2026 UK Card Processing Rate Benchmarks: What SMEs Are Actually Paying

UK small and medium businesses are paying more attention to card processing rates in 2026 than they have for years. Interchange caps, the long tail of pandemic-era contracts coming up for renewal, and a fresh wave of low-rate entrants have made the question of what a fair blended rate looks like a live conversation.

This piece sets out the headline rates published by the major UK card acquirers as at the second quarter of 2026, then translates those into effective blended rates for typical SME card volumes. All figures are taken from each provider’s published rate cards on their UK consumer-facing sites or from the rate data tracked in our terminal database at src/data/terminals.ts. Where a provider offers tiered or negotiable pricing, we note the band rather than a single number.

What a UK SME blended rate actually means

A blended rate is the single percentage a merchant pays on every card transaction, regardless of card type. It hides the underlying interchange (paid by the acquirer to the card-issuing bank), the scheme fees (paid to Visa or Mastercard), and the acquirer’s own margin. Interchange-plus pricing pulls those three layers apart and bills them separately, which is generally cheaper above roughly £25,000 of monthly card volume.

For most UK SMEs trading sub-£25,000 a month in card payments, blended pricing is what you are quoted and what you pay.

Headline rates by provider, Q2 2026

These are the rates each major UK provider advertises on its public site for SME customers as at May 2026. They are entry-point rates: contract negotiations above roughly £15,000 monthly card volume regularly produce lower numbers.

Dojo

1.4% to 1.9% blended on the Dojo Go terminal. Twelve-month minimum contract. Same-next-day settlement. The Dojo rate sits at the lower end for SMEs because the provider is selective about onboarding and its target merchant runs significant card volume.

SumUp

1.69% per transaction on SumUp Solo. No contract, no monthly fee. Hardware is £99 to £149 upfront. The rate is identical across UK debit, credit and contactless. SumUp’s pay-as-you-go model is uncompetitive once monthly card volume passes about £10,000.

Square

1.75% per transaction on Square Terminal for in-person payments. No monthly fee. Hardware is £169 upfront. Square’s online and keyed-in rates are higher (1.9% to 2.5%). Settlement is next business day as standard.

Zettle

1.75% per transaction on Zettle Reader 2. No contract, no monthly fee. Hardware from £59. Zettle pairs with a phone or tablet rather than running standalone, which is the trade-off for the lowest hardware cost in the UK SME market.

Stripe

1.5% plus 20p for UK consumer cards on the Stripe Terminal in-person rate. Online standard rate is 1.5% plus 20p UK, 2.5% plus 20p European Economic Area, 3.25% plus 20p international. Stripe’s reader hardware sits between £79 (BBPOS WisePOS E) and £329 (Stripe Reader S700). No contract.

Tide Card Reader

1.5% per transaction. Free hardware on certain Tide business banking plans, otherwise £35 upfront. No monthly fee. Tide is the lowest-rate option in the no-contract UK market in Q2 2026, conditional on holding a Tide business account.

Tyl by NatWest

0.74% headline rate (conditional, tiered, negotiated). Tyl publishes its rate as a negotiated package rather than a single number. The 0.74% headline is realistic for £50,000-plus monthly card volume merchants banking with NatWest; the typical SME rate sits closer to 1.4% to 1.7%.

Revolut Reader

0.8% to 1.0% per transaction. Hardware from £19. No contract. Conditional on holding a Revolut Business account. Revolut undercuts most of the UK no-contract market on rate.

Effective rates by monthly card volume

The headline rate is rarely what a merchant pays once you factor in monthly fees, minimum monthly charges, PCI compliance fees and settlement timing. For an SME doing £5,000, £15,000 or £40,000 of monthly card volume, the effective rate, which is total annual card cost divided by total annual card volume, looks like this.

£5,000 monthly card volume

At this level, no-contract providers win on simple total cost. SumUp at 1.69%, Square Terminal at 1.75% and Zettle Reader 2 at 1.75% all land within five pounds of each other per month before any add-on fees. Stripe at 1.5% plus 20p works out slightly higher than the pure-percentage providers because the 20p fixed fee bites at a typical SME average transaction value of £18 to £25.

£15,000 monthly card volume

This is the inflection point. SumUp’s pay-as-you-go model now costs roughly £253 a month all in. Dojo, at a negotiated 1.55% blended for this volume tier, costs about £232 a month, plus a £20 monthly device fee, for a total of £252. The two land within a pound of each other once volume is factored in. The decisive variable becomes settlement timing and account support.

£40,000 monthly card volume

At this volume, the picture flips entirely. Interchange-plus pricing through Adyen, Worldpay or a negotiated Stripe arrangement starts to make sense, with effective rates typically landing between 0.9% and 1.2% blended. Tyl and Revolut also bite at this volume. The pay-as-you-go providers (SumUp, Square, Zettle) become uncompetitive at this scale.

What this means for switching decisions

If your current effective rate is above 1.8% and you are trading more than £10,000 a month in card volume, you are paying for either contract inertia or a service layer you may not be using. Rate reviews at 90-day or 180-day intervals are standard practice in the UK SME card-payments market in 2026, and the majority of competitive offers will undercut the historic 2.0% to 2.5% blended rates that were widespread before 2024.

A blended rate above 2.0% on volume below £5,000 a month is normal for a pay-as-you-go account; it is not a sign of being overcharged. Above £10,000 monthly card volume, a 2.0%+ rate is increasingly hard to justify and worth a switching conversation.

Sources and verification

All rate figures in this piece are taken from each provider’s public UK rate card as at May 2026 and the structured terminal data in our internal database. Interchange fee structures are governed by the UK Payment Services Regulations and overseen by the Payment Systems Regulator. We do not publish rate figures we cannot verify against either a primary source (the provider’s site) or our own direct testing.