Home

Apply service charges

In this article
Who is this article for?
  • Account owners or team members with the account and settings permission to edit business information can create a service charge.
  • Account owners or team members with the checkout permission to take payments can manually apply a service charge.
  • You can set permissions in Square Dashboard.
  • Square for Restaurants subscribers.

    • About service charges

    Service charges help offset certain operational or overhead costs, and can be percentage-based or a fixed amount that won’t change based on the purchase cost. The following service charge types and taxes are available:

    • Manual Service Charge: Percentage-based or a fixed amount. Service charges are created in your Square Dashboard and applied on the POS. For example, if a delivery fee is always 3%, that percentage would be set as a manual service charge added to the bill.

    • Variable Service Charge: Exact amount is determined at checkout, based on the total transaction amount or other factors. Once a service charge is added to the bill, you can select the value or percentage used for this particular fee.

    • Nontaxable: The amount of the service charge is not affected by any tax rates.

    • TaxAssigned: These service charges are taxable, and the entire service charge will be taxed at the assigned rate.

    • TaxApportioned: The service charge inherits the tax rate from the items in the basket. If there are two items in the basket and one has a tax rate of 0% and the other has a tax rate of 4%, the service charge will be taxed in proportion to the value of the two items and their respective tax rates.

    Before you begin

    Disclaimer: this guidance is general in nature and does not constitute legal, tax or any other type of professional advice. If you are unsure about your legal obligations or where to find the relevant information, consider consulting with a professional.

    • Multiple service charges: You can apply multiple individual service charges, but you cannot apply a single service charge more than once. For example, you can apply a pickup service charge and a bag service charge to the same sale, but you can’t apply the bag service charge more than once to that same sale.

    • Visibility of service charges When you add a service charge during checkout, both you and your customer will see the charge as a line item on the transaction.

    • Laws and regulations: Merchants are responsible for adhering to all laws and regulations regarding imposing service charges on customers. We encourage you to consult with legal counsel to ensure you’re in compliance with the rules where you do business.

    Surcharging is not currently supported, but is coming soon.
    Square does not support credit card surcharging at this time, but we are actively working on a network-compliant surcharging feature to give you more flexibility in how you manage your costs. We expect this to be generally available this summer. The service charge feature cannot be used to add a credit card surcharge. This is because payment networks updated their rules around credit card surcharging, and surcharging is subject to local laws and regulations that apply to your business and must comply with card network rules, including notification requirements. Similarly, surcharging is never permitted on debit cards, prepaid cards, or Afterpay transactions.

    Create a service charge

    1. Sign in to your Square Dashboard and go to Settings > Device management.

    2. Click Service settings > Service charge.

    3. Toggle on Allow service charge.

    4. Choose a percentage-based or fixed-price service charge, then enter the amount of the charge.

    5. Add any applicable taxes.

    6. Click Save.

    Apply a service charge

    Once you create a service charge from your Square Dashboard, you can manually apply it to transactions. You can add service charges to orders that include items, custom amounts or both. You cannot apply a service charge multiple times on the same sale or invoice.

    Point of Sale app

    From the Square Point of Sale app with full service, quick service or bar mode enabled or from the Square for Restaurants POS app:

    1. Open your Restaurant POS app and select the order to which you want to apply a service charge.
    2. Tap Actions > Service Charges.
    3. Select the service charge you want to apply.

    From the Square POS app with retail mode enabled or from the Square Retail POS app

    1. From the Checkout screen, hold down a tile then tap Edit tile grid.
    2. Under Add to page, tap Action.
    3. Check the Service charges action tile box.
    4. Select applicable service charges.
    5. Tap Finished. From there, you can move the tile to rearrange or tap the Service charges tile to make edits at any time.

    To check out a customer with a service charge

    1. Add items to basket.
    2. Tap the applicable items, then tap Apply Service Charge.
    3. Choose applicable service charges, then tap Save.
    4. Tap Add to Basket.
    5. Tap Charge to complete the payment.
    6. To remove the service charge from the basket, swipe left, then tap Delete.

    From the Square POS app with services mode enabled or from the Square Invoices app

    1. Tap Create a new invoice.
    2. Tap Add a line item to apply a service charge.
    3. Select any pre-existing service charges you want to apply to the invoice.
    4. Fill out the rest of your invoice and send it as you normally would.

    From the Square POS app with standard mode enabled:

    1. From the app, tap Library.
    2. You can search for service charges by name, or tap the Service Charge category.
    3. Choose all of the service charges that apply to the sale.
    4. Tap Review Sale to check the details of the transaction.
    5. Tap Charge. The service charge will show as a line item on your customer’s receipt and in your transaction report details.

    Square Dashboard

    1. Go to Payments > Invoices.
    2. Select Send an invoice and fill out your invoice details.
    3. Under Line items, select Add service charge.
    4. Create a new service charge or choose an existing service charge. Indicate the amount of the service charge and add VAT if needed.
    5. Click Add to apply the service charge to your invoice.
    6. Complete the rest of your invoice and send it to your customer as you normally would, then click Send.

    Square Virtual Terminal

    1. Sign in to your Square Dashboard and select Payments > Virtual Terminal.
    2. Choose Take a payment. If you want to charge an itemised sale or process a Quick Charge. Under Transaction details, choose the purchased items, or manually enter the amount to be charged. Note: you can edit VAT to be charged for each item by clicking the item name.
    3. Select Add service charge.
    4. Choose the service charge you created, or Create service charge. Note: Let your customer know about any service charges before you proceed.
    5. Click Add to add the service charge to the sale, then enter payment details, customer information and choose payment method. Note: you can select Add additional service charge to add more than one service charge to the sale and repeat the process.
    6. Click Charge to charge the total amount, including applicable VAT and service charges. The service charge will show as a line item in your customer’s invoice and receipt and in your report details.

    You can enable or disable service charges from Square Dashboard by selecting Virtual Terminal > Settings > Checkout, and toggling the Allow service charges option on or off.

    Square Online

    When creating a service charge, you can automatically apply the service charge to Square Online orders fulfilled via pickup, delivery or QR code ordering. To do so, toggle Apply automatically to Square Online orders on and choose which fulfilment types you want the service charge to apply to.

    Note: Item-level taxes must be enabled for these fulfilment types before you can set up automatic service charges. Automatic service charges only apply to Square Online orders fulfilled via pickup, delivery or QR code ordering.

    Square Payment Links

    After creating a service charge, you can choose which charges to apply to your Square Payment Links. To start:

    1. Sign in to your Square Dashboard and go to Payments > Payment Links.
    2. Click Settings > General.
    3. Under Service charges, toggle on the service charges you’d like to automatically apply to Square Payment Links.

    View service charge reporting

    To view and export a report of transactions with service charges applied:

    1. Sign in to your Square Dashboard and click Reporting > Reports.

    2. Click Service charges and select your date range.

    3. Click Export.

    Related articles

    In this article

    Still need help?

    Contact us
    Get help from our support team
    Ask the community
    Get answers from Square sellers