I had assumed next day meant the same thing at every card provider. A payment on Friday, money on Saturday, or on Monday at the very worst. When I put the payout pages of three providers side by side on 16 September 2026, the assumption did not survive the second page, because the phrase covers at least three different schedules and one of them does not run at weekends at all.
So when a shop owner asks how long do card payments take to clear, the honest answer starts with a question back. Whose next day, into whose account, and does the calendar include Saturday?
Three providers, three calendars
**Square** publishes the plainest rule of the three. Payments taken before midnight GMT are sent that evening and reach the linked bank account the next day, weekends and holidays included, provided the bank can receive real-time payments. A payment taken after midnight arrives on the second day. The standard transfer costs nothing extra. You can also set a custom close-of-day, to match a shop that shuts at 10pm rather than at midnight, or leave money in the Square balance and move it by hand, which again arrives the next day. The cut-off is the detail I would check first. A pub that takes most of its cards between 11pm and 1am lives on both sides of that midnight line every night, and half of Friday night becomes Saturday's money whether the landlord thinks of it that way or not.
Square also writes that it does not hold funds based on the amount, frequency or type of transaction. Neither of the other two pages I read on 16 September 2026 carries an equivalent sentence.
**Zettle** pays out on a daily standard schedule within 1 to 2 business days of the transaction date. Then your own bank processes the deposit, and Zettle says plainly that this can add a few more business days, which it would be easy to skim past were it not for the line sitting in the middle of the same page, the one that changes the whole comparison: deposits are not made on Saturdays, Sundays or bank holidays. You can switch to weekly deposits, paid on the first bank day of the week, or monthly, paid on the first bank day of the month. Since 1 November 2023 the deposit shows on your statement as coming from PAYPAL UK Ltd, which saves a confused search for a line with Zettle in it.
**SumUp** puts money into its own SumUp Business Account the next day at 7am, weekends and bank holidays included. The fast lane runs into their account, not into yours. Their press release of 21 September 2023 said that payouts to a nominated bank account had typically taken one to two business days once sent, with daily, weekly and monthly options at the time. I could not find a 2026 page that repeats the one to two days, so treat it as history rather than today's schedule.
So that is three calendars from three providers. Square runs seven days into your bank. Zettle runs five, then hands over to your bank. SumUp runs seven, into an account it also provides.
What that does to one weekend
This is where the difference stops being trivia, and I will be honest that it took me longer than it should have to see it.
Take a café, invented for the arithmetic but not an odd one, that does £900 on a Friday, £1,400 on a Saturday and £1,100 on a Sunday, all on cards. On Square's calendar, and with a bank that takes real-time payments, Friday's £900 lands on Saturday, Saturday's £1,400 on Sunday and Sunday's £1,100 on Monday. By Monday morning all £3,400 is in the account.
On a calendar that pays only on business days, within one to two of them, Friday's money can arrive on Monday or Tuesday. Saturday and Sunday are not business days at all, so that £2,500 is paid out from Monday onwards and can easily reach the bank on Tuesday, before whatever time the bank itself adds. On a bad week that is £3,400 of the best trading of the week sitting somewhere outside the account, while the wholesaler's direct debit, the card terminal rental, the business rates instalment and very possibly the first wage payment of the month all go out of that same account on the same Monday morning.
None of that is a fee. It never shows on a statement. It is just money that is not where you need it, which is precisely why nobody compares it.
An aside about bank holidays, which has nothing to do with the rate and everything to do with August. A five-day calendar turns a bank holiday weekend into three non-business days in a row, and the Friday before it can easily sit until Wednesday. Anyway, back to the price of not waiting.
The price of not waiting
Every provider that sells speed charges for it somewhere. Square's version, a flat 1.5%, is the clearest of the three. An instant transfer costs 1.5% of the amount moved, on top of the normal card processing fee, and the money arrives within 20 minutes. You need at least £15 left after fees. You can move at most £3,500 in any 24 hours, and a new seller starts with one instant transfer a day of up to £750.
Now put numbers on it. Pulling £750 forward costs you £11.25, and pulling £1,000 forward costs £15. Pulling the full £3,500 costs £52.50. If a shop pulled £1,000 forward on 250 trading days in a year, it would pay £3,750 for the habit, which on most small businesses is larger than the entire gap between two providers' card rates.
