Hidden Fees, Real Fines: Australia's New Drip-Pricing Law

Advertise a job 'from $89', then add a call-out fee, an after-hours loading and a booking charge before the customer can say yes — and you're doing something Australia is about to police far more tightly. From 1 July 2027, the Competition and Consumer Amendment (Unfair Trading Practices) Act 2026 requires any business selling to households to show the unavoidable cost of a purchase up front, alongside the headline price. Get it wrong and the penalties reach the greater of $100 million, three times the benefit, or 30 per cent of turnover — the last limb being the one built to scale to a small business.

This isn't aimed at big platforms alone. If you advertise a price and let mandatory fees appear later in the flow, the rule is about to apply to you.

Drip pricing — advertising a low headline number, then letting compulsory fees 'drip' in through the checkout — has breached the Australian Consumer Law for years as misleading conduct. The ACCC has pursued it: Dendy Cinemas and Webjet both paid penalties for adding mandatory booking fees late. What the Unfair Trading Practices Act does is stop leaving it to case-by-case enforcement and write the rule down. Parliament passed the Act on 2 July 2026; the pricing provisions commence 1 July 2027.

The mechanics are specific. When you display a base price, you now have to disclose any per-transaction charge that comes with it — the amount, or how it's calculated; that it's a per-transaction charge; whether it applies to every payment method or only some; and whether the base price already includes it. All of it has to sit close to the headline price, legible and unambiguous, shown at the same time — not revealed three screens later. Payment surcharges and taxes are handled under separate rules and sit outside this particular obligation.

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Two kinds of business should read this closely. The first is anyone who advertises a 'from' price and takes payment online or by app — a trades business with a booking page, a clinic, a services firm with an online checkout. If a fee is unavoidable, it now belongs next to the headline number, not at the end of the flow. The second is anyone whose booking, quoting or checkout software adds those fees automatically. The compliance point that matters: the law is technology-neutral, so if an AI-driven quoting or checkout tool reveals fees progressively by default, the liability sits with you — the business that deployed it — not the vendor that built it. We made the same point about AI tools that set a different price for different customers; the principle is identical here.

The ACCC has already put a number on how common this is. In its Digital Platform Services Inquiry, a survey of more than 3,000 Australians found 72 per cent had struck a potentially unfair practice on an online marketplace in the past year — 21 per cent of them hidden charges. This is a revenue-capture and trust question as much as a compliance one: the 'from $89' quote that becomes $140 at checkout wins the click and loses the customer, and now it carries a regulatory tail as well. If you're not sure whether your own quoting flow would pass, see where your exposure sits.

You have about a year, and the fix is mostly display, not strategy. Walk your own booking or quote flow as a first-time customer and find the point where the number changes. Any fee the customer can't avoid — a booking fee, a service fee, a standard call-out — belongs with the advertised price, stated plainly, not sprung at the end. If you advertise 'from $X', make sure $X is a price a real customer can actually pay without a mandatory add-on appearing later. And if the culprit is a default setting in your booking or checkout software, fix it now rather than discovering it in a complaint.

None of this costs margin. A customer who sees the real number up front and books anyway is a customer who trusts the next quote too — and the businesses that treat this as a trust upgrade, not a compliance chore, are the ones it will reward. A short conversation can pressure-test whether your quoting and booking flow shows the price the law will soon require — and whether the AI tools underneath it are helping or quietly working against you.

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Would your quote survive the new all-in price rule?

The fix is mostly in how your booking and checkout flow shows a number — and in the AI tools sitting underneath it. A short conversation can pressure-test both before the rules bite. Book a call.