Drip pricing dies in 2027 and your checkout may be the problem

The unfair trading practices regime reads like a story about airlines and ticketing platforms. Small businesses with a booking fee or an auto-renewing membership should read it as their own.

Parliament passed the Competition and Consumer Amendment (Unfair Trading Practices) Act 2026 in July. It commences on 1 July 2027 and does three things: it creates a general prohibition on unfair trading practices, tightens the rules against drip pricing, and imposes new requirements on subscription contracts.

The general prohibition is the broad one. It captures conduct in connection with supplying goods or services to consumers that manipulates or unreasonably distorts consumer decision-making and is likely to cause detriment, financial or otherwise. There is no materiality threshold written into it and no requirement that the business intended to manipulate anyone or acted dishonestly. The explanatory memorandum indicates legitimate and generally accepted sales practices are not the target, which is reassuring in principle and untested in application.

The conduct flagged as risky is recognisable: impeding a customer's ability to exercise a legal right or seek a remedy, failing to disclose material information, and presenting material information in a way that is complex, unclear, ambiguous or overwhelming. Requiring a customer to supply unnecessary information before they can exercise a right is specifically called out. Any business that has made cancelling harder than joining is on notice.

The drip pricing provisions sit alongside the card surcharge ban in the same project: making the price at the start of a transaction the price at the end of it. The subscription requirements add mandatory disclosure, notification and cancellation obligations, and they extend to small business subscription contracts as well as consumer ones.

There is a second front that matters more for most readers. On 3 June 2026 Treasury consulted on extending unfair trading protections to small businesses and franchisees, proposing that a small business acquiring goods or services receive the same protection as an individual consumer. 

The definition under consideration follows the existing unfair contract terms regime, capturing businesses with fewer than 100 full-time employees or under A$10 million in annual turnover. Submissions closed on 10 July. If that extension proceeds, most Australian small businesses become both subject to the prohibition as sellers and protected by it as buyers.

Twenty months is a long runway, which is exactly why it will be ignored until it is eight weeks.

Do one thing this quarter and the rest can wait: cancel your own product. Go through your signup, your renewal notice and your cancellation path as a customer, time each step, and count how many pieces of information you demand before you let someone leave. If cancelling takes longer than joining, that gap is the exposure, and it is also the most common complaint the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission receives about subscriptions. Second, assess making your advertised price the total price now rather than in 2027, because the surcharge ban has already trained customers to expect it. The quiet upside is the half nobody is reading: if the small business extension lands, the unfair terms your own suppliers and platforms impose on you become challengeable too.