How Square charges: one rate for every card, set by your plan
A shop with $30,000 a month in $25 sales pays about $960 a month on Square Free [1]. Square uses flat-rate pricing. Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover all cost the same on a given plan [2]. A basic debit card and a premium rewards card cost you the same 2.6% + 15¢ in person on Square Free. That is simple, and it is also why Square can cost more than interchange-plus for shops whose customers use a lot of debit cards.
The plan you pick sets the rate. Square Free has no monthly fee. Square Plus is $49 per location per month and Square Premium is $149 per location per month [1]. Plus and Premium both come with a free 30-day trial, and Square says you can cancel or switch plans at any point [2].
- The fee comes out before your deposit. Square deducts processing fees before funds go to your bank [3], so your deposit is already net of fees.
- Tax and tip are charged too. The fee is figured on the total of each sale, including tax and tip [3]. A $40 dinner with $3.20 tax and an $8 tip is charged on $51.20.
- Refunds are worth asking about. Check your dashboard after a refund to see whether the original fee came back. Square's pages we read did not state this in plain terms, so we leave it out of the math.
What Square costs a month at $10,000, $30,000 and $75,000
Here is a shop with all sales in person and a $25 average sale. That is 400 sales a month at $10,000, 1,200 at $30,000 and 3,000 at $75,000. Each total is card sales times the percent, plus sales times 15¢, plus the plan fee [1][2].
| Plan | $10,000 a month | $30,000 a month | $75,000 a month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Square Free, 2.6% + 15¢ | $320.00 (3.20%) | $960.00 (3.20%) | $2,400.00 (3.20%) |
| Square Plus, 2.5% + 15¢ + $49 | $359.00 (3.59%) | $979.00 (3.26%) | $2,374.00 (3.17%) |
| Square Premium, 2.4% + 15¢ + $149 | $449.00 (4.49%) | $1,049.00 (3.50%) | $2,399.00 (3.20%) |
The percent in brackets is your effective rate: total cost divided by card sales. On $25 sales, the 15¢ adds 0.6 points, so a "2.6%" plan really costs 3.2% of sales. The smaller your average sale, the bigger that gap.
Plus pays for itself on in-person rate alone only above $49,000 a month in card sales, because it saves 0.1% of sales against a $49 fee. Premium needs $74,500 a month to break even against Free. Online sales change that math: Plus cuts the online rate from 3.3% to 2.9% [2], so it pays for itself on about $12,250 a month of online sales. Pick a paid plan for its features or its online rate, not its in-person discount.
The fees beyond the card rate
| Fee | Amount |
|---|---|
| Instant or same-day transfer | 1.95% of the amount moved [4] |
| Card issued outside the U.S. | Extra 1.5% [1] |
| Afterpay (customer pays in four installments) | 6% + 30¢ [2] |
| Gift card loads | 2.5% on Free and Plus, 0% on Premium [1] |
| Square KDS kitchen screen app | $30 a device a month on Plus, $20 on Premium [1] |
| Square Kiosk software | $99 a device a month on Plus or Premium [1] |
| Bitcoin payments in person | 0% until 2027 [2] |
| Cash and checks | Free [2] |
Instant transfers are the fee owners most often miss. Moving $2,000 instantly costs $39 on top of the card fees already taken [4]. Square says new sellers start with one instant transfer a day of up to $2,000 [4]. If you use them every day, that is a second processing fee. Next-business-day transfers are included at no charge [1].
Square lists no fee for chargebacks, account inactivity, PCI compliance support or early termination [3]. Those are fees many traditional merchant accounts do charge, so they belong in any fair comparison.
When an interchange-plus account usually costs less than Square
On interchange-plus pricing you pay the card network's wholesale rate (interchange) for each card, plus a set markup. Debit cards from large banks carry very low interchange: Visa's regulated debit rate is 0.05% + 21¢ [6]. A basic Visa credit card is 1.51% + 10¢ in person, and a Visa Infinite card is 2.30% + 10¢ [6]. Square charges the same rate for all three.
To compare, we built one interchange-plus account from published numbers. Interchange uses Visa's April 2026 rates as a stand-in for all cards, with a mix of 40% regulated debit (plus the 1¢ fraud-prevention add-on), 30% basic credit and 30% Visa Infinite [6]. The markup is Helcim's published margin: 0.40% + 8¢ under $50,000 a month and 0.35% + 7¢ from $50,000 to $100,000 [5]. Card network fees are extra on interchange-plus and are not included, so treat these as the low side.
| Monthly card sales | Square Free | Interchange-plus example | Difference before network fees |
|---|---|---|---|
| $10,000 | $320.00 | $247.50 | $72.50 |
| $30,000 | $960.00 | $742.50 | $217.50 |
| $75,000 | $2,400.00 | $1,788.75 | $611.25 |
Network fees and any monthly or statement fee shrink that gap, so the honest reading is this: at $10,000 a month the saving can disappear, at $30,000 it is often a few hundred dollars a month, and at $75,000 it is usually worth a quote. A customer base heavy in premium rewards cards also narrows it. Run your own numbers in the flat rate vs interchange-plus calculator.
Check your own Square costs in five minutes
- In Square Dashboard, open Settings, then Account & Settings, then Pricing & subscriptions, to see the rates on your account by location [3].
- Pull last month's sales report: total card sales, number of card sales and total fees.
- Divide fees by card sales. That is your effective rate. Compare it with the table above for your plan.
- Add up instant transfer fees for the month. If they are more than a few dollars, next-day transfers may be the cheapest fix.
- If you process over $250,000 a year, ask Square about custom pricing first [2]. It costs nothing to ask.
If Square still fits, stay. Square has no early termination fee [3], so you can test another quote without a penalty. BatchOut is our own processing service; if we show it to you as an option, we label it as ours.