Payment Processing for Hospitality at a Glance
Hospitality payments are not just card acceptance with a nicer logo on the terminal. If you run a hotel, a pub, a restaurant, or an event venue, you need pre-authorisation holds for no-shows, tab management across a busy bar, split bills that don’t stall the queue, tipping that complies with the Employment (Allocation of Tips) Act 2023, and one payment trail that covers room bookings as well as the till. We’ve built this guide around the UK providers that actually handle those jobs in 2026, and around where each one stops being the right fit for you.
- Square for Restaurants: best overall for independent pubs, bars, and cafes.
- Dojo: best for mid-market hospitality once your card volume earns a negotiated rate.
- Lightspeed Restaurant: best for multi-site and complex service.
- Worldpay: best for hotels and established hospitality groups.
- Zettle by PayPal: best for the smallest operations.
Hospitality Payment Providers Compared
| Provider | Transaction fee | Monthly cost | Tab management | Tips Act support | Contract |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Square for Restaurants | 1.75% | From £69 (Plus tier) | Yes | Per-server tip reporting | None |
| Dojo | From 1.4% (negotiated) | £20–25 terminal | Via EPOS integration | On-screen tip prompts | Monthly |
| Lightspeed Restaurant | Negotiated | From £79 | Yes (advanced) | Staff tip allocation | Annual |
| Worldpay | IC+ (negotiated) | From £20 | Via EPOS integration | Via EPOS partner | 18–36 months |
| Zettle by PayPal | 1.75% | £0 | Basic | Basic tipping | None |
Rates correct as of June 2026. Dojo, Lightspeed, and Worldpay rates are indicative; contact each provider for a quote based on your volume and setup.
Best Payment Processing for UK Hospitality Businesses
Best for Independents: Square for Restaurants
For a single-site pub, bar, or cafe, Square is the lowest-friction place to start. The free POS tier covers basic card acceptance; the Square for Restaurants Plus plan (£69/month) adds course management, kitchen display integration, floor planning, and per-server tip reporting. In-person processing is 1.75% with no extra monthly fee on the payment side. Pre-auth handles tabs, so a £50–100 hold protects you against a walk-out, and there’s no long-term contract to sign.
Settlement lands the next business day. Hardware runs from a £19 Square Reader up to the Square Register at around £600 for a full countertop setup. The trade-off is that flat 1.75%: once you’re taking serious volume, you’ll beat it elsewhere.
Best for Mid-Market Hospitality: Dojo
Once you’re over roughly £15,000 a month in card turnover, Dojo’s negotiated rate (typically 1.4% to 1.6% at hospitality volumes) undercuts Square’s flat 1.75%. The terminals run on 4G with built-in receipt printers, settle the next business day, and show tipping prompts on the customer-facing screen, which gives you a clean record for the 2023 Act. Dojo integrates with Lightspeed, Epos Now, and other EPOS platforms if you want a semi-integrated setup rather than an all-in-one. We rate it the sensible step up from a flat-rate reader once the maths turns in its favour.
Best for Multi-Site Operations: Lightspeed Restaurant
Lightspeed Restaurant (from £79/month) is built for multi-till venues at peak service: floor planning, course management, kitchen display, and reporting broken down by section, staff member, and time period. Lightspeed Payments, powered by Adyen, handles the card processing at negotiated rates. Staff tip allocation ties into Lightspeed’s shift management, so your Employment (Allocation of Tips) Act records stay auditable rather than living in a spreadsheet. If you’re running a single site, you’re paying for headroom you may not need yet, and the £149 Core and £219 Pro tiers climb quickly.
Best for Hotels and Hospitality Groups: Worldpay
If you take room bookings, restaurant payments, phone reservations (MOTO), and direct online bookings, a single acquirer across all those channels is worth more than a slightly lower headline rate. Worldpay’s IC+ pricing at volume (typically 0.6% to 1.2% effective above £30,000 a month) beats bundled providers, and omnichannel reporting pulls every channel into one view. The catch is the commitment: contracts run 18 to 36 months, so read the exit clause carefully before you sign.
Best for the Smallest Operations: Zettle by PayPal
For a one-person cafe or a food truck, Zettle by PayPal is the cheapest way in: a flat 1.75% rate, a free app, the reader from around £29, and no contract. Tipping works but isn’t granular, which is fine for a cafe that pools tips and less suited to a full-service restaurant that needs per-server records. If that’s you, start one tier up.
