Three quotes on a table and every one leads with a percentage. That percentage is one line on a bill that usually has six.
This is what the other five are, what they typically cost, and how to work out what you are actually paying. It takes about ten minutes with last month's statement in front of you.
Figures below are from Merchant Savvy's card processing fees guide, last updated 6 October 2025. They are ranges across the UK market, not any one provider's price list, and you should check your own contract rather than assume you sit in the middle of a range.
A floor under your bill. If your card fees for the month come to less than the minimum, you are topped up to it.
Reported range is £5 to £25 a month. It costs you nothing in a good month and appears in January, which is the month you noticed.
A monthly charge attached to a security questionnaire you complete yourself.
Reported range is £2 to £20 a month. There is usually a separate, higher charge if the questionnaire is never completed, which is worth knowing because the questionnaire takes about twenty minutes and a lot of venues have simply never been told it exists.
A few pence charged every time a card is authorised, entirely separate from the percentage.
Reported figures sit around 3p to 4.5p per transaction. On its own it is nothing. Multiplied by every transaction you take, it is not.
Charged when a customer disputes a payment, and charged whether or not the dispute goes your way.
Reported range is £15 to £25 per case.
If you take payments online there is usually a gateway fee, reported at £20 to £75 a month. Terminal rental is reported at £14 to £35 a month per device.
Take a site doing £18,000 a month on cards, average transaction £25, so 720 transactions. Say the quoted rate is 0.79 per cent.
That rate is an illustration to make the arithmetic work. It is not one of ours, and we do not publish a rate table, for reasons set out on the pricing page.
Here is the month:
Total: £206.00.
Against £18,000 of card turnover, that is an effective rate of 1.14 per cent.
The quote described one line. The bill has five. Nothing has gone wrong and nobody has misled anybody, but the number you compared on is not the number you pay.
Run the same sum on your quietest month and the minimum monthly service charge finally appears, in the month you can least afford it.
This is the single most useful thing to know before you read another quote.
Interchange is the part of the fee your acquirer hands to the bank that issued the customer's card. In the UK it is capped by law. The Payment Systems Regulator sets out the caps under the UK Interchange Fee Regulation: 0.2 per cent on consumer debit and 0.3 per cent on consumer credit.
That is a cost your provider pays before it has charged you anything. On top of it sit the card scheme's own fees, and only then the provider's margin.
So if a quote shows an all in rate below 0.20 per cent on consumer debit, one of three things is true. It is a markup rather than an all in rate, and the interchange is being added on top. It applies only to a card type you rarely take. Or it is wrong.
Ask which. A provider quoting honestly will answer in one sentence.
Five lines, in this order:
If any of those five is hard to find on the statement, that is itself the answer to a different question.
Ask every provider for the same thing: the total cost in pounds, for your last three months of trading, including every fee. Not a rate.
Three quotes expressed as a rate cannot be compared. Three quotes expressed as a monthly total on your own numbers can be compared in about a minute.
Our own workings on that are on the payments page, and every product and module price we charge is published in full on the pricing page.
Since this article is about the stack, it is fair to say where we sit in it. We charge no PCI fee and there is no subscription on the terminal. The card machine is free, there is nothing to rent and nothing to pay upfront, which takes the terminal rental line out too. What our card terminals cost to run is the processing and nothing else.
That is the whole pitch, and it is at the bottom of the article on purpose. The maths above works the same whoever you end up with.
Send three months of card statements and one busy Friday. We will show you what your card processing is costing you now against what it would cost with us, with every fee named, before you commit to anything.
Get my quote
WhatsApp