Toast fee calculator for US restaurants

Toast publishes exactly two card rates, and both live on the Starter Kit shop page rather than the pricing page. Pay-as-you-Go is described there as a 3.09 percent card processing fee that covers all costs except shipping and taxes, with no upfront hardware cost and no monthly software subscription. Traditional pricing is a 2.49 percent card processing fee, with the hardware bought outright and software billed monthly. That is the whole published schedule for a US restaurant.

Everything else is quoted. Toast's payment processing fees page says its team will build a custom rate specific to the characteristics of your restaurant, and the pricing page lists Point of Sale from $69 a month and Build Your Own as custom, with no card rate beside either. A calculator cannot compute what a sales rep has not told you yet, so the Toast Fee Calculator prices the two published rates and asks you to put your quoted rate against the same volume once you have one.

That leaves two disagreements with the pages currently ranking for these terms. The first is the per transaction fee. Most of them print Toast at 2.49 percent plus 15 cents or 3.09 percent plus 15 cents. No Toast page states a per item component, so the calculator applies none. On 1,650 checks a month, an imaginary 15 cent fee invents $247.50 of monthly cost. That is a 10 percent error on a $2,595 bill.

The second is the online rate. Toast's fees page draws the card present and card not present distinction explicitly and says card not present costs more, but it publishes no card not present number. So the online, phone and keyed channel here repeats the published card present rate. The figure that returns is a floor, not an estimate. Your quoted online rate will sit above it, never below.

Your Toast sales report shows food and drink sales. Your processing statement is built on something larger: the gross settled amount of every card transaction, which is the check plus tax plus whatever the guest wrote on the tip line. Toast states this plainly in its own credit card surcharging FAQ, which says you remain responsible for paying your full contractual processing rate on the gross amount of all card transactions, including both credit and debit cards.

The size of the gap is set by your tip rate, not your rate card. Toast's platform data, drawn from card and digital tips across roughly 171,000 locations, puts the average full service tip at 19.3 percent in the first quarter of 2026, quick service at 15.8 percent, takeout at 13.7 percent and the all restaurant average at 18.8 percent. Cash tips are excluded, correctly, because a cash tip never touches the card rail. At 19.3 percent the tips are 16.2 percent of everything you process: on $70,400 of card food and drink sales, $13,587.20 of tips and $419.84 a month of fees on money you are holding for somebody else.

Toast builds a feature for exactly this, which tells you how common the complaint is. Tip Withholding, under Employees and Payroll management in Toast Web, lets a manager reclaim a percentage of employee card tips to cover card processing fees, and Toast notes it applies to debit as well as credit because both carry fees. Whether you may use it is a wage and hour question that turns on your state, and several states including California prohibit any deduction from a card tip.

Surcharging does not solve it either. Toast's surcharging FAQ is explicit that tips and taxes are not surcharged, and that surcharging debit and prepaid cards is prohibited for all US merchants. The purest pass through line in your volume, the tip, is the one a surcharge program can never recover. If a rep pitches surcharging as the fix, work out what share of your volume is tips and debit, then take that share off whatever recovery was promised.

The two Starter Kit plans are the same product bought two ways. Pay-as-you-Go hands you the hardware with nothing down and no monthly software fee, and Toast is clear this is not a lease: you own the hardware from day one. Traditional pricing has you buy the hardware up front and pay a monthly software subscription, in exchange for a card rate 0.60 percentage points lower. The terminals, the software and the support do not change. Only who carries the cost.

That makes it a break even, and the break even is one division. The 0.60 point gap has to cover $69 of monthly software, so it flips at $69 divided by 0.006, which is $11,500 of monthly card volume. A food truck running $8,000 a month is better off on the free plan, full stop. The full service room in the worked example, at $83,987 a month, is more than seven times past the line and paying $5,219.08 a year for the privilege of not writing a hardware check.

