Enforcement Priorities for 2025-2026 : The Retail Sector in Focus
The ACCC has announced its 2025-2026 compliance and enforcement priorities, with a continued focus on sectors and conduct that significantly impact the cost of living and the cost of doing business.
Key areas of concern include airlines, supermarkets, and essential services. Notably, the ACCC has expanded its scope to include misleading surcharging practices and other add-on costs, alongside enhanced compliance and enforcement activities in the supermarket and broader retail sectors.
Key Actions for Businesses
To ensure compliance with the ACCC’s increasingly stringent approach, businesses should:
- Assess whether their compliance systems and processes remain adequate in light of the ACCC’s enforcement focus.
- Ensure policy documentation is up to date and has been effectively communicated to all staff.
- Implement robust training programs to ensure staff understand their obligations under Competition and Consumer Law, particularly in high-risk areas such as misleading pricing, price fixing, unfair contract terms, and surcharging practices.
Overview of ACCC Priorities for 2025-2026
The ACCC’s ten key priorities for 2024 will continue into 2025, with an expanded scope in several areas, including misleading pricing practices, environmental claims, and unfair contract terms. Additionally, two new priorities have been introduced:
- Misleading surcharging practices and other add-on costs.
- Competition, consumer, fair trading, and pricing concerns in the retail sector.
Enhanced Priorities for 2025
Supermarket and Broader Retail Sectors
The ACCC continues to emphasise the role of robust competition and consumer compliance in alleviating cost-of-living pressures. The supermarket sector remains a focus, but the ACCC has broadened this priority to include the retail sector more generally. This priority is now split into two:
- Competition issues in the supermarket and retail sector – targeting firms with market power and conduct affecting small businesses.
- Consumer and fair-trading issues – with a specific focus on misleading pricing practices.
This expansion aligns with the additional $30 million in funding allocated to the ACCC by the Australian Government over the next three and a half years to support dedicated investigations and enforcement actions.
Other Key Areas
- Unfair contract terms – The ACCC will focus on harmful cancellation terms, such as automatic renewals, early termination fees, and non-cancellation clauses.
- Environmental claims and sustainability – The focus remains on greenwashing.
- Digital economy – A new emphasis has been placed on unsafe consumer products.
New Priorities for 2025
The ACCC has introduced a new focus on misleading surcharging practices and other add-on costs, backed by $2.1 million in new funding allocated in 2024. The agency aims to increase business compliance with excessive card payment surcharging prohibitions and improve pricing transparency for add-on costs.
Full List of ACCC 2025-2026 Compliance and Enforcement Priorities
- Competition issues in the supermarket and retail sector, focusing on companies with market power and conduct impacting small business.
- Consumer and fair-trading concerns in the retail sectors, with a focus on misleading pricing practices.
- Promoting competition in essential services, with a focus on telecommunications, electricity, and gas.
- Misleading pricing and claims in essential services, particularly in energy and telecommunications.
- Competition and consumer issues in the airline sector.
- Competition, product safety, consumer, and fair-trading issues in the digital economy, focusing on misleading advertising, influencer marketing, online reviews, in-app purchases, and unsafe consumer products.
- Misleading surcharging practices and other add-on costs.
- Environmental claims and sustainability, particularly greenwashing.
- Unfair contract terms in consumer and small business contracts, targeting harmful cancellation terms.
- Improving industry compliance with consumer guarantees, particularly in consumer electronics.
- Ensuring NDIS providers comply with Australian Consumer Law.
- Consumer product safety issues for young children, with a focus on button battery standards, infant sleep product regulations, and toppling furniture standards.
Importance of Staff Training in Compliance
To protect reputation and brands, mitigate legal risks, and ensure adherence to Competition and Consumer Law, businesses must invest in comprehensive staff training programs.
Employees should have a good understanding of how to:
- Identify and avoid misleading pricing and surcharging practices.
- Understand unfair contract terms and ensure compliance with Australian Consumer Law.
- Recognise and mitigate competition law risks such as price fixing and bid rigging in daily business operations.
- Ensure customers are dealt with fairly and in line with organisational policy .
The maximum penalty for breaching the Australian Competition and Consumer Act can be $50 million for corporations, or three times the value of the benefit obtained, or 30% of the company’s turnover. The maximum penalty for individuals is $2.5 million.
By proactively addressing these areas, businesses can safeguard against enforcement actions while maintaining consumer trust and regulatory compliance in an increasingly scrutinised marketplace.
GRC Solutions provides a number of industry specific versions of our Competition and Consumer Protection eLearning course. For more information see here.
