Three processors, one screen, every figure linked to the provider's own pricing page with the date we checked it. Rates below are for online card payments in the United States and were confirmed on August 19, 2026.
Where a provider does not publish a figure, this page says so instead of estimating. Those blanks are listed again at the bottom, because what a pricing page leaves out is usually the part that costs you money later.
Every row below the first one is an addition to the headline percentage, and they stack. A domestic card typed in by hand at Stripe is not 2.9% — it is 2.9% plus 0.5%. A card issued abroad, paid in a currency the processor has to convert, picks up two more additions at once.
This matters most if your customers are not all in one country. On the international-card line the three are close together — 1.5%, 1.50% and 1.5%. On the currency-conversion line they are not close at all: Stripe publishes 1%, PayPal publishes a 4.00% spread, and Square publishes nothing. For a business selling across borders, that single undisclosed cell is worth more than the entire headline-rate comparison above it.
How to reduce what you pay
Three levers come straight out of the table, and none of them require negotiating with anyone:
Stop keying cards in by hand. At Stripe that alone is 0.5% on every affected transaction. Neither PayPal nor Square publishes a keyed-in surcharge on the pages checked here, so if you process this way, ask them directly and get it in writing.
Charge in your customer's currency only if you know the conversion cost. The gap between 1% and a 4.00% spread is larger than the gap between any two headline rates on this page.
Check whether a paid plan is cheaper than the free one. Square is the clear case: the Free plan's online rate is 3.3% while Plus and Premium drop it to 2.9%. Whether that trade is worth $49/mo depends entirely on your volume — and that is arithmetic you can do, not a judgement call.
What you will not find here is a claim about which processor is cheapest overall. That depends on your transaction size, your mix of domestic and international cards, and your volume, and any page that answers it without knowing those things is guessing.
Why the fixed fee decides small transactions
The percentage dominates conversation, but on small tickets the flat fee dominates the bill. Stripe and Square both charge 30¢ per transaction; PayPal charges 0.49 USD. On a large order that difference is noise. On a small one it is not — and it is the reason micro-transaction businesses read the fixed-fee row before the percentage row. The exact crossover depends on your average order value, which is arithmetic only you can do.
What a fee table cannot tell you
Every figure above answers the same narrow question: what does the processor keep? It cannot answer the one that decides whether a sale was worth making — what is left once the processor, the platform, the refunds and the cost of finding the customer have all taken their share. Fee schedules are published because they are the same for everyone. Margins are not published anywhere, which is exactly why they are worth working out for yourself.
The method we use for that is a free worksheet, The Hidden Margin Teardown Kit. It is a short list of questions you run against any company, product or subscription — including your own — using only public information of the kind cited on this page. If you can read a fee table, you can fill it in.
Figures on this page were collected and cross-checked with the help of AI tools; every one links to the provider's own page and was reviewed by a person before publication.
What these providers do not publish
Not disclosed by the provider
We looked for these on the provider's own pricing page and they were not there.
Whether standard PayPal Checkout carries a monthly or setup fee could not be confirmed with a direct on-page statement; the page's separate 'Monthly Fees' table lists fees only for other PayPal products and does not list PayPal Checkout itself. This is an absence-based inference, not a direct quote.
Square's official fees page does not publish an explicit currency-conversion fee/spread figure (unlike Stripe's 1% and PayPal's 4.00%); no matching text was found on the page.
Blank cells in the table above
Currency conversion (added) — Square
Manually entered cards (added) — PayPal
Manually entered cards (added) — Square
Monthly or setup fee — PayPal
API / in-app rate — PayPal
Limits of this page
These are things we did not verify, listed so you can judge the rest.
Search volumes for the longtail keywords were not measured — no keyword-volume tool was available in this pass, so monthly_volume is left null for every keyword rather than estimated.
PayPal's official merchant-fees page has no explicit statement confirming or denying a monthly or setup fee for standard PayPal Checkout — its Monthly Fees table covers only other PayPal products. The amounts listed there for those other products were not verified for this page and are therefore not reproduced.