Two cautions on that figure. The $69 in it is Toast's published Point of Sale starting price, not a quoted Starter Kit software fee, because Toast does not publish what Traditional Starter Kit software costs. Treat $11,500 as a floor on the crossover: a higher real software fee pushes it up, a negotiated rate below 2.49 percent pulls it down. And the Traditional plan wants hardware money up front, so this is a running cost comparison rather than a total cost of ownership one.

The wider point is that a percentage rate is a tax on volume and a monthly fee is not. A rate that looks generous when you open is the same rate when you are three times the size, and it collects three times as much. That is why the cheap door has the expensive rate behind it. Review the plan when your volume steps up, not when your contract renews.

Toast markets its own online ordering as commission free, and on its first party channels that is what it is: no percentage of the order goes to Toast beyond the card rate. The subscription is not free. Online ordering sits inside the Digital Storefront Suite, and Toast publishes no price for it: its own support article on subscribing points at a sales form rather than a number. A Toast digital sales line therefore carries a subscription you have to ask for and a card not present rate you also have to ask for.

Delivery is the part Toast does publish, in the support documentation rather than on any marketing page. Toast Delivery Services charges a flat fee per delivery instead of a commission. Through Uber Direct that is $6.99 under 6 miles, $8.74 for 6 to 8 miles, $9.49 for 8 to 9 and $9.99 for 9 to 10. Through DoorDash Drive it is $7.49 within 5 miles plus 50 cents for each additional mile up to 10. On top of those, California adds $2.00, New York City adds $3.00 on Uber Direct or $2.99 on DoorDash Drive, and Seattle adds $5.00 or $4.99.

Those fees do not arrive as an invoice. Toast withholds the flat delivery fee, the driver tip and a Toast service fee from your card payouts on each order, then emails a monthly billing summary. That matters for reconciliation more than for cost: deposits arrive already net of them, so an operator watching the bank balance reads delivery cost as a smaller card payout and blames the processing rate. The driver tip is tracked against a TDS Driver employee and comes out before you pay your own staff.

Marketplace delivery is a different animal and does not belong in this calculator. When an order arrives through the DoorDash or Uber Eats app, the platform takes the card. You receive a payout net of commission and paid Toast no processing fee, so feeding marketplace sales into any card fee calculator invents a cost you never incurred on top of the commission you did. Enter only what settled through your own Toast terminals and your own Toast online ordering.

Because Toast quotes rather than publishes, the negotiation comes down to a few specific lines. Ask for the card present and card not present rates separately, because Toast's own fees page confirms the two are priced differently and a blended quote hides what your online channel pays. Ask whether there is a per transaction amount at all, since the published rates have none and a quoted one may. Ask what the monthly software subscription is on the plan being sold, because $69 is a starting price and Build Your Own has no published price at all.

Then size the answer against the business rather than the rate. In the worked example the card bill is $31,142.45 a year against $960,000 of annual food and drink sales, or 3.24 percent. The National Restaurant Association's analysis published on 16 October 2025 reports median income before taxes of 4.3 percent of sales in 2024 among fullservice operators with $2 million or more of annual sales, a band this restaurant sits below. Card acceptance is consuming roughly three quarters of what a larger, better placed peer keeps before tax, and the tip line alone, at $5,038.13 a year, is about 12 percent of that margin.

That framing also stops the number becoming a panic. A 3.09 percent effective rate on card present restaurant volume is high, and the calculator's verdict band says so, but the fix is a plan change and a quote rather than a platform migration. Moving the same restaurant to the Traditional plan removes $5,219.08 a year without touching a terminal. A quoted card present rate a quarter of a point below 2.49 percent on $83,987 of monthly volume is worth another $2,519.62 a year. Both are conversations, not projects.

The case for doing nothing is real too. Under $11,500 of monthly card volume, Pay-as-you-Go is already the right answer and a lower rate will not repay the software fee. If you run Toast mainly because the kitchen display, the handhelds and the payroll integration take labor cost out, a 40 basis point rate difference against a standalone processor is often smaller than the labor it puts back. Price the whole stack, not the rate line.