Best Payment Processors for Contractors: Stop Losing 3% on Every Job

Short answer first: if you take more than about $10,000 a month in cards, move to interchange-plus pricing and use Helcim as your default. If you take a little card volume and want zero thinking, Square free is fine. And whatever you do, turn on ACH bank payments for your big invoices, because that one switch usually saves more money than changing processors at all.

Here's the part nobody tells you. Processing fees feel small because they show up as a percentage on a single job. They're not small. On $750,000 in revenue with 40% of it collected by card, a 2.9% rate costs you about $8,700 a year. Getting that effective rate down to 2.1% puts roughly $2,400 back in your pocket for maybe two hours of paperwork. And moving three big jobs a year from card to ACH can beat both.

Where That 3% Actually Goes

Every card swipe splits three ways, and knowing the split is what keeps you from getting talked into a bad deal.

Interchange is the biggest chunk, usually 1.5% to 2.5%, and it goes to the bank that issued your customer's card. Nobody escapes it. Visa and Mastercard publish these rates and update them twice a year, usually in April and October. A basic debit card is cheap. A premium travel rewards card is expensive, and homeowners paying for a $40,000 remodel are absolutely using the card with the best points.

Assessments are the card networks' cut, roughly 0.13% to 0.15%. Also unavoidable, also tiny.

The processor's margin is the only part that's negotiable. That's your Squares, your Helcims, your Stripes. It's the number you're actually shopping for, and on a flat-rate account it's buried where you can't see it.

That's the whole game. Interchange is the wholesale cost of the card. Everything on top is retail markup. Flat-rate pricing hides the line between the two, which is exactly why it's so popular.

The Four Ways Processors Price You

Flat rate. One number for every card. Square's 2.6% + 15¢ in person, Stripe's 2.9% + 30¢ online. Dead simple, no monthly fee, and you overpay whenever a customer hands you a plain debit card, because you're charged the premium-card rate no matter what.

Interchange-plus. You pay the true wholesale cost plus a fixed markup. Helcim's published in-person margin is interchange plus 0.40% and 8¢. It's less tidy on the statement and it's almost always cheaper once you're past roughly $10,000 a month, because you stop subsidizing the cheap cards.

Tiered. "Qualified," "mid-qualified," and "non-qualified" buckets, where the processor decides which bucket your transaction lands in. Avoid it. If a sales rep quotes you a "1.79% qualified rate," ask what percentage of your last month's transactions actually qualified. The answer is usually most of them didn't.

Subscription or membership. A flat monthly fee plus interchange plus a few cents. Works well at high volume with a lot of small tickets. Most residential contractors don't fit that shape, since you're running fewer, bigger transactions.

Contractors run the opposite profile from a coffee shop: low count, high ticket. That matters. The per-transaction cents barely register on a $22,000 kitchen, but the percentage is brutal. Optimize for the percentage, ignore the pennies.

Worth saying out loud: processing fees and customer financing are two different conversations. Fees are what it costs you to accept money. Financing programs are what it costs you to let a homeowner pay over time, and those dealer fees run several times higher. Don't judge one by the other.

What the Real Options Cost in 2026

Every number below came off the company's own pricing page as of August 2026.

A few honest notes on that table.

Helcim's rates look complicated because they're the only ones showing you the wholesale cost separately. Helcim says most merchants land at an effective in-person rate near or below 2%, and below 2.5% for keyed and online. Their margin also steps down automatically with volume: past $50,000 a month it drops to 0.35% + 7¢ in person, and past $100,000 a month to 0.25% + 7¢. No renegotiating, no phone call. There's no monthly fee, no PCI fee, no statement fee, no cancellation fee, and no contract.

Square's free plan is genuinely free and genuinely fine for a contractor doing $3,000 a month in cards. The catch is the invoice rate. If you email invoices instead of tapping cards in person, the free plan charges 3.3% + 30¢, which is the most expensive number in the whole table. Paying $49 a month for Plus drops that to 2.9% + 30¢ and adds a $10 cap on ACH, which pays for itself the moment you invoice one large job.

Stripe is a developer tool that happens to process payments. If you're not embedding payments in a website or app, its real value to a contractor is ACH at 0.8% capped at $5, which is excellent.

Two more worth knowing about if you want quotes: Gravity Payments and Payment Depot both do interchange-plus and both quote per business rather than publishing rates.

The Biggest Lever Isn't the Processor. It's ACH.

If you take one thing from this article, take this.

A $30,000 progress payment costs you $870 on a 2.9% card. The exact same payment through Helcim's ACH costs $6, because it's capped. Through Stripe, $5. Through Square's Plus plan, $10.

That is not a rounding difference. That is $860 on one payment, on one job.

Run three or four large payments a year through a bank transfer instead of a card and you've saved more than switching processors would have saved you all year. And here's the thing: homeowners paying $30,000 mostly don't care how they pay. They care that it's easy and it looks legitimate. Nobody's earning enough airline miles on a kitchen remodel to fight you about it.

