Square vs SumUp: Which Card Reader is Better for Your Business?

Updated September 2026

The UK's two most popular no-contract card readers compared. Both excellent - find which suits you better.

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Feature	Square	SumUp
Entry hardware (ex VAT)	Reader £19, Kiosk £99, Handheld £169, Register £699	Solo Lite £15, Solo £49, Terminal £99
Transaction Fee	1.75%	1.69%
Monthly Fee	£0	£0
Contract	None	None
Settlement	Next day to your bank, weekends and bank holidays included	Next day at 7am only into a SumUp Business Account. Straight to your own bank, 1 to 2 business days
App Features	Excellent (inventory, invoices)	Good (basic reporting)
Published lower rate for volume	Custom only, above £200k a year and subject to eligibility	Payments Plus, 0.99% for £189 a year

Rates and hardware prices read from squareup.com/gb/en/pricing and sumup.com/en-gb/pricing on 8 September 2026, excluding VAT. SumUp hardware was on promotional pricing that day, with Solo Lite listed at £15 against a usual £25 and Solo at £49 against £79.

What each one charges, once you read past the headline

Square takes 1.75% of every in-person payment on a UK card. SumUp takes 1.69% on pay-as-you-go. At £10,000 of monthly card turnover that is £175 against £169, so the famous gap between them is £6 a month.

The rate nobody advertises matters more. Square adds 1.5% on top for any card issued outside the UK, so the same contactless tap from a visitor costs 3.25% rather than 1.75%. SumUp's UK pricing page publishes a single in-person rate and no separate figure for non-UK cards. If you run a market stall in York, a café near a station or anything that serves tourists, that one line can be worth more than the headline difference several times over. Work out roughly what share of your takings comes from foreign cards before you weigh 1.69% against 1.75%, because on a seasonal pitch it is often the whole argument.

Away from the counter the two diverge again. Square publishes 1.4% plus 25p for an online sale, 2.5% for a payment keyed in by hand or taken from a card on file, and 2.5% on an invoice. Non-UK cards carry the same 1.5% surcharge on the keyed and invoice rates, and 2.5% plus 25p online. SumUp's pricing page prices its remote tools as subscriptions instead: Invoices Plus at £8 a month excluding VAT for unlimited invoices and quotes, POS Plus at £39, Business Account Plus at £15 including VAT. It does not publish a separate transaction rate for those on that page.

Where the money lands, and when

This is the part most comparisons get wrong, including an earlier version of this one. The two settlement schedules are not equivalent.

Square runs a standard next-day transfer that includes weekends and bank holidays. Funds go out each evening and reach the linked bank account the following day, and Square states it applies no transfer limits by amount, frequency or transaction type. An instant transfer costs 1.5% of the amount moved. A manual transfer still arrives the next day.

SumUp's next-day payout comes with a condition attached. Money arrives at 7am the following day, weekends and holidays included, only if it goes into a SumUp Business Account. Send it straight to an outside bank instead and the published time becomes one to two business days, with the frequency set to daily excluding weekends and bank holidays, weekly every Monday, or monthly on the third business day. So a Friday afternoon of trading can sit until Tuesday on the direct-to-bank route, while the same takings on Square would land on Saturday.

For a business that pays suppliers on Mondays, that gap is worth more than 0.06% on the rate. It is also the single fact on this page most likely to change a decision, and it appears in a help-centre article rather than on either pricing page.

The 0.99% plan, and the turnover where it starts paying

SumUp's pay-as-you-go rate is not its cheapest. Payments Plus charges 0.99% for £189 a year, which SumUp says saves 17% against paying monthly, and it bundles 24/7 priority support and free card reader replacements. SumUp aims it at businesses taking £3,000 a month or more.

The arithmetic puts the crossover lower than that. Moving from 1.69% to 0.99% saves 0.70% of turnover, so the £189 subscription is repaid at £27,000 of card sales a year, which is £2,250 a month. Against Square's 1.75% the saving is 0.76%, and the plan pays for itself at about £24,900 a year, or roughly £2,070 a month. Below those figures the free plan wins. Above them the subscription does, and the margin widens quickly: at £10,000 a month, Square costs £175 and SumUp on Payments Plus costs about £115 once the subscription is spread across the year, a difference of £720 a year.

Square answers this differently. Its Plus packages start at £29 a month and buy software for restaurants, retail and appointments rather than a lower processing rate. A cheaper rate exists only on the Premium plan, which Square limits to businesses processing over £200,000 a year and describes as custom rates that may be available pending eligibility. That wording is doing real work: SumUp publishes a lower number you can act on today, while Square asks you to qualify for one.

One threshold, published twice, in two currencies

SumUp's bespoke pricing tier carries a figure that does not agree with itself. The plan card says bespoke fees are for a business processing “£10,000 or more a month”. Nine paragraphs down the same page, the explanatory text offers custom pricing “if you process over €10k a month”. Both sentences were on sumup.com/en-gb/pricing on 8 September 2026.

