Tools

Card fee calculator: what card payments cost your venue a year, and what your own rate really is

What your current provider is really charging you, what the same turnover costs on each published UK rate, and why a 1.2% headline can be the most expensive number on the page.

Alex Riesenkampff

8 September 2026 · 9 min read · Markdown

The rate you were quoted and the rate you pay are different numbers, and only one of them is on your statement. Work out the real one first: last month's total card fees, divided by last month's card turnover. That percentage is what any new quote has to beat, and it is the only figure on this page that describes your venue rather than an average.

If your provider bills you net, deducting fees before the money lands, the fee total is on the monthly statement rather than in your bank. It is worth the ten minutes it takes to find, because half a percentage point on £18,000 a month is £1,080 a year, and a venue on 2.1% that thinks it is on 1.6% has no way of knowing.

The four rates you can check without a phone call

Most UK card providers will not tell you what they charge until you have spoken to someone. Four will, and these are their published in-person rates for a single venue.

Two of those rates carry a condition, and both conditions are easy to miss. SumUp's 0.99% applies only to UK domestic debit and credit cards presented in person. Premium cards, cards issued outside the UK and American Express stay at 1.69% on both plans. So the discount is real, and how much of it you get depends on what comes out of your customers' pockets, which varies more between a suburban bakery and a bar near a hotel than most rate comparisons admit. Dojo's 1.2% carries the other condition: it is the rate below £100,000 of annual card turnover, and above that you are quoted.

At £18,000 a month, all of it on UK domestic cards, that is £3,780 a year at 1.75% against £2,366.40 on Payments Plus once the £228 of subscription is counted. The £19 a month buys 0.76 of a percentage point, which pays for itself somewhere around £2,500 a month of domestic card turnover and costs you money below it. That is the whole decision, and it is arithmetic rather than judgement.

Where the fixed fee bites, and why the cheapest rate is not the cheapest bill

A fixed charge per transaction is what makes a low average sale expensive, and it is the reason a headline rate tells you almost nothing on its own. Dojo advertises 1.2%, the lowest in-person rate on this page, for venues under £100,000 of annual card turnover. It calls that a blended rate, meaning one figure covering every card type rather than a cheaper one for debit and a dearer one for Amex. Its FAQ also lists a 5p secure transaction fee on every sale.

Put those together at a cafe's basket size and the ranking inverts. A £4.20 flat white costs 2.39% on that pricing, against 1.69% at SumUp and 1.75% at Square or PayPal Point of Sale. A £25 lunch costs 1.40%, and Dojo is suddenly the cheapest thing here. The crossover against a flat 1.75% sits at an average sale of about £9.09, and against SumUp's 1.69% at about £10.20. Below that, the lowest advertised rate in the UK is the most expensive one for you.

The same trap runs online with a bigger fixed component. Square charges 1.4% plus 25p for UK cards taken online, and at the order values a cafe deals in, that 25p is not a rounding error.

A £4.20 coffee ordered for collection costs 7.35% on that pricing. A £25 order costs 2.40%. Same rate card, three times the cost, and the difference is entirely the order size. If you are about to switch on click and collect for single drinks, that is the number to put next to the extra sales you expect, and a minimum order value is a legitimate answer.

What the rate is made of

Interchange, the slice that goes to the bank that issued your customer's card, is capped by regulation. The Payment Systems Regulator sets it at 0.2% of the transaction for UK consumer debit cards and 0.3% for consumer credit cards. Everything above that in your 1.75% is the fees Visa and Mastercard charge, your provider's margin, and the cost of the reader.

The scheme fee part has been moving in one direction. The PSR's final report in March 2025 found that Mastercard and Visa had increased the core fees they charge card companies by at least 25% since 2017, costing businesses at least £170 million a year. The regulator has since issued two directions to both schemes, on transparency and on pricing governance, and consulted on a third covering regulatory financial reporting, with that consultation closing on 3 July 2026.

"We are delivering on our commitment to make the card payments market work better for all," said David Geale, Managing Director at the Payment Systems Regulator, announcing the action on 19 December 2025.

None of that lowers your bill this quarter. It matters because it tells you which part of the price is negotiable. Interchange is not. The margin is.

The providers who will not tell you

Two of the larger UK card companies still publish no rate for a small venue to compare.

Worldpay runs an interactive quote tool rather than a rate card, and the figures it shows carry the on-page caveat that pricing is indicative only. What it does publish is the fixed side, and that is worth knowing before a call: £20 per terminal per month, £5 a month for card security compliance, and a £15 minimum monthly service charge. Those three are £480 a year before a single card is tapped.

Takepayments publishes neither a rate nor a fixed fee. Its page offers instead that "One of our card payment specialists can get a really good understanding of what makes you and your business tick and create a pricing package that works for you."

That is not a scandal. Pricing by quote is normal in this business, and a negotiated rate can beat a published one, particularly above about £10,000 a month where SumUp itself offers bespoke terms and Square opens custom plans above £200,000 a year. It does mean you cannot compare on a website, so go into the call with your effective rate from the first calculator and ask for the quote broken down by UK debit, UK credit, commercial and non-UK cards, plus every fixed charge per sale, every monthly charge and the minimum term. A single headline rate you cannot check is not a quote, and as Dojo's own numbers show, one you can check is still not the whole bill.

Before you switch

Switching on rate alone is how venues end up locked into three-year hardware contracts to save half a point. Our guide to leaving a POS without losing your data covers the exit terms to read before you sign, which is the part that costs money later. If the card reader is coming as part of a new till, the rate and the software are one decision rather than two, and our comparison of cafe till systems prices both together with the contract terms attached. For the per-provider detail behind the rates above, we keep a page each on SumUp's fees, Square's fees and PayPal Point of Sale's fees, with the plan differences and the hardware in full.

And once you know what a percentage point is worth to you, it is worth checking it against the other lever on the same money: what a point of gross profit is worth on the same turnover is usually larger, and nobody has to agree to give it to you.