Payments

Taking Card Payments in the Driveway: What the Rates Actually Cost You

Published 21 July 2026 · Pricing checked 21 July 2026 · No paid placements

A homeowner hands you a card for a $4,800 furnace job standing in the driveway. Whatever processor runs that tap costs you somewhere between $125 and $170 before the money hits your account. Key the number in by hand because the chip reader flaked, and it costs more. Here's what five processors actually charge, pulled from their own pricing pages this week, and the math on where that money goes.

The math on a $4,800 furnace job

Run one real ticket through five processors at their standard in-person rate, as published on each site:

• Square (Free plan, tap/dip/swipe): 2.6% + 15¢ → $124.95 in fees.
• Stripe (card-present): 2.7% + 5¢ → $129.65.
• Jobber Payments (Tap to Pay): 2.7% + 30¢ → $129.90.
• Helcim (card-present, $0–$50K/mo tier): interchange + 0.40% + 8¢ → interchange itself (typically 1.5–1.8% on a consumer credit card) plus roughly $19.28 in Helcim's own markup, so total fees land somewhere in the $92–$106 range depending on the card network and card type used.
• PayPal Zettle / PayPal Point of Sale (card-present): 2.29% + $0.09 → $110.01.

Now run the same $4,800 through ACH instead of a card, using Square's published invoice rate: 1%, $1 minimum, capped at $10 on the Plus and Premium plans. That's a $10.00 fee instead of $110–$170. On the Free plan the cap disappears and it's a flat 1% with no ceiling, so $48.00, still less than half of any card rate above. Jobber's ACH/bank payment rate is a flat 1% with no cap published on its pricing page, which on this same ticket is $48.00.

This is the single biggest lever on a big-ticket trade job and almost nobody uses it. A furnace, a water heater, a roof section (anything over a couple thousand dollars) is a candidate for "let's set up a bank transfer instead of running the card," and the savings are not small. The catch: ACH takes a day or two to clear instead of being instant, and some customers just won't do it. That's a real tradeoff, not a reason to ignore it on every ticket.

Card-present vs. keyed-in: the gap that adds up

Every processor here charges more when the card number is typed instead of tapped, dipped, or swiped, because keyed transactions carry more fraud risk and cost the processor more in chargebacks. The published gaps:

• Square: 2.6% + 15¢ present vs. 3.5% + 15¢ keyed — a 0.9-point gap. On the $4,800 job, that's $43.20 more just for typing the number.
• PayPal Zettle: 2.29% + $0.09 present vs. 3.49% + $0.09 keyed: a 1.2-point gap, or $57.60 more on the same ticket.
• Stripe: the base online rate is already 2.9% + 30¢, and Stripe adds a further 0.5% surcharge on top of that for manually entered cards, so a keyed card through Stripe runs roughly 3.4% + 30¢.
• Helcim: the keyed/online tier at $0–$50K/mo is interchange + 0.50% + 25¢, versus interchange + 0.40% + 8¢ for card-present — a smaller published spread than the flat-rate processors, because interchange-plus pricing passes the real network cost through either way.

Practical takeaway: if your card reader is dead, that's a real cost, not a minor inconvenience. Fix the hardware. If you're routinely keying in cards over the phone for scheduled work, that's a standing tax on every one of those jobs. It's exactly the kind of job that's a better candidate for a bank transfer instead, per the math above.

Interchange-plus vs. flat rate: when the switch pays

Square, Stripe, Jobber, and PayPal Zettle all charge flat-rate pricing: one number, easy to predict, and it doesn't move whether the card is a basic debit or a rewards credit card that costs the processor more to run. Helcim runs interchange-plus: you pay the actual interchange fee set by the card networks, plus a small transparent markup that Helcim adds on top: 0.40% + 8¢ at the card-present tier under $50K/month, dropping to 0.15% + 6¢ once you're processing $1M–$5M a month.