Key Hospitality Payment Considerations
The Employment (Allocation of Tips) Act 2023
Since October 2024, the Act requires all qualifying tips, gratuities, and discretionary service charges to be passed to staff in full, with records kept for three years. In practice that means your processor has to capture the tip per transaction and tie it to the server who earned it, not just total the tips at the end of the night. Dojo’s terminal prompts and Lightspeed’s staff allocation module both produce compliant records, and Square for Restaurants gives you per-server tip reports. Before you sign up, confirm your chosen tier actually includes this, because the entry tiers often don’t.
Pre-Authorisation and No-Shows
Hotels and restaurants with deposit policies use pre-authorisation to hold an amount on a card without taking the money. If the guest turns up, you release or capture the hold; if they no-show, you can capture within the scheme’s window, which is typically seven days for lodging. Pre-auth chargebacks carry more risk than a standard sale, so keep a clear written cancellation policy and your booking correspondence as evidence. We wouldn’t run a no-show charge without both.
Split Bills and Tab Management
Splitting a bill by item or evenly across several cards is standard in Square for Restaurants and Lightspeed; Dojo handles it through your EPOS. If your venue splits bills often, test the workflow during the trial before you commit, because a clumsy split is the kind of thing that slows a Friday service to a crawl and irritates a table that just wants to leave.
Settlement Speed and Cash Flow
Weekend and bank-holiday takings need to clear fast enough to cover payroll and supplier payments. Square, Dojo, and Lightspeed Payments all settle the next business day; Worldpay runs at T+2 to T+3 on standard terms, with faster tiers available. Check the daily cut-off time too, because anything you take after it counts as the next day’s settlement. For a venue living on weekend trade, that one detail moves real money.
Hospitality Payment Fees and Costs to Watch
Monthly minimum charges. Some acquirer contracts include a monthly minimum service charge (MMSC): you pay the minimum even when your transaction fees fall below it. Seasonal venues such as summer beach cafes or Christmas market stalls are most exposed, so check whether the MMSC still applies in your quiet months before you sign.
Card-not-present rates. Online deposits and phone bookings (MOTO) attract higher rates than in-person, usually 1.5% to 2.5% against 1.4% to 1.75%. If you take remote bookings regularly, confirm your MOTO rate separately from your in-person rate.
Hardware costs. Countertop terminals, handhelds for table service, and kitchen display screens all add to the bill. Model the full hardware cost over three years before you compare monthly software prices, or the cheap subscription wins on paper and loses in the car park.
PCI compliance fees. Some providers add a monthly PCI compliance fee of £2 to £10. Ask whether it’s already in the quoted monthly figure or bolted on top.
Frequently Asked Questions
Card schemes typically allow pre-auth holds of seven days for lodging transactions. Most UK hotels pre-auth at check-in for the stay value plus an incidental amount, then capture or release at checkout. If the guest leaves without issue, the hold drops off within 7 to 14 days depending on the issuing bank. Confirm your acquirer’s specific window before you build a long pre-auth period into your operations.
Not if you use an omnichannel provider. Worldpay, Lightspeed Payments, and Square all support card-present, online, and MOTO under one acquirer relationship, so your reporting consolidates across channels and you negotiate a single rate structure. For hotels and event venues juggling several payment types, that’s usually the right architecture.
You need a system that captures the tip per transaction, ties it to the server involved, and keeps that record for three years. Your terminal or EPOS has to support per-server tip recording, not just a total-tips figure at the end of the day. Dojo, Lightspeed, and Square for Restaurants all produce compliant records. Check the specific tier you’re buying before you commit, because basic tiers may not include the granularity the Act requires.
No. Under the Payment Services Regulations 2017, UK consumer-facing businesses can’t add a surcharge for paying by credit or debit card. You can offer a cash discount instead: framing the card price as the standard price and cash as the cheaper option is allowed, as long as you communicate it clearly. Business-to-business payments follow different rules.
Our methodology. We built this guide from each provider’s published pricing and product pages, cross-checked against the Employment (Allocation of Tips) Act 2023, the Payment Services Regulations 2017, and current card-scheme rules on pre-authorisation. We re-verified each provider’s headline pricing against their own published pages in June 2026, and confirmed the regulatory and operational details in May 2026; where a rate is negotiated rather than published, we’ve said so instead of guessing. We haven’t tested these systems in a live service ourselves, so treat the operational notes as research-based guidance and confirm the exact terms in writing before you sign.
BusinessExpert is reader-supported. Some links on this page are affiliate links: if you click through and buy, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. It doesn’t change our editorial independence or which providers we recommend.