POS system cost: monthly fees, card rates and hardware

A small-business POS system in the US costs $0 to about $150 a month per location in software on entry and mid plans, 2.3% to 2.6% plus 10¢ to 15¢ per in-person card payment where the rate is published, and $59 to about $1,900 in hardware up front. For almost any shop taking real card volume, the card processing line is the biggest number on the bill, often by ten times or more.

The table below is the published US pricing for five widely used small-business systems. After it, two worked monthly totals show what those numbers add up to, and the rest of the page covers how to compare them over three years and when building your own becomes rational.

POS pricing table: US list prices

US pricing from each vendor's official pricing page, checked on 18 October 2026. Prices change often, and most vendors quote custom rates above a certain volume, so treat this as the list price before negotiation. We do not rank POS vendors; this is a price reference, not a recommendation.

What sits behind those cells:

• Square charges per location and publishes the full rate card: 2.6% + 15¢ in person on Free, falling to 2.4% + 15¢ on Premium. Online card payments cost more (3.3% + 30¢ on Free, 2.9% + 30¢ on Plus and Premium). Above $250,000 a year in card sales, Square invites you to ask for custom pricing. Hardware runs from the $59 contactless and chip reader to the $299 Terminal, the $149 iPad Stand and the $899 Register.
• Clover sells hardware and software as a bundle, priced by business type. The retail and restaurant pages show each bundle either as one monthly payment for 36 months or as an up-front hardware price plus a monthly fee. Keyed-in cards cost 3.5% + 10¢. The promotional hardware credit on the page requires a 3-year contract.
• Lightspeed Retail (X-Series) includes one register per plan; extra registers and locations cost more per month. The 1.5% card-present rate appears only when the page is set to annual billing, and no per-transaction fixed fee is shown. Confirm the full rate in writing before you rely on it. Hardware is not priced on the public site.
• Shopify plans include casual in-person selling. The POS Pro add-on adds the fuller retail feature set for $89 a month per location, billed yearly. If you use a payment provider other than Shopify Payments, Shopify adds a 2% (Basic), 1% (Grow) or 0.6% (Advanced) fee on top of that provider's rate. The page shows the Shopify Payments rate by visitor region, and we could not confirm the US in-person figure from the official page, so it is left out. Hardware prices are from the Shopify Hardware Store (US store, USD).
• Toast is restaurant-focused. Its pricing page lists the plan prices but not the card rate; Point of Sale is described as "flat-rate processing" with the number given in a sales quote. The Starter Kit price applies to new, single-location customers and includes the first terminal subscription. Toast software runs only on Toast-approved hardware.

Read the table with one caution: the software column is the one people compare, and it is the smallest line for any business with meaningful card volume. The worked examples show why.

Typical monthly POS cost: two worked examples

These are illustrative calculations, built only from the list prices in the table above. They assume every card payment is in person, ignore cash sales (which carry no processing fee), and leave out sales tax, chargebacks, add-ons and negotiated rates. Swap in your own card sales and average ticket to get your number.

A small shop: $20,000 a month in card sales

Assumption: 800 card payments a month at a $25 average.

Hardware comes on top: $59 to $299 for Square, $1,899 for the Clover Standard kit. The Lightspeed row is the cheapest only if the published 1.5% really is the whole rate, which is exactly the thing to confirm in a quote. For the rest, processing is 86% to 100% of the monthly bill.

Note that Square Plus costs more than Square Free here. Its lower rate saves $20 a month on this volume, and the plan costs $49.

A restaurant: $60,000 a month in card sales

Assumption: 1,500 card payments a month at a $40 average.

Over three years, the Clover setup comes to $1,799 in hardware plus 36 months at $1,619.95, about $60,117. Of that, $55,080 is card processing: roughly 92% of the total. Toast cannot be compared without its quoted rate, which is the point: a plan price on its own tells you very little.

When does a higher plan pay for itself?

Divide the extra monthly fee by the rate saving. With Square's published prices:

Below those numbers, the cheaper plan is cheaper unless you need the features. The same division works for any vendor that publishes its rates.

The four components of POS system cost

The cost of a POS system has four components, and they scale in completely different ways. One is fixed, one grows with your headcount, one grows with your store count, and one grows with your turnover. Most people compare vendors on the fixed one, which is like choosing a car by the price of the floor mats.

1. Software subscription: fixed, and the one everyone compares

A monthly or annual fee, sometimes per register, sometimes per location. This is the number in the pricing table and the number in every comparison article. It is worth comparing. It is also, for most businesses doing meaningful card volume, not where the money goes.

2. Payment processing: a percentage of everything you sell

Card processing is charged as a percentage of turnover plus a small fixed amount per transaction. Because it is a percentage, it does not care about your software choice or your register count. It scales directly with success. A difference of a few tenths of a percentage point can outweigh the entire software subscription, in either direction, as the examples above show.

This is why "free POS software" is usually free. Many systems advertised at no cost are payment processors that give you the software so that they get the transaction stream. That can be a good deal, but you are choosing a payment contract, not a software package, and it should be evaluated as one.

