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Square Fees UK 2026: What the 1.75% Leaves Out

Square charges 1.75% on in-person card payments in the UK, plus an additional 1.5% on every card issued outside the UK. That surcharge, and the fact that processing fees are not returned on refunds, decides the real cost for any venue serving visitors.

Alex Riesenkampff

August 12, 2026 · 14 min read · Markdown

Square charges 1.75% on in-person card payments in the UK, with no fixed pence fee and the same rate on every Restaurants tier. The number that decides your actual bill is the one underneath: an additional 1.5% applies to every card issued outside the UK, which takes the in-person rate to 3.25% and is triggered by the issuing country alone, with no EEA or EU exemption published anywhere. For a venue serving visitors, that single line moves the effective rate further than any plan choice does.

This guide computes what Square costs a UK café, bar or restaurant at real turnover levels, using rates published on Square's own UK pages and checked on 12 August 2026, and models the surcharge properly rather than assuming it applies evenly. Super44 does not resell payment terminals or take a commission on processing, so none of this is a pitch for switching provider.

What Square charges a UK business in 2026

Square publishes four different rates and applies the surcharge to three of them. In-person payments cost 1.75%, online payments 1.4% plus 25p, and virtual terminal, keyed-in and online invoice payments 2.5%, with no fixed fee on the in-person or keyed rates. Which rate you are on is decided by how the payment is taken, not by which plan you are on.

Two things on that table are unambiguously good for a hospitality operator. There is no fixed pence charge on the in-person rate, which suits small average tickets: a 5p fixed fee would be 1.43% on a £3.50 coffee and 0.16% on a £32 dinner, so a pure percentage is structurally kinder to a café than to a restaurant. And American Express costs the same as everything else. Square states plainly that "the transaction rates remain the same no matter what type of card is charged - Visa, Mastercard and American Express are all charged at the same rate", with no separate corporate or commercial card line published either.

The 1.5% that applies to every card issued abroad

The surcharge is the single most consequential number on Square's UK fee page and the one comparison articles routinely leave out. Square's help centre states that "an additional 1.5% fee applies for payments made with credit or debit cards issued in a different country than the location of your Square account", wording repeated verbatim in the legal fee schedule the terms point to. The trigger is the country of issue, full stop.

That definition is worth reading twice, because it is narrower and blunter than operators expect. It is not a non-EEA rule and it is not a currency rule. Square's UK pages contain no European Economic Area carve-out at all: a French consumer debit card, an Irish one and an Australian one are treated identically, because all three were issued somewhere that is not the UK. A Berlin tourist tapping a German card in a Brighton bar triggers the same 1.5% as a customer from São Paulo.

The underlying economics are real rather than opportunistic. The Payment Systems Regulator's own market review found that UK-EEA card-not-present consumer interchange rose from 0.2% and 0.3% to 1.15% and 1.5% after Brexit, adding an estimated £150-200 million a year in cost to UK businesses. A flat-rate acquirer cannot absorb an uncapped cost indefinitely, so it draws a line and prices the far side. Knowing why it exists does not change what it costs you, but it does tell you it is unlikely to be negotiated away at small volume.

One detail matters for anyone modelling this properly, and it is the part even careful comparisons get wrong. The surcharge is not a uniform 1.5% across Square's products: online payments carry a separately published non-UK rate of 2.5% plus 25p against 1.4% plus 25p for UK cards, which is a 1.1 percentage point difference, not 1.5. If you take a meaningful share of revenue through Square Online, applying a flat 1.5 points to your whole book overstates the cost.

What Square actually costs at your turnover

The effective in-person rate is 1.75% plus 1.5 points multiplied by your non-UK card share. A venue where 30% of takings arrive on non-UK cards pays an effective 2.20% in person rather than the advertised 1.75%, which at £15,000 a month works out at £810 a year attributable to the surcharge alone. Nothing about your plan changes this, because the rate is identical on every tier.

The rate columns repeat down the table on purpose. The percentage cost of the surcharge is set entirely by your card mix and not at all by your size, which is the opposite of how a subscription behaves and the reason the two need to be evaluated separately. What scales with turnover is the cash: the same 20% share costs £180 a year at £5,000 a month and £1,440 at £40,000.

For most venues the non-UK share is stable and knowable rather than a guess. A suburban bakery may genuinely be near zero all year. A bar by a mainline station, a restaurant near a hotel cluster, or anywhere in Edinburgh in August will sit in double figures reliably, and will peak in exactly the months when turnover peaks, so the cash cost compounds rather than averaging out.

Square for Restaurants: what £69 a month has to earn back

The plan decision is unusually clean at Square because the rate does not move with it. Square for Restaurants Plus costs £69 a month per location and buys features rather than a lower rate, so the subscription adds 1.38 percentage points to the effective cost at £5,000 of monthly card turnover, 0.46 at £15,000 and 0.17 at £40,000. The Free tier processes at exactly the same 1.75%.

