A new study has found some people in remote Indigenous communities are spending between 10 and 20 per cent of their income on ATM fees.

In some cases, the fees are much higher than they would be in the city, but there is no competition, so locals have no option but to pay.

The author of the study says the government should act to eliminate fees in the poorest communities.

Australian Financial Counselling and Credit Reform Association executive director Fiona Guthrie says ATM fees in one community are as high as $10.

"ATMs will always charge sometimes $2, sometimes $2.50, and there's one community where it's up to $10 and you can't avoid the fee because you can't go and use EFT (Electronic Funds Transfer) because the stores also charge fees," she said.

The manager of Money Management Services for Lutheran Community Care in Alice Springs, Judy Woolcock, says the realities of life in remote communities aggravate the problem.

"They don't have fridges and they don't have a lot of places to do cooking and storing of food. So they go and buy food on a daily basis and that then incurs a fee," she said.

She says the sometimes irregular nature of government payments means many people cop fees just to see if they have any money at all.

"Often they're waiting for Centrelink payments to come through so they keep checking the ATMs. So they might have used the ATM between five and 10 times that day just waiting for the money to come through," she said.

Withdrawal limits

Aaron Davis is the CEO of the Indigenous Consumer Assistance Network, based in North Queensland.

He recently visited one ATM on the Torres Strait Islands, which was particularly expensive.

"Every time you took out money you'd be charged $5, but you were only able to take out $100 at a time," he said.

He said many of his clients appear to be spending a large portion of their income simply to access their own money.

"On average they paid $2,300 annually in bank fees," he said.

Some store operators say they are trying to do the right thing.

Rodney Matuschka is the acting manager of the Finke River Mission Store at Hermannsburg, west of Alice Springs.

His store does not charge for EFTPOS.

He says the stores have little say in ATM charges, although they do earn a small dividend if they reach a certain number of transactions.

"Pretty much every month, with the size of this community here and the number of transactions that go through the machine, we would pretty much invariably make a small dividend out of that machine," Mr Matuschka said.

He says his own store allows withdrawals of up to $400 and there are some options for local residents to minimise fees.

"If they're drawing money out and doing some shopping, the smart customer will say 'well I'll just use my EFTPOS card through the EFTPOS machine and I'll save myself the cost of withdrawing from an ATM'," he said.

Fiona Guthrie says it is unacceptable that some of Australia's most disadvantaged people are being charged fees, and the Government needs to act.

"Competition is not going to do it," she said.

"There has to be some sort of intervention, either through the Reserve Bank mandating that the fees are not to be charged, or by asking the banks themselves to come good on their obligations to provide banking services to all Australians and actually putting in ATMs into those communities so people can access them free of charge."

Indigenous Health Minister Warren Snowdon says ATM operators are exploiting remote customers.

"If people understood how to use the ATM perhaps we wouldn't have these level of charges being applied to them because they wouldn't be using," he said.

"Nevertheless, as reported on AM this morning that people were being charged $10 to use an ATM, well that's just way out of court."