What does an EPOS system cost in the UK?

The four things you are actually buying

Every EPOS quote in the UK breaks into the same four parts, however it is presented. Price them separately or you cannot compare two suppliers at all.

1. Hardware, paid once

A touchscreen terminal, a barcode scanner, a receipt printer and a cash drawer. Expect £400 to £1,500 for a complete counter, depending mainly on the terminal. Fanless units with no moving parts cost more and last longer in a shop where the counter is warm and dusty. A customer display, a scale for weighed lines or a second station add to it.

Watch for hardware offered at zero up front. It is almost always financed inside a longer contract or a higher card rate, and the total is higher. Ask what the same bundle costs bought outright, and compare that against the monthly.

2. Software, paid monthly per till

Typically £25 to £120 a month per till. The spread is real and reflects what is included rather than pure margin: a product list and a sales total sits at the bottom, and supplier price files, multi-site management, branch transfers and proper margin reporting sit at the top. The important question is not the number but what falls outside it — support, updates, training and backups are sometimes separate lines.

3. Card processing, charged on your takings

This is the one that scales, and for most shops it is the largest of the four within a year. A shop taking £30,000 a month on card pays £300 a month at 1%, and £525 at 1.75%. That difference is larger than most software licences. Rates are quoted as a blended percentage, as interchange plus, or as a percentage with a fixed pence charge per transaction — and those are not comparable without doing the arithmetic. Card processing rates explained covers how to read them.

4. The contract

Not a price, but it decides what the other three actually cost you. Term length, notice period, whether the rate can be changed mid-term, what happens to your data if you leave, and whether the card terminal is rented separately. EPOS contracts and lock-in goes through it.

The charges that appear later

These are the ones worth asking about in writing before you sign, because they rarely appear in a first quote.

• Card terminal rental, often £15–£25 a month per terminal, and sometimes on a separate contract with a different end date to the software.
• PCI compliance fees and non-compliance fees, charged monthly by some acquirers.
• Minimum monthly service charge, which bites in a quiet month rather than a busy one.
• Authorisation fees of a few pence per transaction, on top of the percentage.
• Support tiers, where the response time you assumed you had is the one that costs extra.
• Training charged per visit, which matters most when you take on new staff rather than at install.
• Data export on exit, occasionally charged, occasionally not offered at all.

A worked example

A single convenience store taking £30,000 a month on card, over the first year, on published mid-market numbers:

• Hardware, once: £399–£1,200
• Software, twelve months at £59: £708
• Card processing at 1%: £3,600
• Card terminal rental at £19.50: £234

Card processing is roughly five times the software cost. That is the normal shape of it, and it is why a supplier who is coy about the rate should worry you more than one whose licence looks dear. Our own worked examples, with the arithmetic shown, are on the pricing page.

How to compare two quotes honestly

• Convert everything to a twelve-month total, hardware included, and compare that single figure.
• Apply each card rate to your own last three months of card takings, not to a round number.
• Ask whether the rate covers business, commercial and international cards, or only domestic consumer ones. That gap is where a headline rate usually hides.
• Ask what the price is in year two, when any introductory discount ends.
• Ask for the total to exit in month thirteen, in writing.