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SumUp Fees UK 2026: What You Actually Pay Per Transaction

SumUp charges 1.69% per in-person transaction on pay-as-you-go, or 0.99% on the £19-a-month Payments Plus plan. But the 0.99% rate only covers UK-issued consumer cards, which changes the break-even point for any venue serving tourists or business customers.

Alex Riesenkampff

August 12, 2026 · 15 min read · Markdown

Ask what SumUp costs and you get two numbers: 1.69% per in-person transaction on the free pay-as-you-go plan, or 0.99% if you pay £19 a month for Payments Plus. Both figures are accurate, and neither is what a working café, bar or bakery actually pays, because the 0.99% rate only covers UK-issued consumer cards and SumUp counts every EEA card as international. Once you account for the cards that never qualify, the plan that looks cheaper at £3,000 a month in turnover can cost you more than the one you were already on.

This guide works out the effective all-in rate for a UK hospitality venue at real turnover levels, using SumUp's own published rates checked on 12 August 2026, and shows where the Payments Plus break-even actually sits once your card mix is included. Super44 does not resell payment terminals or take a commission on processing, so none of this is a pitch for switching provider. It is the arithmetic the pricing page leaves you to do yourself.

What SumUp charges a UK business in 2026

SumUp runs three plans in the UK, and only two of them have published rates. The default pay-as-you-go option costs £0 a month and charges 1.69% on in-person payments, while Payments Plus costs £19 a month and cuts that to 0.99% for standard consumer cards. Above £10,000 a month in processing, SumUp directs you to a Tailored plan with bespoke fees and a dedicated account manager, which is quoted individually rather than published.

The rates that do not change between plans matter as much as the one that does. Online payments taken through Payment Links, Bookings and SumUp's other digital products are charged 2.50% regardless of which plan you are on, so a venue taking a meaningful share of pre-orders or deposits online gets no subscription benefit on that revenue at all.

Two things on that table are genuinely good news for a hospitality operator, and they tend to get lost in comparisons that only look at the headline percentage. There is no fixed pence charge per transaction on either plan, and SumUp states it charges no setup fees, no hardware rental and no monthly minimums, with readers bought outright rather than leased. For a venue with a small average ticket, that structure is worth more than a tenth of a point on the rate.

Where the 1.69% actually goes

A flat rate is not a margin, it is an average of three separate costs bundled into one number. Every card payment carries an interchange fee to the customer's bank, a scheme fee to Visa or Mastercard, and the acquirer's own margin, and UK law caps only the first of those three at 0.2% on consumer debit and 0.3% on consumer credit. SumUp absorbs the variance across all three and quotes you a single figure, which is the entire value proposition of a flat-rate aggregator and also the reason the figure has to sit well above the capped layer.

That bundling is genuinely useful to a small operator. An interchange-plus contract from a bank-style acquirer exposes you to every one of those layers separately, which means your effective rate moves with your card mix month to month and you cannot forecast the line. A flat rate trades a slightly higher average for a number you can put in a budget. The trade is usually worth it below about £20,000 a month, and stops being worth it somewhere above that, which is roughly where SumUp's own Tailored threshold sits.

It also explains the shape of the exclusions. The cards SumUp charges 1.69% for on both plans are precisely the cards where the capped interchange layer does not apply: commercial and corporate cards are outside the IFR caps entirely, non-UK issuers fall outside the domestic cap, and American Express operates its own scheme economics. The Payment Systems Regulator has documented the same boundary at the interchange layer, finding that scheme and processing fees charged to acquirers rose by at least 25% since 2017. A flat-rate provider cannot absorb an uncapped, rising cost indefinitely, so it draws a line and charges the standard rate on the other side of it.

The 0.99% rate is narrower than the marketing suggests

The Payments Plus discount does not apply to your turnover. It applies to a subset of it. SumUp charges 1.69% on international, corporate and premium cards including American Express on both plans, and defines an international card as any card issued outside the UK, explicitly including the European Economic Area. SumUp's own Payments Plus FAQ is unambiguous on the point, stating that the international category "includes cards from countries within the European Economic Area."