That framing makes the question answerable. At £5,000 a month you are paying the equivalent of nearly eight tenths of your processing rate again for table and course management, 24/7 support and unlimited free kitchen display devices; at £40,000 you are paying a rounding error for the same thing. The kitchen display allowance is the one that most often settles it, since Square charges £15 a month per device for it otherwise and a two-screen kitchen therefore recovers £30 of the £69 immediately.

There is a third tier above Plus, and it changes the nature of the decision rather than its arithmetic. Square offers Restaurants Premium at custom pricing to businesses processing more than £200,000 a year, which works out at roughly £16,700 a month in card turnover. At that volume the published 1.75% is a starting point for a conversation rather than a fixed price, in the same way SumUp routes businesses above £10,000 a month to a tailored plan. The leverage in that conversation is the same as anywhere else in this article: a venue that can state its own card volume, average ticket, non-UK share and current effective all-in rate to two decimal places negotiates from a different position than one asking what the standard rate is.

The add-ons are where the monthly bill quietly grows. Team Management runs £20 a month per location, Shifts Plus £3 per team member per month, Marketing from £9, Loyalty from £25 per location, Invoices Plus £20, and Restaurant Inventory a further £79. A venue running Plus with Team, Loyalty and Inventory is at £193 a month in fixed software before it takes a payment, which at £15,000 of turnover is 1.29 points on top of the card rate.

Hardware is bought outright, with interest-free instalments available on purchases between £29 and £3,000 over three, six or twelve months. The Square Reader is £19 excluding VAT, the Stand £99, the Terminal £149 and the Kiosk £99. Square's larger units sit above this range; their prices did not render reliably on their own product pages when checked, so they are deliberately not quoted here rather than reproduced from a secondary source. Promotional prices were also running on some items at the time of checking, so treat the standard figures above as the baseline and the discounts as time-limited.

The fee Square does not charge, and the one it keeps

Square publishes something genuinely unusual, and it deserves credit before the criticism. Square's UK help centre lists chargeback fees among the things it does not charge, alongside account activation, early termination, PCI compliance and account inactivity, which is a real advantage over acquirers that bill £14 to £25 per dispute. For a venue that occasionally gets a disputed card-not-present transaction, that is a meaningful and rarely matched commitment.

The offsetting term sits in the opposite direction. Square states that "when you refund a payment, the processing fees for the payment aren't refunded back to you", repeated in section 33 of its legal payment terms as fees not being refunded by Square Europe. So a refunded £50 booking deposit costs you 87.5p that never comes back, and a venue running deposits, pre-orders or ticketed events at a 3% refund rate on £15,000 a month is leaving about £95 a year on the table. Some competitors return the fee. This is worth checking against whoever you are comparing, because it never appears on a headline rate.

The other fee to watch is instant transfers at 1.5% per transfer, on top of standard processing. Square's standard schedule already pays out next day including weekends where the receiving bank supports it, so the 1.5% buys hours rather than days. Used occasionally to cover a supplier payment it is a reasonable tool; used habitually it is close to doubling your card cost, and it is the kind of small convenience that becomes a standing cost without anyone deciding it should.

The VAT question Square's own pricing page does not answer

There is one gap in Square's disclosure worth naming, because it affects every comparison you make. Square states hardware prices explicitly as excluding VAT, but attaches no VAT qualifier at all to its software subscription prices, including the £69 Restaurants Plus tier, Team Management, Marketing, Loyalty, KDS and Invoices Plus. For a 20% VAT rate, £69 could mean £69 or £82.80, and nothing on the page tells you which.

That matters less for a VAT-registered business reclaiming input tax than it might appear, since the VAT washes through. It matters a great deal when you are laying two providers' price lists side by side and one quotes net while the other quotes gross, which is common enough to have caught out most operators at least once. Put every monthly figure on the same basis before you compare anything, and ask Square directly rather than inferring from the hardware convention on a different page.

What to settle before you sign

Square's Free tier is genuinely low-commitment: no minimum transaction volume, no activation fee, no early termination fee, and fees charged only when card payments are processed. The decision needs four numbers from your own statement, your card volume, your non-UK card share, your keyed and online split, and your refund rate, and the non-UK share is the one that most often changes the answer. Paid subscriptions renew automatically for a term of the same length until actively cancelled, so the cancellation step is on you rather than on a diary reminder from Square.

The comparison that makes all of this concrete is with the provider publishing the identical headline. Zettle by PayPal also charges 1.75% in person in the UK and publishes no card-type surcharge at all, which means the two are exactly level for a venue with no overseas customers and 0.45 points apart for one where 30% of takings are on foreign cards. Our Zettle fee breakdown covers that side, and the SumUp fee breakdown covers a third structure again, where a subscription buys a lower rate but excludes whole categories of card from it.

Beyond the rate, the contract is what turns a switch into a project. Our anti-lock-in POS buyer's guide covers the terms and total cost of ownership sitting around processing, and if the pressure you are actually feeling is on margin rather than fees, raising menu prices without losing customers deals with the lever that moves considerably more money than 1.5 points on a minority of transactions ever will.