How Much Do Card Payments Cost Restaurants in the UK?
How much do card payments cost a UK restaurant?
Most UK restaurants pay somewhere between 0.5% and 1.8% of their card takings in processing fees. Where you land in that range depends on which cards your customers use, how much you put through each month, and who your provider is.
A busy London restaurant taking £80,000 a month on card could be paying anywhere from £400 to £1,400 a month for it. That's a line on the P&L worth knowing well.
Why costs vary so much
Card mix
The card your customer taps matters more than most operators think. It's the biggest single variable in what you pay.
| Card type | Regulated interchange cap | Relative cost |
|---|---|---|
| UK consumer debit | 0.2% | Lowest |
| UK consumer credit | 0.3% | Low–mid |
| Business credit card | Not regulated | Higher |
| Non-UK / international card | Not regulated | Highest |
UK consumer debit and credit cards are capped. Business cards and cards issued abroad aren't. Since Brexit, EU-issued cards fall outside the UK cap too, and in October 2021 Visa and Mastercard raised interchange on online payments made with EU cards at UK merchants from 0.2-0.3% to 1.15-1.5%. Restaurants with a lot of tourist trade feel this most.
Volume
Processors give bigger merchants thinner margins. A restaurant putting £10,000 a month through its card machines doesn't have much to bargain with. A group doing £500,000 a month across several sites can get noticeably lower rates.
Pricing model
Most UK restaurants are on a blended rate - one percentage for every transaction, whatever the card. It's simple. It's also often more expensive than interchange-plus pricing, where you pay the actual interchange cost plus a fixed markup to the processor. On a blended rate, your cheap debit transactions end up paying for the expensive ones.
Typical costs for different types of UK restaurant
| Operator type | Monthly card volume | Estimated monthly cost |
|---|---|---|
| Independent takeaway | £15,000–£30,000 | £75–£540 |
| Neighbourhood restaurant | £25,000–£60,000 | £125–£1,080 |
| Busy city-centre restaurant | £60,000–£150,000 | £300–£2,700 |
| Multi-site restaurant group | £200,000+ | Negotiated rates |
These are rough ranges. Your actual bill depends on card mix, pricing model and provider.
What pushes fees up
- Lots of credit card payments. Tourists, corporate diners and anyone on expenses tend to pay this way.
- International cards, which you'll see far more of in city-centre and tourist-area restaurants
- Low monthly volume, so less room to negotiate
- Old contracts. A rate agreed several years ago may be well above what you'd get today.
- Separate providers for in-person, online and kiosk orders - usually higher combined costs, and more admin
What brings fees down
- Customers who pay by debit. Most UK consumers do, and debit has the lowest interchange cap.
- High volume, which gives you something to negotiate with
- Integrated payments. If your restaurant POS and card terminal are the same system, reconciliation is cleaner and there are fewer processing errors.
- Checking your rate every year. Most contracts let you renegotiate. If nobody has touched yours in three years, you're probably overpaying.
The cost of running more than one payment provider
Plenty of UK restaurants use one provider for the card machines and another for online ordering. That means two fee structures to check, two reconciliations at month-end, and reports that don't line up, so it's hard to work out what each transaction actually costs you. The combined fees are usually higher than one platform would charge, too.
Moving everything onto one platform can cut what you pay in fees, and it takes a lot of month-end work off owners and finance teams.
How Flipdish handles restaurant payments in the UK
Flipdish builds payments into its POS and online ordering platform. UK restaurants on Flipdish take in-person, online and kiosk payments through one system, with one set of reports and one settlement.
That's one payment relationship to manage instead of several. Owners and finance teams can see exactly what they're paying in processing fees, across every channel, in one place.
For how card processing fees are structured, see Restaurant Card Processing Fees Explained.