Restaurant card payment processing fees UK: budget from your card mix, not one headline rate

13 min read

The fix is not to hunt for a lower percentage. It is to stop treating card processing as one rate and start treating it as a weighted average of your own card mix, with the refund and dispute lines priced separately. That calculation takes about ten minutes, it uses numbers already sitting in your payment dashboard, and it is the only version of the figure that survives contact with a real trading month.

This guide builds that calculation from a current first-party rate card, keeps it strictly separate from marketplace commission, and shows what changes when the mix moves. Every rate below was observed on Stripe UK pricing on 6 August 2026. These are live commercial prices and can change; recheck them before you commit a budget.

A restaurant taking orders and bookings online is usually paying two different organisations for two different things, and the two are constantly confused in conversation.

Platform or marketplace commission is a percentage of order value charged by whoever owns the ordering channel. It is set by contract, it varies enormously between channels, and it is the number a restaurant can actually change by changing where its demand comes from.

Card processing is what the payment processor charges to move the money. It applies to a direct order on your own website, a deposit on a booking and a card payment taken at the table. It is set by a published rate card rather than by your negotiating position, and it does not disappear when commission does.

This is why "0% commission" and "free payments" are not the same sentence. A platform can genuinely take nothing from the order and the card fee still lands, because the card fee was never the platform charging you. Any restaurant comparing channels needs both lines visible, or it will compare a commission figure on one side against a processing figure on the other and reach a conclusion the arithmetic does not support.

The rest of this guide prices the second line only. Your commission line comes from your own contract, and it belongs in a separate column.

Online card payments in the UK are not priced as one rate. They are priced as a set of categories, and every transaction lands in exactly one of them.

All five lines were shown on Stripe UK pricing on 6 August 2026. The currency-conversion line is displayed against both international rows and applies where conversion is required, not on every foreign-issued card. The same page describes standard pricing as having no setup fees, monthly fees or hidden fees, which is a statement about account charges rather than a statement that transactions are free.

Two things follow immediately. First, the gap between the cheapest and dearest online category on this rate card is more than double: 1.5% against 3.15%, before any conversion. Second, the fixed 20p matters far more than it looks on a busy weekday lunch. On a £34.00 order, 20p is under 0.6% of the value. On a £6.50 coffee-and-pastry order, the same 20p is over 3% on its own, before the percentage component is added at all.

The uncomfortable part of this calculation is that the most powerful variable is decided by your guests.

You do not choose whether a guest pays with a standard or a premium UK card. That category follows the card that is presented. You do not choose whether the couple booking a Saturday table are paying on a card issued in Manchester, Munich or Manila. What you can do is measure the mix you actually have rather than assume the one on the pricing page headline.

That measurement is the difference between a budget that survives a quarter and one that quietly runs over every month. A neighbourhood restaurant with regulars is a very different payments business from a restaurant beside a station, a stadium, a conference centre or a tourist landmark, even when both take an identical amount of money.

Pull the last full calendar month from your payments dashboard and answer five questions:

Those five answers are the whole calculator.

The formula is deliberately plain, because a formula an owner can run on paper is a formula that gets run.

Run it in this order:

Sum the categories and divide by total card volume. That percentage is your blended rate, and it is the only figure worth carrying into a budget, a menu-pricing review or a channel comparison. Round the percentage component to the nearest penny at category level before summing, and keep the method consistent month to month so the trend means something.

Two disciplines make the output trustworthy. Use transaction counts rather than a single volume figure, because the fixed component is per transaction. And keep card-present and card-not-present transactions in separate calculations, for the reason set out in section 8.

The following worked examples are illustrations built on the rate card above. They are not observed restaurant data. Both use identical inputs except the mix: 900 online card transactions, average transaction value £34.00, total card volume £30,600.00.

Mix A, mostly domestic — 80% standard UK, 12% premium UK, 5% EEA, 3% international:

Mix B, visitor-heavy — 55% standard UK, 15% premium UK, 12% EEA, 18% international:

Now put those against the two budgets a restaurant is most likely to have written down:

Read the gaps rather than the totals. Mix B costs £109.08 a month more than Mix A on identical trade, which is £1,308.96 across a year bought entirely by who walks through the door. Against the headline-rate budget, Mix B is £187.27 a month adrift, or £2,247.24 a year. Against the percentage-only budget that ignores the 20p altogether, the gap is £367.27 a month, or £4,407.24 a year.

One more line completes the picture. If 60 of Mix B transactions required currency conversion, that is £2,040.00 of volume carrying an extra 2%, so £40.80 more. The month becomes £867.07 and the blended rate 2.83%. None of these numbers are exotic; they are the same rate card applied honestly.

Refunds are the line restaurants forget, because the money going back out feels like the transaction being undone. It is not.

The current Stripe UK pricing FAQ states that for businesses on standard pricing there may be fees for refunds when bank transfers are used, that for all other payment methods there are no fees for issuing refunds, and that the payment processing, Connect and currency conversion fees from the original transaction are not returned, observed 6 August 2026. Businesses on custom pricing may have refund fees depending on their fee schedule with Stripe.

In practice that means a refunded order costs you the original processing fee with no sale attached. A refunded £34.00 order paid on a standard UK card retains £0.51 in percentage and £0.20 fixed: £0.71 gone on a sale that no longer exists. If 3% of the 900 transactions above are refunded, that is 27 refunds, £19.17 a month and £230.04 a year of pure retained cost.

That figure should change how you think about the operational causes of refunds rather than about refunds themselves. Wrong item, unclear menu description, a dish sold out after the order was taken, a collection slot the kitchen could not meet: each of those is a small operational failure that now carries a specific, calculable payment cost on top of the goodwill cost. Fixing the cause is cheaper than absorbing the fee.

