Most large Australian retailers now accept American Express. The notable holdouts are ALDI and Costco. Below is what we could verify against each retailer’s own published payment information, with the source and the date we checked. Where we could not find an official statement, we say so instead of guessing - card acceptance changes, and a comparison table full of assumptions is worse than a short one full of facts.
Last checked 21 September 2026. [Affiliate disclosure: I earn a referral fee if you sign up via my links - it never affects my analysis.]
Verified against the retailer’s own payment information
| Retailer | Amex? | What the retailer says |
|---|---|---|
| Woolworths | Yes | Lists Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Diners Club; contactless Amex works on Scan&Go. |
| Coles | Yes | Accepts Visa, Mastercard or American Express credit or debit cards. Coles Pay accepts Australian-issued Amex. |
| Bunnings | Yes | Help centre lists Visa, Mastercard and AMEX, plus PayPal, Zip, Apple Pay and Afterpay online. |
| ALDI | No | “ALDI accepts cash and payment by credit and debit cards including Visa, MasterCard and ALDI Gift Cards. AMEX, Afterpay, ZipPay and lay-by are not accepted.” |
| Costco Australia | No | “We accept cash, Visa, MasterCard, debit cards and Apple Pay at our Australian warehouses.” |
Not verified - check at the register
These are retailers people ask about constantly. Plenty of comparison sites will give you a confident yes or no for each. We could not find a current, official statement from the retailer itself, so we are not going to print one:
Kmart, Big W, Target, Officeworks, Chemist Warehouse, IGA, Dan Murphy’s, BWS, JB Hi-Fi, Harvey Norman, 7-Eleven.
Two useful rules while you are standing at the counter. First, franchised chains vary store by store - IGA is the obvious one, because most stores are independently owned and set their own merchant facilities. Second, a group brand does not inherit the group’s policy: Big W, BWS and Dan Murphy’s sit under the Woolworths Group umbrella but hold separate merchant agreements, so Woolworths accepting Amex tells you nothing about them.
Why acceptance is better than it used to be
Amex historically charged merchants a higher fee per transaction than Visa and Mastercard, and Australian retailers responded by either refusing the card or surcharging it. Two things shifted. Amex cut merchant rates to widen acceptance, and the RBA’s surcharging rules forced surcharges to reflect the retailer’s actual cost of acceptance rather than acting as a deterrent.
The result is that the question has flipped. A decade ago the sensible assumption was that Amex would not be accepted. Today the sensible assumption is that it will be, with a short list of exceptions - and the exceptions are concentrated among retailers competing hardest on price, which is exactly where a higher acceptance cost hurts most.
What to do if you carry an Amex
Carry a Visa or Mastercard as a backup and stop thinking about it. That is genuinely the whole strategy. The cards that earn well on Amex tend to earn well because Amex pays the issuer more, so there is no equivalent Visa that solves the problem - you just need something that works at ALDI, Costco, small cafes and the occasional market stall.
If the Amex carries an annual fee, the question worth asking is whether the points you actually earn - on the shops that take it - cover the fee. The card worth-it calculator does that maths on your real spend, and the best no annual fee credit cards covers the backup card.
How we check this
Every “yes” or “no” in the verified table above comes from the retailer’s own published payment information - a help centre article or payment options page on their site - read on the date shown, not from another comparison site. Where a retailer only publishes its online checkout options, we treat that as evidence about online payment and say so rather than extending it to the register.
Card acceptance changes, sometimes without announcement. If you find something here is out of date, tell us and we will recheck it.