Australia Payments - Market Share Analysis, Industry Trends & Statistics, Growth Forecasts (2026 - 2031)

Australia Payments Market Analysis

Australia payments market size in 2026 is estimated at USD 1243.7 billion, growing from 2025 value of USD 1070 billion with 2031 projections showing USD 2629.8 billion, growing at 16.14% CAGR over 2026-2031. Fast uptake of real-time infrastructure, contactless proliferation, and regulatory clarity around buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) licensing form the backbone of this growth. Real-time rails delivered by the New Payments Platform (NPP) continue to draw volume away from the Bulk Electronic Clearing System (BECS) as merchants and consumers prioritize speed and data-rich settlement. Tap-to-phone innovation is widening acceptance for micro-merchants, while earned-wage access products improve liquidity for shift workers in hospitality and retail. Interchange reform, rising fraud costs, and scheduled sunsetting of aging rails temper the outlook, but policy consistency and the Reserve Bank’s push toward a cash-lite economy sustain long-term momentum.

Australia Payments Market Trends and Insights

Growth in Contactless Card Usage

Tap-and-go now accounts for more than 95% of face-to-face card payments, cementing contactless as the de-facto tender for low-ticket transactions. Average ticket sizes are declining as consumers abandon cash even for sub-AUD 10 spends. Hardware makers have responded by integrating near-field communication (NFC) readers into inventory and customer-relationship tools, incentivizing merchants to retire mag-stripe and PIN-pad estates. Micro-merchants such as market stalls and food trucks that historically considered terminals cost-prohibitive have migrated to all-in-one readers or tap-to-phone apps, broadening overall acceptance. This infrastructure refresh supports richer data capture per transaction, enabling loyalty and real-time offers that further entrench digital habits. Card schemes gain volume headroom, but interchange compression risk spurs ancillary revenue pursuits in value-added services.

E-commerce Expansion Post-COVID

Domestic online checkouts reached AUD 69 billion in 2024 as digital wallet penetration grew 34% year on year. Healthcare, education, and professional services embedded pay-by-link and hosted checkout widgets to replace paper invoicing, trimming debtor days. Within medical practices, on-the-spot Medicare integration cut back-office reconciliation times by 42% according to Commonwealth Bank’s GP Insights dataset. Payment orchestration layers that juggle cards, PayTo mandates, and alternative methods in a single API saw merchant adoption triple, driven by demand for fail-over routing and dynamic currency conversion. Logistics, subscription media, and utility billers now benchmark themselves against the “single-click” retail standard, making frictionless authentication and tokenized storage a baseline rather than a differentiator.

Interchange Fee Regulation Pressure

Reserve Bank consultation proposes aligning digital-wallet and BNPL interchange caps with four-party card schemes to level acceptance costs. Retail lobby groups cite EU experiences where caps lowered merchant costs 0.2%-0.3% of transaction value, intensifying advocacy. Processors diversify toward data monetization, subscription billing, and anti-fraud services to offset possible margin squeeze. Some acquirers introduce tiered pricing that rewards merchants for routing transactions to least-cost rails, improving stickiness but thinning blended yields. Long-tail SMEs may benefit from cost relief, yet innovation budgets risk compression if interchange inflows fall faster than value-added uptake.

Other drivers and restraints analyzed in the detailed report include:

1. Roll-out of New Payments Platform (NPP)
2. Instant Salary Access (Earned-Wage) Services
3. Rising Fraud and Chargeback Costs

For complete list of drivers and restraints, kindly check the Table Of Contents.

Segment Analysis

Point-of-sale (POS) payments controlled 59.55% of the Australia payments market share in 2025, translating into a USD-denominated majority of the transactional Australia payments market size. Debit card contactless usage is displacing credit cards as consumers prioritize fee avoidance, while digital wallets unify online and in-store identities, shrinking checkout divergence. Tap-to-phone and integrated POS tablets bundle loyalty, order-ahead, and pay-at-table functions, raising average spend by 8% for quick-service restaurants. Account-to-account PayTo debits at physical checkouts offer merchants processing fees that run 20-30 basis points below card-present rates, though adoption is nascent. Cash dipped below 7% of over-the-counter spend in 2025 as regional infrastructure gaps closed. Cryptocurrency acceptance remains marginal but provides marketing cachet for tech-savvy merchants.

Online payments accelerated at a 17.62% CAGR through 2031, propelled by subscription models in media and software-as-a-service, and by open-banking data feeds that simplify account verification. Tokenized one-click checkouts cut cart abandonment by 42% for fashion e-tailers, while marketplace escrow solutions diminish seller fraud risk. Cross-border e-commerce leverages multicurrency routing engines that settle in local clearing systems, bypassing card scheme FX spreads. Chargeback liability shifts under scheme rules spur merchants to add 3-D Secure, though friction pushes some to link PayTo as default auto-debit. Combined, hybrid fulfillment models blur the boundary between POS and online, setting the stage for unified commerce dashboards that reconcile inventory across channels in real time.

The Australia Payments Market Report is Segmented by Mode of Payment (Point-Of-Sale [Debit Card Payments, Credit Card Payments, A2A Payments, Digital Wallet, Cash, and More], Online [Debit Card Payments, Credit Card Payment, A2A Payment, Digital Wallet, Cash-On-Delivery, and More]), End-User Industry (Retail, Entertainment, Healthcare, Hospitality, and More), and Geography. The Market Forecasts are Provided in Terms of Value (USD).

List of Companies Covered in this Report:

1. Commonwealth Bank of Australia
2. Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Ltd
3. National Australia Bank Ltd
4. Westpac Banking Corporation
5. PayPal Holdings Inc.
6. Block Inc. (Square)
7. Stripe Inc.
8. BPAY Group Pty Ltd
9. EFTPOS Payments Australia Ltd
10. FIS (Worldpay)
11. Adyen N.V.
12. Tyro Payments Ltd
13. Wise Plc
14. Afterpay Ltd
15. Zip Co Ltd
16. Klarna Bank AB
17. Apple Inc. (Apple Pay)
18. Google LLC (Google Pay)
19. Samsung Electronics Co. (Samsung Pay)
20. Visa Inc.
21. Mastercard Inc.

Additional Benefits:

• The market estimate (ME) sheet in Excel format
• 3 months of analyst support