plan all agree.

What surcharge do you actually need to cover the wages?

Here’s the maths most surcharge articles skip. Public holiday penalty rates are set by your award. Most cafés and restaurants come under the Restaurant Industry Award, while wine bars and taverns usually come under the Hospitality Industry (General) Award. Rates differ by award, classification and employment type, so build your roster in Fair Work’s pay calculator rather than from a rule of thumb.

Once you have the roster cost, the break-even surcharge is simple:

Break-even surcharge = extra wage cost for the day ÷ expected sales for the day, excluding GST

Use sales excluding GST because the GST on the surcharge isn’t yours to keep. Include super in the wage cost, too. Since Payday Super started on 1 July 2026, it leaves your account with each pay run, so a heavy holiday payroll hits your bank balance in full that week. Our Payday Super cash flow page explains the timing.

A worked example

Illustrative figures only. A suburban café in Adelaide normally spends $2,400 on wages, including super, for a Saturday. The same hours on Boxing Day, costed through Fair Work’s calculator, come to $4,300. The extra cost is $1,900.

The owner expects $9,000 in takings including GST, the same as a good Saturday. Excluding GST, that’s about $8,182.

• Break-even surcharge: $1,900 ÷ $8,182 = about 23%.
• A 15% surcharge brings in about $1,227 excluding GST, which covers roughly 65% of the extra wages.

So the “standard” 15% doesn’t make this café whole. The owner has four levers: accept the gap as the price of keeping regulars, trade shorter hours focused on the 8am to noon rush, run a tighter menu with fewer staff on the pans, or close and give the team the day. The figures make the decision; the surcharge alone won’t. Our page on public holiday trading walks through the open-or-close test in more detail.

If the sums say opening pays but the December payroll lands before the takings do, you can check what your café could access in about a minute, without a mark on your credit file.

What surcharge level do customers accept?

The usual pattern is a lower Sunday rate and a higher public holiday rate. One Adelaide restaurant owner told the ABC in January 2025 that he charges 10% on Sundays and 15% on public holidays, and the business chamber quoted called surcharges “good business practice”. The same reporting found diners objected most to broad seasonal surcharges, rather than charges tied to particular days.

A few things that keep the peace on the floor:

• Name the days. A surcharge on named days is easier to accept and fits the ACCC wording. A vague “holiday season surcharge” covering weeks invites complaints.
• Brief the team. Your staff will be asked about it a hundred times on Boxing Day. Give them one friendly sentence: “It helps us pay the team properly for working today.”
• Don’t stack fees. With card surcharges gone, a day surcharge is the only extra line customers should see.
• Fix the menu first. If a dish loses money on a Tuesday, a surcharge won’t save it on a public holiday. Run the numbers with our menu costing guide before the season starts.

How do you fund a heavy holiday payroll?

The hard part about Christmas trading isn’t the busy days. It’s the order things happen in. Penalty-rate wages for Christmas, Boxing Day, the Monday after and New Year’s Day can fall across two pay runs, and the week after New Year is often quiet enough to eat into whatever those holidays brought in. Add the December stock order and the end-of-year supplier accounts, and even a profitable season can leave the account thin for a fortnight. Our Christmas trading cash flow page covers the whole season.

For a trading café, that gap is often filled with a line of credit or a short cash-flow facility. Pronto’s lenders typically offer unsecured, cash-flow and line-of-credit options for trading businesses from $5,000 to $500,000, sized on turnover and bank statements. Bad credit and ATO debt are considered case by case. See our page on café business loans for what lenders usually look at.

Want a buffer behind your holiday roster?

You’ve done the hard bit: the menu notice is right, the dates are checked and you know what the surcharge does and doesn’t cover. If the numbers say open, but the payroll weeks look tight, let’s talk before the first public holiday rather than after it. Pronto, as they’d say behind the machine.

The enquiry takes about 60 seconds, and simply asking won’t touch your credit score. We don’t send your details to a pile of lenders, so your phone won’t light up with strangers. A real person who knows how a café’s December really runs will read your enquiry and give you a call. Please fill the form in accurately, especially your monthly turnover and what the money is for, so we can line up the right option first time.

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