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Zettle Fees UK 2026: What the 1.75% Actually Covers

Zettle by PayPal charges 1.75% on in-person card payments with no fixed pence fee and no card-type surcharge, American Express included. It publishes no international-card premium and refunds the processing fee on refunds, which is where the real difference against a same-priced rival sits.

Alex Riesenkampff

August 12, 2026 · 14 min read · Markdown

Zettle by PayPal charges 1.75% on in-person card payments, with no monthly fee and no fixed pence charge per transaction. The number that matters more is the one Zettle does not charge: there is no card-type surcharge published anywhere on its UK pages, and American Express is named specifically as included at the same rate, which is unusual enough that it is worth most of this article. Square's UK card-present headline is also 1.75%, and the two prices stop being the same the moment a customer pays with a card issued abroad.

This guide works through what Zettle costs a UK café, bar or bakery at real turnover levels, using rates published on Zettle's and PayPal's own UK pages and checked on 12 August 2026. It also sets out what Zettle does not publish, which for a fee comparison is half the exercise. Super44 does not resell payment terminals or take a commission on processing, so none of this is a pitch for switching provider.

What Zettle charges a UK business in 2026

Zettle runs one in-person rate and no software subscription. In-person card payments cost 1.75% with no monthly fee and no fixed pence component, while manually keyed payments cost 3.4% plus 20p and payment links cost either 1.2% plus 30p or 2.9% plus 30p depending on how the customer pays. The gap between the first number and the rest is the largest in the table and catches out venues that take phone bookings.

One naming point before the numbers, because it makes the pricing pages hard to search. Zettle is mid-rebrand: zettle.com/gb is still the live UK site, but the on-page copy now reads PayPal Point of Sale, PayPal Reader and PayPal Terminal, several product pages redirect to paypal.com/uk, and PayPal's own fee page confirms the current terms were "formerly known as the PayPal Zettle Terms and Conditions". The Zettle name survives mostly in legal documents and legacy products.

The absence of a fixed pence fee on the in-person rate is worth more to a hospitality venue than a tenth of a point on the percentage. A fixed fee is simply the fee divided by the average ticket, so 5p is 1.43% on a £3.50 coffee and 0.16% on a £32 dinner. Hospitality has the smallest average tickets of any card-accepting sector, which makes a pure-percentage structure structurally well suited to it and makes "low rate plus a few pence" offers worse than they look on a menu of £4 items. That relationship is the same one that governs whether a menu price change actually reaches your margin, which our menu pricing calculator works through in detail.

The flat rate has no card-type carve-outs, and that is unusual

Most flat-rate acquirers draw a line somewhere in the card mix, then charge a higher rate on the other side of it. Zettle draws none that it publishes: its own card reader page states it charges "1.75% per transaction, no matter which cards you accept, including American Express!", and no surcharge for international, corporate or premium cards appears anywhere on its UK pages. Amex being called out by name is the tell, because Amex is the card type competitors most often surcharge.

The same claim appears on the help-centre pricing article that Zettle's own terms designate as authoritative, which states: "You'll be charged a fixed transaction fee, regardless of which card you process with your card reader or terminal." That sentence carries an asterisk, and it is worth knowing what the asterisk resolves to, because a footnote on a fee claim is normally where the exclusions live. Here it does not: it reads only "You'll find the full list of transaction fees for all accepted payment methods on our pricing page." The one other footnote on the page says fees are subject to change. Neither introduces a card-type exception.

Being precise about what that does and does not establish still matters. Zettle affirmatively confirms Amex is charged at the same rate and says the fee is fixed regardless of the card. It does not discuss issuer country explicitly, so the strictly accurate statement is that no premium for a non-UK card is published anywhere, rather than that a non-UK card is contractually guaranteed 1.75%. Absence of a surcharge in the fee schedule the terms point to is meaningful, since that is where such a fee would have to appear, but it is weaker than an explicit promise and worth confirming in writing if a large share of your trade is international.

Zettle is open about the fact that its own costs do vary by card. Its fee-schedule help page describes the interchange fee it pays the card issuer and the scheme fee it pays Visa and Mastercard, both of which move with card brand, type and issuer. That is exactly the variance a flat rate exists to absorb: the acquirer takes the mix risk and quotes the merchant one number. The UK's interchange caps of 0.2% on consumer debit and 0.3% on consumer credit bind only the issuer layer, and only when merchant, issuer and acquirer are all in the UK, so the variance underneath a flat rate is real and sometimes large.

Same headline rate, different bill

Zettle and Square publish the same in-person card rate in the UK, which makes them the cleanest possible comparison and the most misleading one. Both charge 1.75% card-present, but Square adds "an additional 1.5% fee ... for payments made with credit or debit cards issued in a different country than the location of your Square account", so the two identical headline rates separate into 1.75% and 2.20% for a venue where 30% of takings arrive on non-UK cards.

