Restaurant EPOS System UK: Costs, Contracts and Features

A restaurant EPOS (electronic point of sale) system takes orders, sends them to the kitchen, takes payment and records every sale for your accounts. In the UK the monthly software fee is the smaller part of the cost: on the published plans we checked it runs from £0 to about £220 per site, while card processing on a restaurant taking £50,000 a month by card costs £845 to £875 a month at the flat 1.69% to 1.75% rates listed below, and more where a fixed fee per payment applies. The contract you sign matters as much as the features, so this guide focuses on cost, lock-in and what to ask before you buy. For a feature-by-feature comparison of the main providers, see our best restaurant POS UK guide.

What a restaurant EPOS actually does

EPOS and POS mean the same thing in UK usage: the till system. A modern restaurant system is more than a till. At minimum it should cover:

• Order taking at the table, bar or counter, with modifiers, courses and split bills.
• Kitchen routing to printers or a kitchen display screen (KDS), so tickets reach the right station.
• Payments: cards, contactless, Apple Pay and Google Pay, cash, gift cards, plus tips and service charge.
• Reporting: sales by item, hour, server and payment type, ready to send to your accountant.
• Stock and cost links: items depleting ingredients, so gross profit is based on what was actually used.
• Booking and guest data: either built in or connected to your reservation book.

Where these live matters. A system that does order-taking only, with bookings, rota and stock in three other products, means three logins, three bills and no single view of your numbers. That trade-off is the main buying decision after price.

What an EPOS costs: software, hardware and card processing

There are three separate cost lines, and vendors often advertise only one of them.

1. Software subscription, charged per site per month. Add-ons such as a KDS, reservations, inventory or extra registers are often billed on top.
2. Hardware: tablets or terminals, receipt printers, cash drawers, card readers. You can buy it, lease it, or in some cases run the software on tablets you already own.
3. Card processing: a percentage of every card payment, sometimes with a fixed fee per transaction.

Here is what a selection of providers publish, as listed on each vendor's own pages in October 2026. Prices change, and you should check whether each figure is quoted with or without VAT: Square, Lightspeed and Epos Now do not state it on the pages we checked, while SumUp, Zettle and TablePort do (ex VAT).

Two things stand out. First, "free" software plans exist, but you pay through processing. Second, a flat percentage and a percentage plus fixed fee behave very differently depending on your average payment, which the next section covers.

Card processing: the cost that dominates

For most restaurants, card fees are bigger than the software bill. It is worth understanding what you are paying for.

A card payment fee has three parts: the interchange fee paid to the cardholder's bank, scheme fees paid to Visa or Mastercard, and the acquirer or provider's own margin. In the UK, interchange on domestic consumer cards is capped by regulation at 0.2% for debit and 0.3% for credit. Premium, business and non-UK cards cost more, which is why many providers publish a "standard" rate and a higher one for other cards.

Three practical points when comparing:

• Compare the effective rate, not the headline. Divide total fees by total card sales. A rate of 1.6% plus 18p on a £45 payment is about 2.0%; on a £5 coffee it is over 5%. A flat 1.75% has no such sensitivity. Fixed fees hurt low-ticket businesses most.
• Ask for the premium and non-UK card rates. A cheap standard rate can hide a higher charge on corporate cards and tourist spend.
• Ask about volume. Several providers will negotiate once you pass a monthly turnover threshold. SumUp and Lightspeed both say custom rates are available on higher tiers.

Fees on gift cards, online bookings with deposits and keyed payments are often priced differently again. Square, for example, lists 2.5% for manually entered cards.

Contract traps: terminals, terms and exit costs

Contracts are where a cheap-looking quote becomes expensive. Read these clauses before you sign:

• Terminal leases. Some providers rent card machines on a fixed term. The Payment Systems Regulator's card-acquiring remedies, published in October 2022, set a maximum duration of 18 months for POS terminal lease and rental contracts, with a rolling monthly contract thereafter. It applies to the card-acquiring providers and merchants it covers, so do not assume it applies to every hardware or software contract. Ask your provider in writing which rules apply to yours.
• Multi-year software terms. Twelve to 36 months is common. A three-year term with no right to leave if the service fails is a serious risk for a business that may close, move or sell.
• Early termination fees. Ask for the exact figure for leaving at month 6, 12 and 24.
• Auto-renewal. Check the notice period. Missing a 90-day window can roll you into another year.
• Hardware you do not own. If the tablets or terminals are proprietary, switching provider means replacing them. Check whether you can reuse them.
• Data export. You should be able to export menus, sales history and customer data in a usable format when you leave, and you remain responsible for customer data under UK GDPR.
• Price rises. Look for clauses allowing the provider to raise fees mid-term.