I would not call that a bad product, and I was surprised how reasonable 1.5% looks one Monday at a time. Some Mondays that £15 is cheap. It is a bad habit, and the trouble with any charge priced per use is that nobody ever adds it up for you, which I find more irritating than the fee itself.
What to do with this
### Put the calendar next to the rate
When you compare providers, write the payout calendar in the same row as the card rate: seven days or five, into your bank or into theirs, and the cut-off time. A cheaper rate on a five-day calendar can cost a weekend-heavy business more in overdraft interest, arranged or unarranged, or in the goodwill of a supplier who is paid two days late every month, than it ever saves in percentage points, and I have never once seen that trade-off set out on a single comparison table anywhere. Not once.
### Check the bank end as well
Square's weekend transfers depend on your bank account accepting real-time payments. Zettle warns that your bank may add days after it sends the deposit. The provider's promise stops at the edge of its own system. Open a recent Monday on your bank statement and note what time the weekend money actually appeared, and from whom.
### Count instant transfers once a month
If you use instant transfers, add up a month of the fees, every one of them, from the transfer history rather than from memory. At 1.5%, pulling £1,000 forward once a week costs £15 a time, which over 52 weeks comes to about £65 a month. That belongs in your effective rate as much as the rental on the terminal, and it is the line most often missing from the sum.
### Ask about holds before you need to
Square says it does not hold funds by amount, frequency or type of transaction. Ask your own provider in writing whether it can say the same. Ask what would trigger a hold. The worst week to learn the answer is the week of your largest sale, when a payment far above your usual size is exactly the kind of thing an automated risk check was built to notice and the customer is already out of the door with the goods.
Weekly and monthly deposits, counted in days
Zettle lets you trade the daily schedule for a weekly one, paid on the first bank day of the week, or a monthly one, paid on the first bank day of the month. I suspect people pick these for tidier bookkeeping. I would guess few of them count what it does to the wait.
Count it on the 2026 calendar. Money taken on Tuesday 8 September waits for the first bank day of the next week, Monday 14 September: six days, and then the bank's own processing on top. Money taken on Wednesday 2 September on a monthly schedule waits for Thursday 1 October, the first bank day of that month. That is twenty-nine days of waiting.
Twenty-nine days is not a payout schedule. It is a loan from the shop to its card provider, interest free, every month. Some businesses genuinely prefer one deposit a month and have the cash to live with it. Most small shops I can picture would be better served by the daily schedule and a separate savings pot, and that is a guess about habits, not a rule.
The one line of law that bears on this
I went looking for a statutory rule on how fast a card provider must hand over a merchant's money, half expecting a clean number of days. There is not one in the shape people imagine, and I was wrong to expect it.
What the Payment Services Regulations 2017 do contain is regulation 89. Where there is no currency conversion by the payee's provider, it says that provider must make the amount available to the payee immediately after it has been credited to the provider's own account. In plain words, once your provider has the money it is not supposed to sit on it.
What the regulation does not say is when your provider counts as having the money, or how that meets a card settlement cycle and a payout schedule you agreed to in a contract. I have read all four paragraphs of it, including the textual amendments added in 2018 and at the end of 2020, and I cannot tell you with any real confidence how it maps onto the payout arrangements of each of the 3 providers I compared above, because each of them describes its schedule in its own words and none of them mentions the regulation at all. I would rather admit that than dress a rule about value dates up as a guaranteed payout time. If a provider is holding funds for days with no explanation, regulation 89 is the one to quote in writing. Keep the letter short. Name the regulation, name the dates of the payments, and ask on which date the provider's own account was credited with them.
What I could not establish
I could not find a current SumUp page stating how long a payout to an external bank account takes, as opposed to its own Business Account. I found the 2023 figure and nothing newer, and a three-year-old press release is not today's schedule.
I could not find settlement times published by the high street acquirers who serve larger shops, since none of the 3 pages I read belongs to one of them. My guess is the answer sits in their contracts, a document I have not seen.
The number I keep thinking about is the £65 a month. I still do not know how many shops paying it have ever set it beside their card rate.