For most venues that share is not a guess and not volatile. A high street bakery in a market town might genuinely be at nothing; a bar near a London terminus, a hotel-adjacent restaurant, or a café in Edinburgh in August will be well into double figures every year at the same time. At £15,000 a month and a 20% non-UK share the gap is £540 a year, and at £40,000 and 30% it is £2,160.

None of this makes Zettle the right answer by itself, because a processing rate is one line of a larger bill and the two systems do different amounts of work. It does mean the headline rate settles nothing, and that a comparison stopping at "both are 1.75%" has answered the wrong question. The full Square UK fee breakdown covers the other side of that comparison, including where Square's software earns its subscription back.

Zettle refunds the processing fee. Its closest rival does not.

The second difference is smaller per transaction and easier to overlook, because it only appears on the days something goes wrong. Zettle's own refunds page states that "when you refund a card payment to a customer; we'll also refund you the card processing fee", while Square states in its legal terms that "when you process a refund, the Fees are not refunded by Square Europe". On the same £15,000 of monthly turnover with a 3% refund rate, that is £94.50 a year that one provider returns and the other keeps.

Refund rates in hospitality are normally low, so this is a second-order number for a sit-down restaurant. It stops being second-order for a venue taking deposits on cancellable bookings, running click-and-collect, or selling event tickets, where refunded volume can reach a few per cent of turnover in a normal month and considerably more in a bad one. Zettle also allows card payments to be refunded up to 365 days after purchase, which is a longer window than most operators expect.

The rates that are not 1.75%

The in-person rate is the one Zettle advertises, and it is genuinely the one most of your turnover will use. Manual keyed entry costs 3.4% plus 20p, roughly double the in-person rate before the fixed fee is counted, which works out at an effective 4.73% on a £15 order and 5.90% on an £8 one. Any venue that takes card details over the phone for a booking deposit is paying that rate, often without having noticed which rate it is on.

Payment links split by how the customer chooses to pay, which is not something you control. A link paid by card or wallet costs 1.2% plus 30p; the same link paid through a PayPal account costs 2.9% plus 30p. On a £32 order that is 2.14% against 3.84%, so the same £32 sale can cost you 79p or £1.23 depending on which button the customer presses.

Two legacy rates are worth knowing about only to check whether you hold them. Zettle Invoice at 2.5% and PayPal QR codes at 1.75% are both restricted to sellers who signed up before 8 May 2023. If you registered before that date and still use either, you are on pricing that a new business cannot get today, which is a reason to check before migrating an account rather than after.

What Zettle does not publish

Three gaps are worth naming, because a fee page you cannot fully read is itself a fact about the provider. Zettle confirms its transaction fee "is based on your transaction volume during one calendar month" but publishes no thresholds, no tiers and no rates for them, directing merchants instead to their own logged-in account. Custom rates exist, and Zettle's own wording is that any such agreement is "subject to a specific agreement between the parties" and entered into "at our sole discretion". That is honest, and it also means the published 1.75% is a starting point at volume rather than a ceiling.

The second gap is the chargeback fee, and it is worth stating carefully because it is easy to get wrong in both directions. No amount appears on any Point of Sale page: the current terms reserve the right to recover chargeback costs without naming a figure, and the POS fee page those terms designate as authoritative has no chargeback line at all. A general PayPal UK business-fees page does list a £14.00 chargeback fee, but it sits under a separate heading that is not scoped to Point of Sale, so it cannot be confirmed as the in-person figure. Treat £14 as the number to ask about, not the number to budget.

The third is the paid software tiers. Zettle PRO and Zettle Food and Drink still have live terms and conditions pages, both dated 1 July 2021, and both defer the price to "our Website and/or in your Zettle Account settings" rather than stating it. Neither product appears on the current pricing page. If either is offered to you, note that the annual upfront version carries an early-termination penalty equal to the discount received and no refund of fees already paid, which is a materially different commitment from the free app's no-contract terms.

The numbers to have in front of you first

Zettle's core service is genuinely low-commitment: the app is free, the hardware is bought outright rather than rented, and the terms state you may stop using the service at any time. The decision needs four numbers from your own statement, your card volume, your average ticket, your non-UK card share and your keyed-entry share, and the last two are the ones that move the answer most. Switching provider is a different exercise from switching plan, and the costs that decide it usually sit outside the rate you are comparing.

The wider point is that card processing sits inside a 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 around the processing rate, and the SumUp fee breakdown covers a provider that takes the opposite structural approach, discounting a subscription rate but excluding whole categories of card from the discount. If card tips are a meaningful share of what you process, our UK tronc scheme guide covers how those payments should be handled once the processing fee has come off.