The math only favors interchange-plus once your average card mix leans toward lower-interchange debit and basic credit rather than heavy rewards cards, and once your volume is big enough that a few basis points of markup difference is worth tracking instead of just accepting a flat number. Helcim's own lowest tier starts at $0, so a solo operator can access interchange-plus pricing without hitting any volume minimum. The tradeoff is a statement that requires reading interchange categories instead of one flat percentage, which is real friction for a one-person shop already buried in paperwork.

For a 2-truck operation doing a mix of small service calls and a few big-ticket jobs a month, the flat-rate simplicity of Square or Stripe is often worth the few extra basis points. Interchange-plus starts paying off once you're processing enough monthly volume, and enough of it on lower-cost debit cards, that the spread is bigger than the mental overhead of not knowing your exact rate until the statement arrives.

Chargeback exposure on big-ticket work

A $4,800 furnace job that gets disputed is a $4,800 problem, not a $50 problem. Stripe's own pricing page lists a $15 fee just to receive a dispute, refunded only if you win it — and that fee is separate from losing the disputed amount itself if the chargeback goes against you. None of the processors researched here publish chargeback-win-rate data, because it depends heavily on your documentation, not the processor.

This is another point in ACH's favor for bigger jobs: a bank transfer authorized by the customer carries a different, and generally lower, dispute mechanism than a card chargeback. It's not risk-free, but it removes the card network's chargeback process from the equation entirely.

Why the payments button inside your field-service app is often the expensive one

Jobber Payments charges 2.9% + 30¢ on credit cards across every Jobber plan (Core, Connect, Grow, and Plus), with no volume-based discount published anywhere on its pricing page. Compare that to Square, which drops its card-present rate to 2.5% on the Plus plan and 2.4% on Premium, or Helcim, whose interchange-plus rate improves automatically as volume climbs. A field-service app's built-in processor is convenient — it's already wired into your invoicing and scheduling, so there's no second login — but convenience is exactly what you're paying the premium for. The rate doesn't move because you're not the customer being competed for; the software subscription is the product, and payments is a captive add-on.

If you're already running field service management software with payments bolted on, it's worth pulling one month of card volume and running it through Square's or Helcim's calculator side by side. On a shop doing meaningful monthly card volume, a half-point difference is real money, and switching the payment processor usually doesn't require switching the scheduling or invoicing tool at all. Most of these integrate with a standalone processor just fine.

One we couldn't verify this run

QuickBooks Payments is a real option for shops already running QuickBooks Online for invoicing and books, and it's commonly cited elsewhere at roughly 2.4% swiped, 2.9% invoiced, and 3.4% keyed, with a 1% ACH rate. We are not printing those numbers here: every attempt to load Intuit's own payments pricing pages this run timed out, and we don't publish a rate we haven't verified on the source page ourselves. If QuickBooks Payments is on your shortlist, pull the current rate directly from quickbooks.intuit.com before you sign anything. Intuit has changed these rates before.

The rates, side by side

Card-present and keyed rates as published on each processor's own pricing page. Helcim's figures are its lowest published tier ($0–$50K/month), which covers effectively every business this article is written for.

Bottom line

For a solo operator or a 2-truck shop, Square or PayPal Zettle's flat rates are the least amount of thinking for the least amount of money on typical job sizes, and neither charges a monthly fee to access it. Helcim is worth the extra statement-reading if you're processing enough volume that the interchange-plus spread beats a flat rate, and it costs nothing to try since there's no minimum tier. Jobber Payments is fine if you're already paying for Jobber and the convenience of one login outweighs a rate that's stuck a half-point higher than the standalone options with no volume discount in sight. And on anything over a couple thousand dollars, ask the customer to pay by bank transfer before you run the card. The math above says it's not close.

None of this replaces reading the actual total cost of whatever estimating or invoicing stack you're already committed to, since payment processing rarely stands alone — see how it fits into the broader all-in-one vs. best-of-breed decision.