Learn about payment limits
About payment limits
Payment limits are restrictions that put a temporary cap on your ability to process transactions through your Square account. Square doesn’t put limits on your payments because you’ve done anything incorrectly, but in certain situations limits are put in place to protect your account and the larger Square ecosystem from transactions that seem likely to result in payment disputes.
Before you begin
Square doesn’t put payment limits in place lightly, because we know we’re putting a ceiling on the amount of business you can bring in. It all comes back to your customers’ ability to dispute payments they’ve made to you—we’re trying to protect your business and our ecosystem from losing money when the customer’s bank rules that you have to return their money. Square makes this decision based on a number of different possible scenarios:
New to Square: If you’re new to Square and have a lack of processing history on your account, we may put a payment limit on your account until we know more about how you process payments.
High rate of payment disputes: If a lot of your customers are disputing their purchases and/or if you have insufficient funds to support/refund those disputes, we may put a limit in place until your rate of disputed payments goes down.
Erratic processing activity: Sudden changes in how many payments you’re taking within a given period, or the size of transactions you’re taking, the velocity or volume of transactions on your Square account may result in a payment limit until a regular pattern re-establishes itself.
High-risk goods or services: We’ve found that some businesses sell products or services that are more prone to receiving payment disputes. We may put a payment limit on these kinds of businesses until we’ve established that they can maintain a low rate of payment disputes.
It is possible for an account to have more than one limit restriction at one time.
Payment limit notice
We’ll send an email to your Square account if it’s necessary to put limits in place or adjust limits already in place. You can email Square to ask for more details or check in on how far you have progressed towards your limit—just respond to the original payment limit notice that we sent to your Square account
Payment limit updates
We’ll send you update emails when you’ve hit or exceeded 50% and 75% of the total limit for the calendar period, when there are 7 days left in that calendar period. You can also respond to the original payment limit notice or call the number above at any time to check in on how far you’ve progressed toward your limit.
Payment limit timeframe
A payment limit is applied by calendar period. Limits might be applied in a monthly, quarterly, or annual timeframe. Limits applied mid-period will apply to the entirety of that period. For example, if a monthly limit is applied on June 15th, then the amount processed between June 1st and June 15th will count toward the processing limit for the remainder of that month.
We periodically review your limits based on your processing history and on documentation that we request from you.
Payment limit frequency
This varies widely depending on the type and size of your business and the kinds of transactions you process—payment limits are always temporary and you shouldn’t expect it to happen frequently. However, it is possible for an account to have more than one limit restriction at one time.
Payment limits at point of sale
If you attempt to process a payment after you’ve already reached your payment limit for that calendar period, you can expect the transaction to decline at the point of sale.
Payment limits for eCommerce
If you exceed your payment limit, any additional transactions that your customers attempt will be declined. We recommend you seek an alternate method of payment for any transactions that exceed these limit(s), such as a check or wire transfer to your bank.