Cheapest Card Machine UK 2026

Why the cheapest machine depends on your average sale

A headline percentage tells you almost nothing on its own, because the thing that decides your bill is the size of a typical sale. Take a cafe putting through 3,000 card transactions a month at an average of £4, so £12,000 of card turnover. At 1.69 percent the percentage element is £202.80. Add a 3p per-transaction charge and that is another £90, which on £12,000 is a further 0.75 percent. The advertised 1.69 has become an effective 2.44 without a single word of the quote being untrue.

Now run the same 3p charge past a furniture shop taking 100 transactions at £400 each. The per-transaction element costs £3 a month against £40,000 of turnover, which rounds to nothing. Identical pricing, and for one business it is the largest line on the statement while for the other it is invisible. Low-ticket, high-volume trades (cafes, bakeries, newsagents, pubs) should always ask about the pence-per-transaction charge before comparing percentages.

That is also why the volume bands above are a rough guide rather than an answer. A pub taking £12,000 a month in £4 rounds and a builder taking £12,000 a month in three invoices have the same turnover and completely different cheapest options.

The floor under every quote, and what sits above it

Only one part of what you pay is capped. The interchange fee, the slice that goes to the bank that issued your customer's card, is capped at 0.2 percent for UK consumer debit cards and 0.3 percent for UK consumer credit cards under the Interchange Fee Regulation. Everything above that, the acquirer's margin, the card scheme fees and the provider's service charge, is uncapped and is where the difference between a 1.4 percent quote and a 1.9 percent quote lives.

So a 1.75 percent blended rate on a mostly-debit card mix is roughly 0.2 percent of regulated interchange, a small amount of scheme fees, and the rest margin. That is not a criticism of any provider; someone has to build the terminal and answer the phone. It is the reason a quote is worth negotiating, and the reason two providers can look identical on the headline and differ by hundreds of pounds a year on the statement.

Commercial cards, business cards and cards issued outside the UK sit outside those caps entirely and cost noticeably more to accept. A business trading with other businesses, or with a lot of overseas visitors, will see a higher effective rate than its consumer-facing neighbour on exactly the same contract.

How to work out your own answer in ten minutes

One number settles this and it is on a statement you already have. Take your total card charges for a month, every line of them, and divide by the card turnover for the same month. That is your effective rate, and it is the only figure that can be compared across providers, because it already contains the percentage, the authorisation fees, the PCI charge, the terminal rental and the minimum monthly service charge.

Then repeat the sum with a competitor's quoted pricing applied to your own transaction count and average sale. If the quote does not let you do that, it is missing a number, and the missing number is usually the per-transaction charge or the minimum monthly service charge. Ask for both in writing before signing anything, along with the contract length and the notice period, which are the two things that make a cheap rate expensive when you want to leave.

Prices on this page were checked in mid-2026 and card pricing changes often. Dojo does not publish a rate card, so any Dojo figure here is illustrative rather than quoted, and the number that matters is the one on your own offer.

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