What card machine fees actually cost a pub, per pint

Card fees are the quietest overhead in the pub. No bill lands, no renewal letter comes, the machine just keeps a slice of every tap. On a £5.34 pint that slice is between 6p and 9p depending on your provider, you pay it on the VAT and duty in the glass as well as your own money, and across a normal wet-led year the gap between a good setup and a lazy one is about £1,000. Here are the real 2026 rates and the sums in pints.

I run a wet-led pub in Washington, Tyne and Wear, and like every pub the card machine has quietly become the till. The arithmetic backs the feeling: cash is down to around 12% of all UK payments, and in a 2026 Payments Association survey only 10% of people said they mainly pay with it. Whatever your machine charges, it's charging it on nearly everything you take. Which is exactly why it's worth an hour of your attention once a year.

What the machines actually charge in 2026

The market splits into two shapes. Pay-as-you-go readers with no monthly fee and a flat rate, and contracted machines with a lower rate plus a monthly cost. Current published numbers:

UK in-person card rates, checked September 2026. Per-pint figure is the fee on a £5.34 pint, the Morning Advertiser 2026 average.

Provider	In-person rate	Monthly cost	Fee on a £5.34 pint
SumUp	1.69%	£0 (reader £39 to £59 +VAT)	9.0p
Zettle (PayPal)	1.75%	£0 (reader from £29)	9.3p
Square	1.75%	£0	9.3p
Dojo	~1.2% blended, quoted	terminal £15 to £25	6.4p

The Dojo row needs a caveat. The 1.2% is a blended figure for businesses under £100,000 a year in card turnover, reported by a reseller in August 2026, and above that threshold everything is a custom quote built off your card mix. Dojo's contracts run from 30-day rolling to 12 months and next-day settlement includes weekends, which matters more than people admit when the beer order goes out on a Monday.

None of these numbers is the whole bill on its own. Keyed-in payments (taking a card number over the phone for a function deposit, say) run at about 2.5% almost everywhere, and Square adds 1.5% on top for cards issued outside the UK. If you're on a tourist route, that line item is real.

The per-pint sum

A pint at the 2026 average of £5.34 hands the machine 9p at 1.75%. A round of four is £21.36 and costs you 37p to put through. Now scale it. A pub selling 800 pints a week at the average price takes £4,272 in wet sales; call 88% of it card, which is where the national numbers put you, and £3,759 a week goes through the machine. At 1.75% that's £65.79 a week, £3,421 a year. At 1.69% it's £3,304. At a negotiated 1.2% it's £2,346.

So the spread between the dearest PAYG rate and a properly quoted contract rate, on a very ordinary wet-led pub, is about £1,000 a year. That's not switch-your-energy money, but it's a week's beer order for filling in one comparison form. I did the same exercise on electricity per pint and Sky Sports, and card fees sit comfortably in that tier of overheads: invisible individually, four figures annually.

Against margin it looks like this: the average pint carries about £2.23 of gross profit on my arithmetic, so a 9.3p card fee is 4% of the GP on every pint you pour. You'll fight a supplier over 4%. This one never gets a phone call.

You pay card fees on the taxman's money

Here's the bit no comparison site mentions. The card fee is charged on the gross transaction, and the gross transaction is stuffed with tax that was never yours. A £5.34 pint contains 89p of VAT, and on a typical 4.5% draught beer about 50p of alcohol duty at the 2026 rates. That's £1.39 of the pint's price you're collecting for HMRC, and at 1.75% you pay 2.4p per pint in card fees for the privilege of handling it.

On our 800-pint week with 88% by card, that's roughly £880 a year in fees paid on money that goes straight out the other side. There's no way round it, card fees have always worked on the gross. But when you're weighing up whether a quoted rate matters, remember the percentage is biting a bigger number than your margin ever sees. I've broken down what duty a pub pays per pint and keg separately if you want that arithmetic.

PAYG or contract: the £1,750-a-week crossover

The no-monthly-fee readers are brilliant for low volume, and the flat percentage is the whole appeal: quiet week, tiny bill. The rented terminal with a negotiated rate wins once volume is real. The crossover is findable with one sum.

Take SumUp at 1.69% against a quoted 1.2% with, say, £37 a month of terminal rental and software. The rate gap is 0.49%, so the rental pays for itself once 0.49% of your monthly card take exceeds £37. That happens at about £7,500 a month, or £1,750 a week through the machine. Under that, keep the PAYG reader and spend your energy elsewhere. Over it, get two written quotes and make them bid against each other, because above £100k a year you're exactly the customer the quoted-rate providers want.

Run your own number, not mine: one month of card takings off your Z reads or your EPOS reports, times the rate gap you're offered, against the monthly cost they want. Thirty seconds, and it settles the argument for your pub rather than the average one.

What I'd actually do this week

Pull last month's card statement and find your effective rate: total fees divided by total card takings. Not the headline rate, the real one, because authorisation fees and PCI compliance charges hide in the gap between the two, and so do minimum monthly service charges. If your effective rate starts with a 2 and you're doing more than £1,500 a week on cards, you're the pub this article was written for.

And put the number in your head in pints. At £2.23 GP a pint, a £3,400 annual card bill is 29 pints of profit a week going to the machine. You'd notice 29 pints going anywhere else. This line only escapes attention because nobody ever posts you the total. Card fees belong on the same list as your GP%: numbers you check on a schedule, not when something feels wrong.

Common questions

What percentage do card machines charge pubs in the UK?

The big pay-as-you-go readers charge 1.69% (SumUp) or 1.75% (Zettle, Square) on in-person payments with no monthly fee. Contracted providers like Dojo quote custom rates, reported around 1.2% blended for smaller businesses, plus terminal rental of £15 to £25 a month.

How much does a card machine cost a pub per year?

A wet-led pub putting £3,700 a week through the machine pays roughly £2,300 to £3,400 a year depending on rate. The gap between the cheapest and dearest realistic setups is about £1,000 a year at that volume.

Is it cheaper to use SumUp or a contracted card machine?

Below about £1,750 a week in card takings, a no-monthly-fee reader at 1.69% to 1.75% usually wins. Above that, a negotiated rate with terminal rental works out cheaper, and the more you take the wider the saving gets.

Do pubs pay card fees on VAT and duty?

Yes. The percentage is charged on the full transaction, and £1.39 of an average £5.34 pint is VAT and duty. At 1.75% that's 2.4p per pint in fees paid on tax you're collecting, roughly £880 a year for a pub doing 800 pints a week mostly on cards.