Month-to-month terms remove most of these problems. TablePort, for example, bills monthly with 30 days notice and no setup fees, but whichever provider you pick, get the notice period and exit costs in writing.

Integrations and offline mode

Integrations that matter in the UK

List the tools you already pay for and check each one connects without a third-party connector fee:

• Accounting: Xero, QuickBooks or Sage, with VAT-correct sales posted daily.
• Reservations: either built in, or a two-way link so booked tables show on the floor plan.
• Delivery: Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat orders landing in the same queue as dine-in, with item mapping.
• Payroll and rota: clock-ins and sales per labour hour feeding your labour cost percentage.
• Stock and suppliers: sales depleting stock so your food cost is real, not estimated.

TablePort connects to Xero and QuickBooks, and to Deliveroo and Uber Eats (those two delivery platforms only), and its POS keeps taking orders and printing kitchen tickets through an outage. If you rely on a platform that is not on a vendor's list, ask whether they build custom integrations and at what price.

Offline mode

Broadband and Wi-Fi fail. Ask exactly what keeps working without internet: order entry, kitchen tickets, cash payments, and especially card payments. Also ask what happens to orders taken offline when the connection returns, and who carries the risk if a payment taken offline is later declined. Test it by switching the router off during a quiet shift before you go live.

A worked three-year cost example

Take a restaurant taking £50,000 a month by card, with an average card payment of £45 (about 1,111 payments a month). The three quotes below are illustrative, not real offers, but they use realistic structures:

• Quote A, lease and blended rate: £60 a month terminal lease on a 36-month term, £79 a month software, 1.6% per payment.
• Quote B, own hardware and lower rate: £1,200 hardware bought upfront, £99 a month software, 1.4% plus 5p per payment.
• Quote C, flat rate and add-ons: £800 hardware upfront, £69 a month software plus £40 a month of add-ons, 1.75% per payment.

Three lessons from the arithmetic:

1. Card fees are about 85% of the three-year cost in every quote. A 0.1 percentage point difference in your rate is £50 a month, or £1,800 over three years, more than most monthly software differences add up to.
2. The quote with the highest upfront cost had the lowest total. Low or zero upfront hardware is often paid back, with interest, through a lease.
3. Exit cost is hidden in Quote A. Leave 14 months into the 36-month lease and you could still owe 22 months at £60, or £1,320, depending on the contract's exit terms (and on whether any rules limit the term).

Replace the inputs with your own card turnover, average payment and real quotes. Use your last three months of card statements for turnover, and your till's average transaction value rather than a guess.

Buying checklist: ten questions for every vendor

1. What is the total monthly cost for my site, including add-ons I need, excluding VAT?
2. What are my effective card rates on a typical month, including premium and non-UK cards?
3. Is there a fixed fee per transaction, and what does it do to my average payment?
4. What is the minimum term, the notice period and the exact cost of leaving at month 6, 12 and 24?
5. Do I own the hardware, and can I use my own tablets and printers?
6. What keeps working offline, including card payments?
7. Which integrations are included and which carry a fee?
8. How do I export my data if I leave, and in what format?
9. What does support cover, at what hours, and how are urgent problems handled during service?
10. Can you migrate my menu, modifiers and customer list, and what does that cost?

Run a trial on a real service before committing: most vendors offer a free trial or a demo, and you can see how TablePort's POS handles it in a 30-day free trial with no card required. For segment-specific advice, see our guides for pubs and cafés, and our head-to-head comparisons with Square, Lightspeed and Dojo.

This guide is general information about costs and payment-contract rules, not legal or financial advice, so check your own contract and circumstances with a qualified adviser.