At the exchange rates of the period those are not the same threshold, and a business sitting between the two has no way to tell from the page whether it qualifies. It is a small thing and almost certainly a copy error left over from a European template. Worth knowing anyway if you are near the line: ask the sales team which figure applies and get the answer in writing before you plan around it.

Hardware, and what a promotional price hides

On the day we checked, SumUp was discounting. Solo Lite showed £15 against a usual £25, Solo £49 against £79, and the Terminal £99 against £135, all excluding VAT. Tap to Pay on a phone costs nothing on either side, which for a sole trader testing whether they need a reader at all is the honest starting point.

Square's range runs £19 for the Reader, £99 for the Kiosk, £169 for the Handheld and £699 for the Register, with the last three also offered over six monthly payments of £17, £29 and £59. Both firms give a one-year warranty, and SumUp adds a 30-day money-back guarantee from delivery.

Compare the entry prices and £15 beats £19, but the difference is four pounds and it disappears inside the first month of trading. Compare the top of each range and the question changes shape entirely: Square sells a £699 countertop till system and SumUp does not, so a business that wants one integrated device on the counter is really choosing between Square and a full terminal provider rather than between these two readers.

Three businesses, three different answers

A mobile trader taking £1,200 a month is better off on SumUp pay-as-you-go with Tap to Pay or a £15 Solo Lite. Turnover sits well under the Payments Plus crossover, the 0.06% rate edge is worth about 72p a month, and the money that matters is the £15 not spent on hardware.

A salon turning over £8,000 a month should look hard at Payments Plus. It clears the £2,250 crossover comfortably, so 0.99% saves roughly £60 a month against Square, and appointment software is the deciding factor only if Square's £29 package genuinely replaces something the salon pays for already.

A café doing £25,000 a month with heavy weekend trade and a lot of tourist cards leans the other way. Square settles Saturday and Sunday takings without routing them through a second account, and its restaurant software is deeper. Against that sits the 1.5% non-UK card surcharge, which on a genuinely tourist-facing site can cost more than everything else on this page combined. At that turnover it is also worth pricing a full terminal provider before committing to either reader.

Our Recommendation

Choose Square If:

You want inventory and team management built in
You take few cards issued outside the UK
Weekend takings need to settle on the weekend
You want a £699 countertop till, not just a reader

Choose SumUp If:

You take £2,250 a month or more, where 0.99% pays
You want the cheapest published rate, 1.69% or 0.99%
You want to start free on Tap to Pay before buying hardware
You take a lot of cards issued outside the UK

Which is cheaper: Square or SumUp?▼

SumUp is slightly cheaper on the standard rate, 1.69% against Square's 1.75% on UK cards, which is £6 per £10,000 taken, or £216 over three years at £10,000 a month. Entry hardware runs the other way: the Square Reader is £19 ex VAT and the SumUp Solo Lite £15, with Solo at £49 and Terminal at £99. SumUp also publishes a 0.99% plan at £189 a year for businesses above roughly £3,000 a month, which is the larger saving if the volume is there. Checked 8 September 2026.

Which has better features?▼

Square publishes the deeper software: inventory, integrated invoicing and team management, with paid Plus packages from £29 a month aimed at restaurants, retail and appointments. SumUp is the simpler set-up and its free tier covers invoicing and a business account. Both operate well beyond the UK, so treat that as a wash rather than a deciding factor, and pick on the features you will actually use.

Can I use both Square and SumUp?▼

Yes, and there is a sensible reason to. Neither charges a monthly fee on its entry plan, so a second account costs nothing to hold. Businesses commonly keep Square on the counter for the software and a SumUp Solo Lite in the van or at an off-site event, or hold one as a backup for the day the other has an outage. The one thing to keep straight is bookkeeping: two providers means two payout streams landing on different schedules, which is exactly where reconciliation goes wrong at year end.

Which settles funds faster?▼

Square, and the gap is wider than it looks. Square runs a standard next-day transfer that includes weekends and bank holidays, sending funds each evening to the linked bank account, with no limits by amount, frequency or transaction type; an instant transfer costs 1.5%. SumUp pays out at 7am the next day including weekends only if the money goes into a SumUp Business Account. Straight to an outside bank it is one to two business days, on a schedule of daily excluding weekends and bank holidays, weekly on Mondays, or monthly on the third business day. A Friday night of trading can therefore sit until Tuesday on SumUp's direct-to-bank route and arrive Saturday on Square. Checked 8 September 2026.

Which is better for restaurants?▼

Square, for a full-service restaurant. It sells a dedicated restaurant package from £29 a month covering menus, table management and kitchen displays, and its Register hardware at £699 excluding VAT is a countertop till rather than a handheld reader. SumUp has no equivalent at the top of its range. For a takeaway or a coffee counter the picture reverses, because SumUp's Solo at £49 does the job and the software difference stops mattering. Above roughly £25,000 a month it is worth pricing a full terminal provider against both.

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Sources and references

CapExpand Ltd (Company No. 14433858) is an authorised Dojo partner, not a card machine manufacturer. Card machine pricing and availability are subject to change. Our card machine services are not regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and fall outside our appointment as an Appointed Representative of White Rose Finance Group Limited, which covers credit broking only.