Payment Gateway: UK 2026 Pricing & Fee Calculator
A payment gateway is the technology that securely passes card details from your website to your processor. This page explains typical gateway costs, which usually sit on top of a processing rate.
What Payment Gateway charges
| Fee | Rate |
|---|---|
| Gateway fee per transaction (typical) | About 10p to 20p |
| Monthly gateway fee (typical) | About 10 to 25 pounds |
| Processing rate | Charged separately by your acquirer |
How the fees work
A payment gateway authorises and encrypts online card payments. Standalone gateways usually charge a small per-transaction fee (often 10p to 20p) and sometimes a monthly fee, which is charged on top of your acquirer or processor percentage rate, not instead of it.
Many modern providers (Stripe, Square, Shopify Payments and similar) include the gateway inside their headline rate, so there is no separate gateway charge. You typically only pay a separate gateway fee when you pair a standalone gateway with a traditional merchant account.
The figures here are typical, not a single product price. Always check whether a quoted processing rate already includes the gateway before adding a separate gateway cost.
Check the official pricing
Fees change. Confirm the current rate at Stripe (gateway benchmark).