Banking & home loans
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Bank accounts, home loans and card payments with a prescription: what constrains a bank, a lender or a pharmacy, and where a complaint goes.
Banking questions reach this site in three shapes: an account closed or frozen with a medicine somewhere in the explanation; a home-loan application that seems to ask a health question; and a pharmacy counter where the card terminal is somehow the problem. None of the three has a cannabis-specific answer in Australian law — there is no Act about medicinal cannabis and banking — so the honest answer in every case comes from ordinary banking, credit and discrimination law, plus the terms of your own account.
Three things are worth saying before the detail.
What you hold is lawful. Medicinal cannabis has been supplied on prescription in Australia for years, through the Special Access Scheme and the Authorised Prescriber pathway — the TGA's own access data records applications back to 1992, with most approvals since 2016. Whatever a bank's risk systems make of the word, you are not asking anyone to bank an illegal activity.
Your account exists under a contract, not a right. No Australian law obliges a bank to keep a personal account open, and none forbids it closing one. What constrains a closure is the account's terms and conditions and, for a bank that has adopted it, the Banking Code of Practice — which promises reasonable notice where a bank closes an account that is in credit. Banks do not generally owe you a reason, and they rarely give one. What you can actually do when it happens is on the account-closure page below.
Lenders ask about money, not medicines. A home loan is governed by credit law, whose obligations run the other way: the lender must make reasonable inquiries about your finances and take reasonable steps to verify them. There is no standard question about prescribed medicine on a credit application, and no statute creates a duty to volunteer one. The health questions that do exist sit one step away — lenders mortgage insurance and loan protection policies — and those are insurance, with an insurance duty, not credit law.
Payment processing is the quiet fourth question. There is no Australian rule that treats a prescription medicine differently at a card terminal; where a pharmacy prefers cash or adds a surcharge, the reasons are commercial, and the surcharge itself is capped by competition law. The pages below set each of these out in detail — what a bank, a lender or a merchant can actually do, and what you can do about it.
- Can my bank close my account because of my medicinal cannabis prescription?There is no law on this
It can happen, and no Australian law says a lawful prescription is a reason a bank cannot use. What limits a closure is the account's own terms and conditions, plus — for a bank th
- Do I have to tell my mortgage lender about my prescription?There is no law on this
No — and not because of a technicality. A home loan is a credit contract, and the law that governs it, the National Consumer Credit Protection Act 2009 (Cth), directs the lender to
- Why did my pharmacy ask for cash or add a card surcharge for my prescription?There is no law on this
There is no cannabis specific rule at the card terminal — an Australian pharmacy filling a prescription is an ordinary merchant, and what you are paying for is an ordinary transact
Status: not yet checked against primary sources — general information, not legal advice