Square's official fees page (squareup.com/us/en/payments/our-fees) does not publish an explicit currency-conversion fee/spread percentage, unlike Stripe (1%) and PayPal (4.00%). It is possible Square folds this into its card rate or discloses it only in merchant-specific terms not on the public page; this was not found and is recorded as confidence=not_found rather than guessed.
Square's pricing structure changed to a three-tier model (Free / Plus / Premium) with different online rates per tier (3.3%+30¢ on Free vs 2.9%+30¢ on Plus/Premium). The brief's schema assumes a single 'standard rate' per company; this cluster reports the Free-tier rate as the no-monthly-fee baseline and the Plus/Premium rate as the alternative, rather than collapsing them into one number.
Square's setup fee status was not explicitly confirmed with a direct quote (only the 'no monthly subscription cost' FAQ line for the Free plan was found); a dedicated 'no setup fee' statement was searched for and not located on either squareup.com/us/en/payments/our-fees or squareup.com/us/en/pricing.
No secondary/unverified sources (blogs, comparison sites) were used for any evidence item in this cluster — every evidence entry came directly from the three companies' own domains (stripe.com, paypal.com, squareup.com), so there are zero 'unverified' confidence entries, only 'verified' or 'not_found'.
Free worksheet: The Hidden Margin Teardown Kit
A short list of questions for working out where a company, product or subscription actually makes its money, using only public information like the pricing pages cited on this page. It opens on the page — no email required.
How much does Stripe charge per online transaction?
Stripe's Standard plan charges 2.9% + 30 cents per successful online transaction for domestic US cards. There is no monthly or setup fee on this plan.
How much does PayPal charge for online sales?
PayPal Checkout charges 3.49% plus a fixed fee (0.49 USD for transactions received in US dollars) for standard domestic commercial transactions. This is higher than Stripe's or Square's base online rate.
How much does Square charge for online payments?
Square charges 3.3% + 30 cents per online or invoice payment on its free plan, dropping to 2.9% + 30 cents on its paid Plus and Premium plans. Its payments API rate is 2.9% + 30 cents on every plan.
Which processor is cheapest for international cards: Stripe, PayPal, or Square?
Stripe and Square both add a flat 1.5% surcharge for cards issued outside the US, while PayPal adds 1.50% on top of its already-higher 3.49% base rate. On the surcharge percentage alone, Stripe and Square are tied and both are lower than PayPal's combined effective rate.
Do Stripe, PayPal, or Square charge a currency conversion fee?
Stripe discloses a 1% fee when currency conversion is required, and PayPal discloses a 4.00% currency conversion spread (or another disclosed amount). Square's official fees page does not publish a specific currency-conversion figure, so that comparison point is unconfirmed for Square.
Do Stripe, PayPal, and Square charge monthly or setup fees?
Stripe's Standard plan has no setup or monthly fee, and Square's Free plan also has no monthly subscription cost (Square's Plus and Premium tiers do add a $49/mo or $149/mo per-location fee). PayPal's standard PayPal Checkout monthly/setup fee status could not be confirmed from an explicit statement on its official fees page.
What we could not verify
Search volumes for the longtail keywords were not measured — no keyword-volume tool was available in this pass, so monthly_volume is left null for every keyword rather than estimated.
PayPal's official merchant-fees page has no explicit statement confirming or denying a monthly or setup fee for standard PayPal Checkout — its Monthly Fees table covers only other PayPal products. The amounts listed there for those other products were not verified for this page and are therefore not reproduced.
Square's official fees page (squareup.com/us/en/payments/our-fees) does not publish an explicit currency-conversion fee/spread percentage, unlike Stripe (1%) and PayPal (4.00%). It is possible Square folds this into its card rate or discloses it only in merchant-specific terms not on the public page; this was not found and is recorded as confidence=not_found rather than guessed.
Square's pricing structure changed to a three-tier model (Free / Plus / Premium) with different online rates per tier (3.3%+30¢ on Free vs 2.9%+30¢ on Plus/Premium). The brief's schema assumes a single 'standard rate' per company; this cluster reports the Free-tier rate as the no-monthly-fee baseline and the Plus/Premium rate as the alternative, rather than collapsing them into one number.
