Square Terminal Payments FAQ
What are my fees?
Contactless, swiped or inserted chip and PIN credit cards and swiped magnetic stripe credit card payments processed through the Square Terminal have a 1.75% fee.
If you have a custom processing rate on your Square Account that is lower than 1.75% for card present payments, that rate will apply to all transactions on your Square Terminal.
There are no fees for recording cash, cheque or gift card payments.
There are no monthly or hidden fees for credit card processing. All fees are deducted before funds are transferred to your linked bank account.
Note: Processing fees are deducted before each transfer and cannot be charged on a monthly basis. You can view your total fees on a monthly basis from your online Square Dashboard.
Contactless Payments
Contactless payments describe the act of paying without touching the payment device. NFC (Near-Field Communications) is a technology that allows for contactless payments. Using radio frequency, NFC allows devices (e.g. smartphones) to wirelessly communicate at close range to do things like process payments. Apple Pay and Google Pay are both types of contactless payments.
When you are ready to accept a contactless payment, tap the ‘Charge’ button on Terminal. If you have Default to Customer Checkout enabled, the contactless symbol will appear on a blue screen. If not, tap on ‘Customer Checkout’ to enable contactless payments. Have your customer hold a contactless device or card near the contactless symbol to start a contactless payment.
If you do not see the blue contactless symbol screen after tapping charge, you can adjust your Customer Checkout options.
Yes, they’re just as secure as accepting chip cards. In some cases because of additional verification methods (like Touch ID with Apple Pay), contactless payments can be even more secure. Learn more in
Square’s comprehensive guide to Apple Pay.
Insert Payments
Chip and PIN card payments require additional security steps to transfer and verify chip data. It will take around 2 seconds to complete a chip card transaction when it’s inserted into the EMV card slot.
Yes, you’ll need to leave the chip and PIN card in the Terminal chip and PIN card slot until the transaction is complete. You’ll see a confirmation message when it’s time to remove the card.
Manage Payments
- From the navigation bar at the bottom of your screen, tap Transactions.
Select the payment you’d like to refund > Issue Refund. - Tap Select All Items to refund the entire sale, select the specific items you’d like to refund or tap Amount to refund a specific amount.
- Tap Refund.
When issuing an itemised refund, the amount being refunded will reflect any applicable taxes (e.g. Sales Tax) and discounts for the selected item(s).
For Custom Amount transactions, you’ll have the option to refund any pound amount up to the total amount of the sale.
You can reprint a payment receipt from your Square Terminal. To do so, follow these steps:
- From the navigation bar at the bottom of your screen, tap Transactions.
- Locate and tap the payment.
- Tap New Receipt > Paper Receipt.
Note: To find the transaction in your history, you can scroll through your transaction list or search by manually entering the card number, inserting, tapping or swiping the card or payment device.
Manage Orders
Yes. With Square Terminal you can view and filter your orders by status or type, update order progress, update tracking information and have your orders printed from the Square Terminal’s built-in printer.
You can learn more about managing orders on Square Terminal in our Support Centre.