That definition does a lot of work in a hospitality setting. A German tourist paying with a Girocard-branded Mastercard in a Brighton bar, a Dublin visitor with an Irish debit card, a supplier rep paying for lunch on a company card: none of those transactions receive 0.99%, on either plan, at any turnover level. The card sits outside the discount not because it is exotic but because it was issued across a border that stopped being invisible in 2021.

This is a narrower version of the same post-Brexit boundary the Payment Systems Regulator has documented at the interchange layer. The Interchange Fee Regulation caps consumer interchange at 0.2% on debit and 0.3% on credit, and the UK retained those caps after Brexit, but they only bind when merchant, issuer and acquirer are all within the UK. The 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. SumUp's flat 1.69% on EEA cards is a simpler expression of the same underlying economics, and it is why a flat-rate provider has to draw the line somewhere.

The practical consequence is that you cannot evaluate Payments Plus from your turnover alone. You need to know roughly what share of your takings arrives on cards that will never qualify.

What SumUp actually costs at your turnover

The effective all-in rate is the monthly subscription spread across your volume, plus the blended transaction rate across your card mix. At £3,000 a month with a fifth of takings on non-UK or corporate cards, Payments Plus costs an effective 1.76% against pay-as-you-go's flat 1.69%, so the plan SumUp recommends at that turnover leaves the venue £26 a year worse off. The advantage only becomes reliable once volume is high enough to dilute the £19 across more transactions.

Read down the £3,000 row and the advertised threshold falls apart. With every card a UK consumer card, Payments Plus saves £24 a year. At a 10% non-qualifying share the two plans are exactly level at 1.69%. At 20% you are paying to be worse off. SumUp's £3,000 figure is not wrong, it simply assumes a card mix that a tourist-facing venue does not have.

The break-even is easier to reason about in reverse. The £19 subscription buys a 0.70 percentage point saving, so it needs £2,714 of eligible volume to pay for itself. Convert that to total turnover and the threshold moves with your card mix: £2,857 at a 5% non-qualifying share, £3,016 at 10%, £3,393 at 20%, £3,878 at 30%.

If you do not know your non-qualifying share, that is the number to go and find before you change anything. It sits in your monthly statement, and for most venues it is more stable month to month than turnover is.

Why no fixed pence per transaction matters more than the headline rate

For a low average-ticket venue, the fee structure decides the cost more than the percentage does. SumUp charges no fixed pence component on either UK plan, which is worth an effective 1.19 percentage points to a bakery averaging £4.20 a transaction compared with a provider charging just 5p per payment. The smaller your average ticket, the more a fixed fee dominates, and hospitality has the smallest tickets of any card-accepting sector.

The arithmetic is simply the fixed fee divided by the average transaction value. A 5p charge is 1.43% on a £3.50 coffee, 0.62% on an £8 lunch, and 0.16% on a £32 dinner for two. Compare a 1.69% pure-percentage rate against a "1.4% plus 5p" offer and the second one looks cheaper right up until you notice your average ticket is under a fiver, at which point it is 2.83% and you have been reading the wrong number.

This cuts both ways when you are shopping around. A pure-percentage provider is structurally suited to a coffee shop and structurally uncompetitive for a restaurant with a £40 average cover, where a low percentage plus a few pence will usually beat it. Match the fee structure to your ticket size before you compare headline rates, not after.

The add-on plans that change your real monthly bill

The transaction rate is not the whole invoice for most venues that use SumUp as a till rather than just a reader. SumUp prices its POS, banking and invoicing tools as separate monthly plans, at £29 excluding VAT for POS Plus, £15 including VAT for Business Account Plus, and £8 excluding VAT for Invoices Plus, none of which is included in the £19 Payments Plus subscription. A restaurant running POS Plus alongside Payments Plus is on £48 a month in fixed fees before it takes a single payment, which changes the effective-rate arithmetic materially at lower turnover.