Two things to establish before you sign anything:

• What is the effective rate, all-in, including the fixed per-transaction component and any monthly minimum, not the headline percentage.
• Are you locked to their processor? If the software only works with one payment company, you cannot renegotiate the biggest line on this page without replacing the whole system. Shopify's third-party fee and Toast's approved-hardware rule are two published examples of how that lock looks in practice. That single question is worth more than any feature comparison.

3. Hardware: up front, then again in four years

Terminal, card reader, cash drawer, receipt printer, barcode scanner and a stand. Sometimes financed into the monthly fee, as with Clover's 36-month bundles, which makes the subscription look higher and the up-front cost look like zero.

The line people forget is replacement. Counter hardware lives in a hostile environment and gets replaced on a cycle. Price it as an annual cost rather than a one-off, and check whether the hardware is locked to the vendor. Proprietary hardware means the cost of leaving includes buying all of it again.

4. Setup, migration and the staff day

Getting your product catalogue in, mapping tax rates, configuring receipts and training staff. Usually quoted as a one-off if it is quoted at all, and usually underestimated, because the real cost is trading hours rather than a fee.

How POS system pricing is structured

Know which pricing model you are being quoted, because the same headline number means very different things across them. There are four, and vendors rarely name which one they use.

Per register. A fee for each till. Simple and predictable, and it punishes exactly the moment you succeed: a second checkout at Christmas doubles the software line. Ask whether a register can be deactivated seasonally or whether you pay year-round for a till you use in December.

Per location. A fee per shop, unlimited registers inside it (Square's plans are priced this way). Better for busy single sites, worse for a chain of small ones. Three tiny shops can cost more than one large one, which is the opposite of how your revenue works.

Flat rate. One price, everything included. Rare, and usually a higher headline that turns out cheaper for anyone with more than one till.

Revenue share, or "free". No software fee; the vendor takes a cut of processing. The price of a POS system on this model is not zero. It is a variable you cannot see on an invoice.

Two modifiers cut across all four. Per-user charges appear when every staff member needs their own login, which they should, because shared logins destroy the audit trail that makes a POS worth having. And module pricing puts inventory, loyalty, purchasing or multi-location behind separate line items, so the entry price of a POS system is rarely the price of the system you end up needing.

When you ask for the price of a POS system, ask for it as: base, per register, per user, per module, per location, plus processing. A quote that resists that breakdown is telling you where the money is.

Work out your three-year number

Compare on three years, not one. One-year comparisons flatter whichever option front-loads its cost.

Run it twice: once at today's turnover, once at your three-year target. The second run is the one that matters, because the processing line grows with the business and the software line usually does not. Systems that look identical at today's volume can differ substantially at twice the volume.

To find your own crossover between "shopping for software" and "shopping for a payments deal", divide your annual software cost by your effective rate. Take the Clover Standard software fee of $84.95 a month ($1,019.40 a year) at 2.3%: above about $44,300 in annual card sales, processing costs more than the software. Very few working shops sit below that line.

What you should be getting for it

Price comparison is only meaningful against a fixed idea of what the system must do. We maintain a hand-counted inventory of 60 real retail POS products, and the frequency distribution is unusually clear-cut:

Two things stand out.

Checkout is universal. Every single product has it, so it is not a differentiator and should never be a line item you are sold on. What separates systems is the bottom half of that list.

The register and cash-close lifecycle appears in under a third. Open float, cash in and out during the day, a counted close and a variance figure. It is underreported in marketing and it is the thing that tells you whether the till was short on Tuesday. If you take cash at all, ask for a demonstration of the full trading day rather than the sale.

Likewise, returns appear in fewer than half, and a refund is the hardest thing in a POS to get right, because it must reverse every ledger the original sale wrote: stock, cash, tax, loyalty. Ask to see an exchange with a price difference, not a straight refund.

The number that makes building rational

For most businesses, buying is correct. The software is cheap relative to the processing line, the products are mature, and somebody else carries the maintenance.

Building becomes rational at a specific and identifiable point: when your processing arrangement is locked to your software, and the lock is costing you more than a build would.

That is the calculation nobody puts in a comparison table. If your POS forces a processor, and an independent processor would give you a materially better effective rate, then the annual difference on your card turnover is the true price of that software. It recurs every year and grows as you grow. On the restaurant example above, each 0.1% of rate is $60 a month, or $2,160 over three years. Against that number, a one-off build whose only ongoing cost is maintenance can pay back quickly.

The other trigger is fit. If your counter workflow is really unusual (trade counters with account customers, service work that becomes a sale, deposits against future collection, weighted goods, split ownership across trading entities), you will pay for that mismatch every day in staff time, and no subscription line captures it.

If you do build, the capability order above is the specification. Checkout first, because it is the product. Then stock that reconciles, then reporting that drills to source rows rather than displaying totals nobody can trace. The register lifecycle and the returns workbench are where self-built systems usually stop, and they are exactly what makes the difference between a demo and a till you can trust on a Saturday.

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If free is where you are starting, free POS software covers what those systems are and what they cost you elsewhere. For what matters when choosing one at all, POS system for small business counts it across 60 real products. And if you are building, the Retail POS planner is the specification we hand our own coding agents: the cashier-first counter, durable receipts, reversible money, and the controls that hold.