So build the rule into your process. Deposits and small change orders can go on a card, no problem. Anything over about $5,000 gets an invoice with ACH as the default option and card as the backup. You don't have to refuse cards. You just have to stop making them the first thing people click.

Watch the caps, though, because they're the whole point. Helcim caps ACH at $6, Stripe at $5, Square at $10 on paid plans. The field-service platforms mostly do not cap it. A 1% uncapped ACH fee on a $30,000 payment is $300, which is better than $870 but nowhere near $6.

What About the Processor Built Into Your Software?

Most contractors never shop processors at all, because their software came with one. That's a real convenience and it costs real money. Here's what the two most common ones charge.

Jobber charges 2.9% + 30¢ on cards, 2.7% + 30¢ on Tap to Pay, and 1% on ACH, and those rates are identical on every plan from $49 a month up to $499. Instant payouts cost an extra 1%.

Housecall Pro is more granular. Cards swiped, tapped, or chipped with a reader run 2.59%. Cards the customer enters online through an invoice are 2.99%. Cards your office keys in by hand or charges from a saved card on file are 3.49%. Amex and any commercial or business card is 3.49% no matter how it's collected. ACH is 1%, Tap to Pay adds $5 per device per month, and Instapay adds 1%.

Look at that Housecall Pro spread for a second, because it's the most useful thing in this section. The identical $8,000 payment costs $207 if the homeowner taps a card at your reader and $280 if your office manager types the card number into the computer. Same money, same customer, $73 difference, purely from how it got entered. Keying in saved cards is the single most expensive habit in most contracting offices.

Is the built-in processor worth it? Usually yes if your volume is modest, because the reconciliation is automatic and you're not chasing which payment matched which invoice. Once you're processing $30,000 a month or more in cards, the roughly 0.8% you're overpaying is $2,880 a year, and at that point it's worth wiring an outside processor into your accounting instead.

If you haven't picked a platform yet, that decision drives your processing rate whether you meant it to or not, so it's worth reading the Buildertrend, [JobNimbus, and Jobber breakdown](/blog/buildertrend-vs-jobnimbus-vs-jobber/) before you commit.

Should You Pass the Fee to the Customer?

You can, within rules, and plenty of contractors do. Two different mechanisms, and people mix them up constantly.

A cash discount advertises one price and takes a percentage off for cash or check. Legal everywhere, no notification required, and the simplest option.

A surcharge adds a fee on top for credit cards. This one has real rules. Per Visa's published merchant surcharging requirements, U.S. merchants may surcharge credit cards up to the lesser of your own merchant discount rate or 3%. You cannot surcharge debit cards or prepaid cards, ever, in any state. You have to notify Visa and your processor at least 30 days before you start. And you have to disclose the surcharge at the point of entry and at the point of sale, plus print it on the receipt.

State law adds a layer. As of its published guidance, Visa lists Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, and Puerto Rico as prohibiting surcharging, and Colorado, Minnesota, New Jersey, and New York as having their own requirements. These rules shift, so confirm your state before you turn it on.

My honest take: for residential work, a cash or check discount reads better than a surcharge. "3% off if you pay by check" sounds like a deal. "3% credit card fee" sounds like a nickel-and-dime, and you're having that conversation with someone who just wrote you a five-figure check for their own house. The math is identical. The feeling is not.

Read Your Own Statement in Ten Minutes

Before you switch anything, find out what you're actually paying. It takes one number.

Pull last month's processing statement. Find total fees, find total volume processed, and divide fees by volume. That's your effective rate, and it's the only number that matters. Not the rate on the sales sheet, not the "qualified" rate, not what your rep told you two years ago.

Now compare:

• Under 2.3%: you're in good shape. Leave it alone and go work on ACH instead.
• 2.3% to 2.8%: normal for flat-rate. Worth a quote from an interchange-plus processor if you're doing real volume.
• Over 2.8%: something is wrong. You're either on tiered pricing, keying in a lot of cards by hand, or paying junk fees. Go line by line.

While you're in there, hunt for the junk: monthly minimum fees, PCI compliance fees, PCI non-compliance fees, statement fees, batch fees, annual fees, and terminal lease payments. That last one is the worst. Never lease a terminal. A four-year lease on a $300 card reader can total more than $2,000, it's usually non-cancellable, and it's the single most common way small businesses get taken in this industry. Buy the hardware outright.

So What Should You Actually Do

If you're under roughly $10,000 a month in cards, stay on flat rate. The savings from switching won't justify the afternoon it costs you. Turn on ACH for large invoices and get back to work.

If you're over $10,000 a month, get an interchange-plus quote. Helcim is the easy default because they publish everything and there's no contract to escape. Compare their number against your effective rate, not against their headline rate.

If you're keying in a lot of cards by hand, fix that first. Getting the card tapped or letting the customer enter it themselves on an invoice is worth almost a full percentage point on some platforms, and it costs you nothing to change.

And regardless of size: default your big invoices to ACH. It's the highest-return five minutes in this entire article.