POS Plus is the one that matters for hospitality specifically, since floor plan management and accounting sync are the features a table-service venue actually needs and a market stall does not. Worth checking against your own workflow before subscribing: if you are already exporting to your accountant monthly by hand and your floor plan lives in someone's head, the £29 buys convenience rather than capability.

Fold the add-ons into the calculation and the picture shifts. At £8,000 a month with a 15% non-qualifying share, Payments Plus alone runs about 1.34% effective. Add POS Plus and the same venue is at roughly 1.70%, which is above the pay-as-you-go transaction rate, though you are now buying software as well as processing rather than processing alone. The comparison is only fair if you price what the equivalent POS software would cost you elsewhere, which for independent-venue systems typically starts around £0 and runs to several hundred a month depending on tier.

What SumUp does not charge is as relevant as what it does. There are no setup fees, no hardware rental, and no monthly minimums, and readers are purchased outright rather than financed. That last point is the one worth holding onto if you ever compare against a bank-style acquirer, because leased terminals routinely outlive the processing contract they came with and turn into a liability you are still paying after you have switched away.

Above £10,000 a month, the published rate stops being the price

SumUp's own pricing page draws a line at £10,000 in monthly processing. Beyond that volume SumUp routes businesses to its Tailored plan, which offers bespoke fees and flexible terms rather than a published rate, which means the 0.99% headline is a ceiling to negotiate down from rather than the best available price. A venue at £25,000 a month is paying roughly £300 in fees on the published Payments Plus rate at a typical card mix, and that is a large enough monthly line to be worth a conversation.

The leverage in that conversation comes from knowing your own numbers before you start: your total card volume, your average ticket, your split between qualifying and non-qualifying cards, and your current effective all-in rate computed the way the table above computes it. Providers quote against a competitor's headline rate. They negotiate against a merchant who can state their blended cost to two decimal places.

None of that is peculiar to SumUp. Every large provider prices the same way, and our anti-lock-in POS buyer's guide sets out the full negotiation sequence, what to ask for per card type, where the published volume tiers sit across the market, and how to convert a contract term into a number before you agree to it. What is worth adding here is the part specific to SumUp's structure, because it changes what you should be asking for.

The Payments Plus subscription and the processing rate are two separate levers, and a Tailored quote can move either. A venue whose problem is a high non-qualifying share gains far more from a rate that covers international and corporate cards than from a lower headline on the qualifying ones, and that distinction is invisible if you negotiate on the headline percentage alone. Ask what the quoted rate covers, not just what it is. Ask whether the £19 monthly fee survives a Tailored plan or is folded into it. And because SumUp sells terminals outright rather than leasing them, you have something most acquirer negotiations do not: nothing physical is holding you in place while you shop the quote around.

If you would rather not run that process yourself, Super44 can generate a custom SumUp rate based on your venue's actual turnover, priced to be competitive against list pricing. Get in touch and we will put your numbers through it.

What to work out before you change plan

Changing plan inside SumUp is low risk, because Payments Plus is a rolling monthly arrangement you can cancel from the dashboard and it comes with a seven-day free trial. The decision needs exactly four numbers from your own statement, your card volume, your average ticket, your non-qualifying share and your current effective all-in rate, and the £2,714 eligible-volume break-even settles it in one calculation. Changing provider is a different exercise, and the costs that decide it are rarely on the pricing page you are comparing.

The wider point is that a processing rate is one line of a larger stack, and the stack is where the money leaks. Our anti-lock-in POS buyer's guide covers the contract terms and total cost of ownership that sit around the processing rate, and if you are weighing card costs against the other pressures on the same P&L, our restaurant labour cost benchmarks and UK tronc scheme guide cover the two lines that usually move before this one does. If your average ticket is the number doing the damage here, our menu pricing calculator is the place to start.