Disputes are where the arithmetic stops being gentle, and where the online restaurant sits in the more exposed half of the market.

GOV.UK guidance on payment obligations sets out the exposure plainly. If a customer asks their credit or debit card issuer to reverse a transaction, they can reclaim the value of the transaction from you; this is known as a chargeback. It can be made when the purchased item never arrived, when the item was not as described, or when a card was used without permission to purchase the item fraudulently. You can be charged up to 120 days after the transaction has been debited or from when the goods or services were due to be received. Where a customer uses their PIN, you are liable only if the goods are faulty or not as described. Where you cannot accept a PIN, a clear signature helps but there is no guarantee against a chargeback. And for card-not-present transactions, such as online sales, the risks of chargeback will be higher.

The processor charges sit on top of the reclaimed value. On the rate card observed 6 August 2026:

Price the worst case, because that is the one that arrives unannounced. A single disputed £34.00 order that you contest manually and lose costs the £34.00 of reclaimed value, the £20.00 dispute received fee and the £20.00 countered fee that is not returned on a loss: £74.00, more than twice the ticket value. Put differently, at Mix B blended rate of 2.70%, £74.00 is what processing costs on £2,740.74 of card sales. One lost dispute on a mid-week table can wipe out the processing economics of an entire busy evening.

Note carefully what the sources do and do not say. The countered fee is described as returnable on a win. The received fee is not described that way, so budget it as spent from the moment the dispute arrives.

Keep the two channels in two calculations, because they are two different rate cards.

The same pricing page shows in-person Terminal payments at 1.4% + 10p per successful charge for EEA cards and 2.9% + 10p per successful charge for non-EEA cards, observed 6 August 2026. Those are different percentages and a different fixed component from the online rates in section 2.

If you merge counter takings and website orders into one blended figure, you produce an average that describes neither channel and cannot be used to judge either. Run the online calculator on online transactions only. Run a separate one for the room. Then you can see, honestly, what your direct digital channel actually costs to operate, which is the number you need when you are deciding how hard to push guests towards it.

Card processing is a real cost, but it is a cost you carry on essentially the same terms whichever website route you choose, because it is charged by the processor rather than by the website. What genuinely differs between routes is everything wrapped around it: the commission on the order, the recurring software, the ordering layer, the domain and certificate, the search-ready configuration, and the hours an owner spends holding it together.

That is the comparison that decides the real annual figure, and it is where TableSpark is the strongest choice for an independent UK restaurant.

TableSpark starts at £19 per month excluding VAT. The TableSpark column comes from the live TableSpark pricing page observed 6 August 2026: Starter £19/mo, Growth £39/mo and Full £69/mo, with 0% TableSpark commission on bookings and orders taken through your own site, and the plain statement that Stripe standard card-processing fees apply to online payments and TableSpark adds nothing on top. The assembled column is deliberately marked "Quote required" rather than filled with invented figures; those amounts depend on the specific contracts, plans, add-ons and renewal terms a restaurant signs, and they should be demanded in writing before any comparison is treated as settled.

That transparency is the point. A restaurant can state its total confidently because both halves of the payment question have a published answer: the platform takes nothing from the direct order, and the processor charges a rate you can look up and recalculate yourself using section 4. There is no rate that appears only after the first busy month.

Starter carries the self-managed structured restaurant website and menu, bookings and enquiries Inbox, guest records with CSV export, and managed technical SEO foundation. Growth adds the custom-domain connection with managed SSL, live table inventory, floor-plan workflows and POS connections. Full adds online ordering. For an independent UK restaurant weighing the complete restaurant-ready stack rather than one headline, TableSpark is the best-value and best overall restaurant-website choice, and it is the explicit recommendation of this guide.

There is a failure mode that makes the whole calculation academic, and it has nothing to do with rates.

A restaurant can hold a 0% commission direct channel and a carefully measured blended processing rate, and still lose the order, because the guest never arrived at the direct page. A website can be live at a working link and still be absent from Google. Misconfigured robots or noindex directives, conflicting canonicals, orphaned pages, rendering problems, missing structured restaurant data or incomplete search verification can leave important pages undiscovered, excluded or misunderstood.

The commercial consequence lands exactly where the fees do. A guest searching your restaurant name, menu, cuisine or location may reach a directory, a commission-charging marketplace or a competing restaurant before they reach your own ordering page, and the order you priced so carefully at 0% commission arrives instead through a channel that charges for it. Getting the processing arithmetic right and the discoverability wrong means paying more per order for a smaller share of them.

TableSpark packages that search-readiness work into the restaurant website rather than leaving an owner to hire a technician and assemble it: crawlable structured restaurant content, titles and descriptions, canonical URLs, sitemaps, robots controls, Restaurant and LocalBusiness schema, internal linking, mobile-first output and search-verification setup. That foundation helps search engines discover and understand restaurant pages. It does not guarantee crawling, indexing, rankings or rich results, and no one should tell you otherwise; those remain Google decisions.

A calculation run once is a curiosity. Run monthly, it becomes an early-warning system.

Keep one short record each month: transaction count, average transaction value, the four category shares, conversion transactions, refund count, dispute count and outcomes, total fees and the resulting blended rate. Ten minutes, one line per month.

Then watch for the four movements that matter:

Rechecking the published rates is part of the same routine. Every figure in this guide is a live commercial price observed on 6 August 2026 and can change without notice. Before you commit a budget, a menu-price change or a channel decision to paper, open the rate card again and confirm the numbers you are relying on still say what they said.

That is the whole discipline. Measure the mix you actually have, price refunds and disputes as real lines rather than exceptions, keep processing separate from commission, and make sure the channel you priced so carefully is the one guests can actually find.