Payment processing for restaurants that keeps tables turning

Two contracts, two bills: the POS and the processing

Most restaurant owners describe one payments cost, and there are almost always two. The point-of-sale system is software and hardware, usually billed as a monthly subscription per terminal or per location, sometimes with a hardware purchase, rental or lease alongside it. The merchant account is a separate agreement that prices the card transaction itself, and that price has three layers: interchange, which the card networks publish and which is paid to the bank that issued the customer's card; network assessments, paid to the network; and your provider's markup. Visa states plainly in its US interchange schedule that merchants do not pay interchange reimbursement fees — merchants pay a merchant discount to their own financial institution, and interchange is one of the inputs to it. The reason this matters on a restaurant floor is that the two contracts have different terms, different lengths and different exit costs, and a POS company that also processes your cards has an incentive to keep them tied together. Ask for both agreements in writing, ask what happens to the hardware if you change processors, and ask whether the POS will keep working if the processing moves.

What a downgrade actually costs a restaurant

The single biggest controllable variable on a restaurant statement is not the headline rate. It is how many of your sales fall out of the program they should have landed in. Visa's April 18, 2026 schedule prices the same debit card very differently depending on how the sale was submitted, and the ladder below is the one a late batch, a keyed card or a missing data field walks you down. The rates shown are interchange reimbursement fees paid between banks, not your cost; your merchant discount sits on top of them. The point of the table is the spread, not the absolute numbers.

The tip tolerance changed in February 2026

If your terminals authorise the bill and add the tip afterwards, the gap between the authorised amount and the settled amount is governed by Table 7-10 of the Visa rules. That table changed this year. Effective 21 February 2026 in the US region, MCC 5811 (Caterers), 5812 (Eating Places and Restaurants) and 5814 (Fast Food Restaurants) are permitted a difference of up to 30%, where the same merchant categories in the AP, Canada, CEMEA, Europe and LAC regions are permitted up to 20%. Drinking places under MCC 5813 stay at up to 20%. Card-absent cardholder-initiated transactions stay at up to 15%. And there is one case where no variation is allowed at all: following a partial authorisation response, the clearing amount and the authorisation amount must match. That is the case a busy service is most likely to get wrong, because a partially approved card is exactly the one a server hands back with a tip line still open. Our tip adjustment guide works through the operational side, and the Department of Labor's Fact Sheet #15 covers the wage side: an employer may reduce a charged tip by the percentage of the card processing fee but not by more than the actual fee on that transaction, and the tip must reach the employee no later than the regular pay day.

Delivery-app fees ride on top of your card fees, not instead of them

DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub commissions are separate from — and stack on top of — the interchange and processor markup on the card the customer used to pay the platform, not you. DoorDash's own merchant pricing page states three tiers: 15% (Basic), 25% (Plus) or 30% (Premier) commission on delivery orders, with pickup orders at 6% on every plan, no monthly fee and no contract. Uber Eats and Grubhub do not publish a single public commission number the way DoorDash does — their current per-order rate depends on the plan a restaurant signs up for and is quoted directly, so treat any percentage you see for those two outside their own onboarding flow as third-party estimate, not their rate card. What is certain across all three: your merchant account never touches that transaction — the diner pays the platform, the platform pays you a net deposit, and the platform's payment processing is priced and disclosed by the platform, not by us. Online ordering you run yourself (a branded site or QR-code menu through your own POS) instead moves that order back onto your own merchant account, at your own card-present or card-not-present rate, with no 15-30% commission — which is why several POS platforms bundle commission-free online ordering as a retention feature.

Equipment: what you own, what you rent, and what you are locked into

There is a well-documented failure mode here, and it is worth naming because it is a matter of public record rather than opinion. In July 2022 the Federal Trade Commission filed a complaint against First American Payment Systems in the Eastern District of Texas alleging, among other things, that small businesses were charged undisclosed exit fees when they tried to leave. In February 2025 the FTC announced refunds to affected small businesses. The lesson for a restaurant is procedural, not brand-specific: before you sign anything, get the term length, the renewal mechanism, the early termination amount and the equipment arrangement in writing, and check whether the hardware is being sold to you, rented month to month, or financed through a separate non-cancellable lease held by a third party. A lease assigned to a funding company does not end when your processing agreement ends. Ask which of the three it is and get the answer on paper.

Compliance a restaurant actually has to handle

Two obligations sit with you rather than with your provider. The first is PCI DSS validation. The PCI Security Standards Council publishes the merchant guidance and the self-assessment questionnaires, and which questionnaire applies depends on how you accept cards — a dining room on validated point-to-point encrypted terminals is a different scope from a kitchen PC running the ordering site. Visa's own published credit performance threshold criteria list PCI compliance as a requirement alongside volume, so it is not a box your processor ticks for you. The second is disclosure. Visa's rules require a merchant that restricts returns, refunds or cancellations to disclose that policy at the point of transaction before the cardholder completes the sale, or on the front of the transaction receipt with a space for the cardholder to indicate acceptance. For a restaurant this bites hardest on deposits, event minimums and no-show fees. The same section says a merchant must not require a cardholder to waive the right to dispute a transaction with the issuer. This is general information about published card network rules and federal regulations, not legal advice (September 17, 2026).

Switching without closing for a service

A processing change and a POS change are different projects, and conflating them is what turns a switch into a closed night. Moving processors while keeping the POS is usually a configuration change and a hardware reprogram. Moving the POS as well means menu rebuild, staff retraining and a data migration. Sequence them. Whichever you are doing, three things need to be settled before the cutover date: what happens to stored cards and open tabs, when the last batch closes on the old account and the first closes on the new one, and what your exit costs are on both the processing agreement and any hardware lease. Regulation II is worth knowing here too: 12 CFR 235.7(b) prohibits an issuer or network from inhibiting a merchant's ability to direct the routing of a debit transaction over any network that can process it, so debit routing configuration on your new terminals is a question you are entitled to ask and get answered.

About the rate tables on this page: Visa is the only card network that publishes a public US merchant interchange schedule, so the rate tables on this site are Visa-only. Mastercard, American Express and Discover do not publish an equivalent US merchant schedule, and their rates are neither shown above nor implied by these figures. Ask your processor for the rates that apply to each network on your account.