Best card readers for gas engineers: the 2026 fees compared

Which card reader is best for a gas engineer?

The one with no monthly fee, next day payout and a rate you can live with, because a gas round is lumpy work rather than a shop till. Two boiler services in a quiet week and a full install the next is not the pattern a monthly plan is built for. That pushes most sole traders towards SumUp or Square, where the hardware is £19 to £25, the plan is free and nothing carries on billing you through a slow January. Once cards are most of your takings the arithmetic changes and a lower rate starts to earn its keep, which is where Dojo and Revolut come in. The other thing worth saying early: the reader is not the only route. A payment link sent from the quote costs no hardware at all and is often better for the money that never gets paid on a doorstep anyway, like a deposit before you order a boiler.

What does each reader cost per transaction?

Between 0.8% and 1.75% on a UK consumer card, where the provider publishes a rate at all. Three of the nine below do not publish one, which is itself useful to know before you spend an afternoon on the phone to a sales consultant. Every cell in this table was read off the provider's own UK page on 6 September 2026, and where the page is silent the cell says so rather than guessing. Read the rate next to the monthly fee and the contract, because those three move together: the cheapest headline rate on this list sits behind the longest wait for your money, and the shortest contract sits next to a rate nobody will quote you until they have your turnover.

What do the fees add up to at my volume?

Less than most engineers fear, and the gap between the cheapest and dearest is real but rarely decisive under about £4,000 a month. The arithmetic is simple enough to redo yourself: multiply your monthly card takings by the percentage, then add the fixed pence multiplied by the number of payments, then add any monthly plan fee. The table below assumes an average card payment of £250, which is roughly a service plus a part, so £1,500 a month is six payments, £4,000 is sixteen and £10,000 is forty. Change the average and the percentage barely moves while the pence-per-transaction rows move a little. Hardware is left out because it is paid once.

Two things fall out of those numbers. The first is that at £1,500 a month the whole argument is worth about £14, which is less than an hour of your time, so pick on payout speed and convenience and stop optimising. The second is the crossover on a paid plan. On my arithmetic SumUp's Payments Plus overtakes pay as you go at around £2,700 a month, while SumUp itself puts the crossover at £3,300, and the gap is card mix: premium, international and American Express cards stay at 1.69% on the paid plan, so the blended saving is smaller than the headline 0.99% suggests. That is worth remembering wherever you see two rates side by side. Tyl's and Dojo's figures also exclude fees they mention but do not price, so treat those rows as a floor rather than a bill.

How fast do you get paid?

Anywhere from minutes to a week, and it is the number that changes how a small business feels day to day. Zettle is the quickest of the group: PayPal says funds typically arrive in your PayPal Business account within minutes. SumUp lands the money in its own Business Account by 7am the next day, weekends and bank holidays included, which for a Friday afternoon boiler swap is genuinely better than a bank working day. Square publishes one to two working days as standard, with instant transfer available for a fee. Dojo says next day takings, Takepayments says the next working day, and Revolut says settlement within 24 hours while noting the schedule can vary under its terms. Stripe is the outlier at the start: UK accounts wait 7 calendar days for the first payout, then settle to 3 business days. That is fine for a business with a float and painful for one without, so if you are setting up a payment route before a big job, set it up a fortnight early rather than the night before.

What if there is no signal in the property?

Ask before you commit, because the answer decides your kit more than the rate does. Basements, plant rooms and thick-walled cottages are where card readers embarrass you, and none of the providers above publishes a plain statement that its reader banks payments offline and takes them later. What they do publish is how the reader connects. Dojo's devices connect automatically to Wi-Fi or any available 4G network, and it markets the Go Max on switching to 4G when the Wi-Fi drops. SumUp's Solo Lite is phone-paired, so it borrows whatever signal your handset has, while the Solo is a standalone device at £79. Revolut's Terminal is standalone too. In practice there are three honest answers to a dead spot. Walk to the front door or the van and take it there. Ask to use the customer's Wi-Fi, which most people offer once you explain why. Or send a payment link and let them pay from their own phone when they next have a bar of signal, which is the one route that does not need you standing there at all.

Do I need a reader at all?

No, if you have a reasonably recent phone. Every major provider now turns the handset itself into the reader through its own app, and the customer taps their card or watch against the back of your phone. Dojo lists Tap to Pay on iPhone as no contract and £0. SumUp's Tap to Pay page quotes the same 1.69% pay as you go and no monthly cost as its readers. Revolut charges its in-person rate plus an additional £0.08 for Tap to Pay on iPhone. Stripe adds £0.10 per authorisation. The catch is the same everywhere: it works on a phone the provider supports, so check yours against their list before you rely on it, and a flat battery at four in the afternoon takes your card terminal with it. Plenty of engineers carry a £25 reader as the backup for exactly that reason.

Can I take card payments without a reader, from my job software?

Yes, by sending a card payment request straight from the quote, which is how Manifold does it. You build the quote from the defects and parts already on the job, request a deposit, the balance or payment in full against it, and the customer gets a branded email with a secure Pay now link they open on their own phone. When they pay, the payment is reconciled and marked paid against the quote automatically, so nothing sits in an app waiting to be matched up later. The money goes into your own Stripe account, which you connect under Settings, then Integrations: your business is the merchant of record, so payouts and disputes are yours rather than ours. You pay Stripe's UK card fees on each payment, 1.5% plus 20p on domestic cards as published on 6 September 2026, and Manifold plans are priced per engineer per month with card payments included from the Growth plan and during the trial.

This route wins in the places a reader never reaches. A deposit before you order a boiler, taken while the customer is still keen and you are not yet out of pocket for the parts. A landlord or letting agent who was never at the property and pays from an office three towns away. A balance chased after a job where the homeowner was at work. A reader still wins on the doorstep with a customer standing in front of you who wants to tap and go, because a link means waiting while they find their phone and their card. Most engineers who take cards seriously end up with both: a cheap reader for the doorstep and a payment request for everything else.

Can I add a card surcharge to the bill?

No, not to a consumer. The surcharge ban came in on 13 January 2018, and GOV.UK's announcement puts it plainly: it is unlawful for retailers to charge additional fees when someone uses a particular credit or debit card, or other payment systems like PayPal, to make a purchase. So a line on a homeowner's invoice saying card fee is not an option, and neither is a quiet 2% added at the door. The fee is a cost of doing business, priced into your rates alongside fuel, van insurance and your ACS renewals. On the numbers above that is somewhere between 0.8% and 1.75% of your card takings, which on a £4,000 month is roughly £12 to £70. Set a sensible minimum job value if you want, and price the work properly, but do not put the fee on the customer's bill.

How do card payments fit Making Tax Digital records?

Every card payment needs to land against a job and an invoice in a digital record, not float in a provider's app until tax time. Making Tax Digital reached sole traders with gross income over £50,000 in April 2026, which means digital record keeping and quarterly updates to HMRC, with lower income bands following. A standalone card reader satisfies none of that on its own: it takes the money and leaves you to type the payment into something else afterwards. That is the argument for taking the payment from the same place the invoice lives, whichever tool you use, so the record is a side effect of getting paid rather than an evening job.

Which reader for which engineer?

Match the kit to how often a card actually comes out, not to the best rate on the page. The table below is a starting point rather than a verdict, and every row assumes you have checked the current fees yourself before signing anything.

Whichever way the money arrives, it still has to land against the job. Manifold closes that loop on the doorstep: quote the job, request the card payment against the quote, and the payment is recorded against it in the digital records Making Tax Digital expects, into your own Stripe account rather than ours. The customer pays once and the paperwork happens as a side effect.