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Square for Restaurants cost 2026

Square Free is the cheapest legitimate restaurant POS at low volume. The catch in 2026 is that the card rate is no longer flat across plans: Free pays the most per tap.

Square for RestaurantsSquare for Restaurants pricing · 2026-09-23
Cheapest published: Free plan $0/mo per location (2.6% + 15c tap, dip or swipe)
Pricing model: Freemium + per-location SaaS, flat processing
Processing: Tap/dip/swipe 2.6% + 15c on Free, 2.5% + 15c on Plus, 2.4% + 15c on Premium. Online 3.3% + 30c on Free, 2.9% + 30c on paid tiers. Manual entry or card on file 3.5% + 15c on every tier.
Hardware: Square Register (2nd generation) $899 outright or $44/mo over 24 months. Square Stand $149. Square Terminal $299. Square Handheld $399. Reader for contactless and chip $59; first magstripe reader free.
Contract: No SaaS contract on Free or Plus. Pay monthly. Cancel any time.
19-bang · named gotcha
The card rate is no longer flat across plans: Free pays 2.6% + 15c on a tap, Plus 2.5%, Premium 2.4%. So the cheaper subscription carries the dearer processing, and on $80K monthly card volume the 0.2 point gap between Free and Premium is $160/mo, roughly the Premium subscription itself.

What it actually costs in 2026

Free plan is $0/mo per location with 2.6% + 15c on a tap, dip or swipe, 3.3% + 30c online and 3.5% + 15c on manual entry or card on file Square pricing · 2026-09-23. Plus is $49/mo per location and Premium $149/mo per location, and each step down the subscription ladder steps the card rate down with it: 2.5% + 15c on Plus, 2.4% + 15c on Premium, with online falling to 2.9% + 30c on both paid tiers.

That inversion is the thing to model. On $80K of monthly card volume the 0.2 point gap between Free and Premium is $160, which is more than the $149 Premium subscription costs. The subscription can pay for itself on processing alone before you count a single feature.

Hardware: Square Register (2nd generation) at $899 outright or $44/mo over 24 months, Square Terminal $299, Square Handheld $399, Square Stand $149. The magstripe reader is free with a Square account; the contactless and chip reader is $59. The KDS app is $30/mo per device on Plus and $20 on Premium, and is not available on Free at all.

Worked arithmetic on the published Free-plan rates, emitted by the calculator on this site. A coffee shop doing $20K monthly card volume on a $12 average ticket pays $779/mo in processing: the percentage is only $520 of that, and the 15c per-transaction fee does the rest, which is why small tickets punish the Free plan hardest. A $1.5M FSR doing $80K monthly card volume at a $42 average ticket, 78% of it card-present, pays $2,524/mo. Both are arithmetic on Square's published rates, not quotes. SpotOn on the same FSR profile models at $2,188/mo interchange-plus, but SpotOn publishes a markup band rather than a rate, so treat that as an estimate and not a like-for-like.

No SaaS contract on Free or Plus. Cancel any time. Square fees · 2026-09-23

Owner questions

Is Square Free actually free?

The subscription line is genuinely $0/mo per location. Processing is the real cost, and on Free it is the dearest Square charges: 2.6% + 15c on a tap, 3.3% + 30c online, 3.5% + 15c on manual entry. Right pick for coffee shops, food trucks and low-volume QSR.

Where does the Free plan stop being cheap?

Two thresholds, not one. The first is against Square's own paid tiers: at roughly $75K monthly card volume the 0.2 point saving on Premium covers its $149 subscription, so Free costs you money. The second is against a negotiated processor, which opens up somewhere past $150K monthly volume where interchange-plus beats any flat rate.

What does Plus tier unlock?

Multi-location reporting, coursing, conversational modifiers, table maps, and access to the KDS and Kiosk apps, which Free cannot run at all. It also cuts the tap rate to 2.5% + 15c and the online rate to 2.9% + 30c.

Where does Square hit its FSR ceiling?

Complex menu, true coursing with tableside ordering, large multi-location chain, deep inventory. At that point Toast or Lightspeed become the honest answer.

Best fit

Coffee shop · Food truck · QSR · Single-unit independent

Recent changes (2026-09-23)

Repriced and re-URLed by September 2026. Plus fell from $69 to $49/mo per location and Premium from $165 to $149; the card-present rate moved from 2.6% + 10c to 2.6% + 15c on Free and now steps down by plan (2.5% Plus, 2.4% Premium). Square Register is now a 2nd-generation unit at $899. The old squareup.com/us/en/restaurants/pos-pricing URL 404s; pricing lives at /point-of-sale/restaurants/pricing.

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