19 May 2026 · The Payments Expert
Anatomy of a card statement — what your restaurant is actually paying
A line-by-line walk through a typical independent restaurant merchant statement — what each fee means, where the cliff edge sits, and how to spot mid-contract rate creep.
Most independent restaurant owners glance at the headline rate on the front of their monthly merchant statement and move on. The statement is dense on purpose. The numbers that decide whether you are overpaying live a few pages deeper — and the ones the sales rep showed you when you signed are usually not among them.
Here is how to read your own statement in fifteen minutes, without a payments background.
The four numbers that actually matter
Pull last month's statement. Find these four:
- Total card volume. Everything you took on cards in the month.
- Total fees charged. Add every line that starts with a £ sign and is being taken from you. Scheme fees, interchange, authorisation, gateway, PCI, terminal rental, statement fees, the lot.
- Effective rate. Divide total fees by total volume. That is the number a competitor will quote against.
- Scheme and interchange share. The portion of your fees that is not going to your acquirer — it is going to Visa, Mastercard and the issuing bank. This is the floor. Nothing legitimate can quote you under this number.
If your effective rate is meaningfully higher than your scheme-and-interchange floor, the gap is your acquirer's margin. That is the negotiable bit.
What "interchange" actually is
Interchange is what the issuing bank charges to authorise the transaction. A UK consumer debit card costs around 0.2% on most schemes. A UK consumer credit card costs around 0.3%. A commercial or international card can be 1.5–2.5%. Your acquirer passes these through one of two ways:
- Blended pricing — every card gets the same rate. Your statement looks simple. The acquirer pockets the difference between the cheap cards and the expensive ones.
- Interchange-plus pricing — every card costs you the underlying interchange plus a fixed acquirer markup. Your statement is harder to read but cheaper to operate.
For most independent restaurants doing under £100k a month on cards, blended pricing is a worse deal than interchange-plus. The debit-heavy mix that restaurants typically run is the most punished by a flat blended rate.
Where Dojo and Paymentsense quietly mark you up
Three specific patterns we see on hospitality statements every week.
Mid-contract rate rises. A 0.10–0.30 percentage-point hike applied with no warning, despite a fixed-term contract. Search your statements for the line where the headline rate stopped being the headline you signed for.
"Non-qualified" or downgrade buckets. Cards that fall outside the "qualified" rate quoted to you get re-priced at a markup. On a busy restaurant with corporate-card lunches, this can be 15–25% of your monthly volume sitting in a more expensive bucket.
Hidden monthlies. PCI compliance fee, statement fee, "regulatory compliance fee", non-EU surcharge, gateway, terminal rental. None of these showed up in the sales pitch. All of them show up now.
Try this with your last full month
Open the statement. Find the four numbers. Subtract scheme and interchange from total fees. Divide what's left by your monthly card volume.
That percentage is what your current acquirer is making from you. Most restaurants we look at sit between 0.6% and 1.2% acquirer markup. Anything above 0.9% is well above what we would quote on Clover with an interchange-plus deal — and the further above that line you are, the easier the conversation gets.