Square's setup fee status was not explicitly confirmed with a direct quote (only the 'no monthly subscription cost' FAQ line for the Free plan was found); a dedicated 'no setup fee' statement was searched for and not located on either squareup.com/us/en/payments/our-fees or squareup.com/us/en/pricing.
No secondary/unverified sources (blogs, comparison sites) were used for any evidence item in this cluster — every evidence entry came directly from the three companies' own domains (stripe.com, paypal.com, squareup.com), so there are zero 'unverified' confidence entries, only 'verified' or 'not_found'.
Sources
Stripe's Standard plan charges 2.9% + 30 cents per successful online transaction for domestic (US) cards. — https://stripe.com/pricing (verified on: 2026-08-19, confidence: verified)
Stripe adds a 0.5% surcharge on top of the base rate for manually entered (keyed-in) card transactions. — https://stripe.com/pricing (verified on: 2026-08-19, confidence: verified)
Stripe adds a 1.5% surcharge on top of the base rate for international cards. — https://stripe.com/pricing (verified on: 2026-08-19, confidence: verified)
Stripe charges an additional 1% fee when currency conversion is required. — https://stripe.com/pricing (verified on: 2026-08-19, confidence: verified)
Stripe's Standard pay-as-you-go plan has no setup fee and no monthly fee. — https://stripe.com/pricing (verified on: 2026-08-19, confidence: verified)
PayPal's standard rate for receiving a domestic commercial transaction through PayPal Checkout is 3.49% plus a fixed fee. — https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/merchant-fees (verified on: 2026-08-19, confidence: verified)
The fixed-fee component of PayPal's commercial transaction rate is 0.49 USD for transactions received in US dollars. — https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/merchant-fees (verified on: 2026-08-19, confidence: verified)
PayPal adds an additional 1.50% fee on top of the domestic rate for international commercial transactions. — https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/merchant-fees (verified on: 2026-08-19, confidence: verified)
When PayPal converts a payment into another currency, it applies a currency conversion spread of 4.00% (or another amount disclosed at the time of the transaction). — https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/merchant-fees (verified on: 2026-08-19, confidence: verified)
Whether standard PayPal Checkout carries a monthly or setup fee could not be confirmed with a direct on-page statement; the page's separate 'Monthly Fees' table lists fees only for other PayPal products and does not list PayPal Checkout itself. This is an absence-based inference, not a direct quote. — https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/merchant-fees (verified on: 2026-08-19, confidence: not_found)
Square charges 3.3% + 30 cents per online/invoice card payment on its Free plan, and 2.9% + 30 cents on its Plus and Premium plans. — https://squareup.com/us/en/payments/our-fees (verified on: 2026-08-19, confidence: verified)
Square's payments API rate for online/in-app card payments is 2.9% + 30 cents across all three plans (Free, Plus, Premium). — https://squareup.com/us/en/payments/our-fees (verified on: 2026-08-19, confidence: verified)
Square adds a 1.5% international card transaction fee to payments made on credit or debit cards issued outside the United States, on the Free, Plus and Premium plans alike. — https://squareup.com/us/en/pricing (verified on: 2026-09-02, confidence: verified)
Square's official fees page does not publish an explicit currency-conversion fee/spread figure (unlike Stripe's 1% and PayPal's 4.00%); no matching text was found on the page. — https://squareup.com/us/en/payments/our-fees (verified on: 2026-08-19, confidence: not_found)
Square's Free plan has no monthly subscription cost — merchants only pay per-transaction processing fees. — https://squareup.com/us/en/payments/our-fees (verified on: 2026-08-19, confidence: verified)
Square's Plus and Premium plans carry a monthly location fee ($49/mo and $149/mo per location respectively), while the Free plan's location fee is $0/mo. — https://squareup.com/us/en/pricing (verified on: 2026-08-19, confidence: verified)
