Square Fee Calculator

A Square fee calculator shows exactly what Square keeps from a sale and what lands in your account, using Square's own published standard processing rates for the way the payment was taken.

Square's standard processing rates

Square publishes three standard rates depending on how a card is charged. In-person payments, tapped, dipped or swiped through a Square reader, cost 2.6% plus 10 cents per transaction. Online payments, through Square Online, invoices or Virtual Terminal, cost 2.9% plus 30 cents. Manually keyed-in card payments, entered by hand rather than read from the card, cost 3.5% plus 15 cents. Each rate is a percentage of the sale plus a small flat fee, and this calculator applies whichever rate matches the payment type you select.

Why card-not-present payments cost more

Online and keyed-in payments are both card-not-present transactions, meaning the processor cannot physically verify the card was present at the sale. That carries more fraud and chargeback risk than a tapped or swiped card, and processors across the industry, not only Square, price that risk into a higher percentage and flat fee for card-not-present methods. Choosing in-person hardware over manual entry when it is available is one of the simplest ways a business can lower its effective processing cost.

Why the flat fee matters more on small sales

The flat portion of the fee does not scale with the sale amount, so it eats a much larger share of a small transaction than a large one. A 30 cent flat fee is 3% of a $10 sale but only 0.3% of a $100 sale, which means average order value has a real effect on your true blended processing rate. A business selling mostly small-ticket items should weigh that flat fee as carefully as the percentage rate when comparing processors, which is exactly the kind of unit economics work that sits alongside ecommerce growth strategy when margins are tight.