Square Appointments pricing and Square Appointments cost per month

Square Appointments costs 0 USD on Free, 49 USD a month per location on Plus and 149 USD a month per location on Premium, with unlimited staff calendars on every plan. Card processing is charged on top and gets cheaper as the plan gets dearer: 2.6%, 2.5% or 2.4% plus 15 cents in person. No-show fees and the waitlist start on Plus; room and resource management needs Premium.

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How much does Square Appointments cost per month?

Square sells three plans, priced per location, plus custom pricing for businesses that process over 250,000 USD a year. Staff count does not change the price, which makes Square one of the cheapest booking tools for a busy salon on a single site.

Plans, prices, processing rates and text allowances are from squareup.com/us/en/appointments/pricing. Square offers a free trial on Plus and Premium.

Is Square Appointments free? The Free plan is, for the software. You still pay Square's processing on every card payment, and Free has the highest rates of the three plans. For a solo stylist who takes a card at the chair, it is hard to beat.

What are the Square Appointments processing fees?

Every card payment runs through Square; there is no option to bring your own processor. The rate depends on the plan, and Premium has the lowest rates.

Watch the keyed row. No-show and late cancellation fees are charged to the card on file, so they go through at 3.5% plus 15 cents on every plan. So do deposits taken later against a saved card.

Can the lower rate pay for the plan? Only at high volume. Plus saves 0.1% on in-person cards against Free, so it pays for its 49 USD fee on processing alone at about 49,000 USD a month in card sales. Premium saves another 0.1%, so the extra 100 USD over Plus pays for itself at about 100,000 USD a month. Most salons upgrade for the features, not the rate.

What is the difference between Square Appointments Plus and Premium?

Plus is the plan for enforcing your booking rules: cancellation policies, no-show fees, a waitlist and appointments that need two staff members at once. Premium adds resource management, which means booking a treatment room, a chair or a piece of equipment along with the person, plus reporting on future bookings and service costs.

For a hair salon where every stylist has a chair, Plus usually covers it. For a day spa, a massage studio or a med spa front desk with shared rooms, it usually doesn't. Without resource management two therapists can be booked into the same room at 2 pm, and the front desk becomes the double-booking check. That one feature moves a spa from 49 to 149 USD a month per location.

What else costs extra on Square?

• Marketing texts beyond the allowance: 3 cents each on Plus after 500 a month, 1.5 cents on Premium after 2,500. Free has no text marketing.
• Square Payroll: from 35 USD a month plus 6 USD per person paid.
• Gift card loads: 2.5% on Free and Plus, 0% on Premium.
• Hardware: readers, terminals and registers are bought separately.
• Each extra location: the full plan price again, since Plus and Premium are charged per location.

Square also lets you export sales, deposits and fees as CSV files. If your bookkeeper wants them in QuickBooks, a CSV to QuickBooks converter saves retyping a month of transactions, and it shows the processing fees as their own lines, which is the cleanest way to see what Square really cost you.

Square Appointments cost for a real business, four examples

Here is a year of plan fees at four sizes, leaving processing out because it depends on your volume. The last column is what the same business pays on a booking system priced per location.

Read the table honestly. For a solo stylist and for a salon that only needs no-show fees, Square is the cheaper buy, and we would tell you so. Reserving's Core plan has 3 staff logins and no deposits, so a six-chair salon needs Growth.

The picture flips once rooms matter. Square puts resource management in Premium at 149 USD per location. On Reserving, every booking is checked against the staff member and the room on every plan, and Growth adds deposits by service, two-way SMS reminders and a queue that refills cancelled slots. Billed yearly, the four-room spa pays 888 USD instead of 1,788 USD, and the three-location group 2,988 USD instead of 5,364 USD, before processing.

Is Square Appointments worth it?

For a solo pro or a small salon that already runs Square at the register, yes. The free plan is real, staff calendars are unlimited, and the POS, booking and payments are one system. For a spa or clinic that needs rooms, or a group with several locations, the per-location Premium price adds up fast, and every deposit and no-show fee is locked to Square's processing.

Reserving takes deposits and card holds through your own payment provider at its normal rate, and charges one flat price per location with no fee per booking. See how a treatment is booked against a therapist and a room on our salon and spa booking software page. If you are weighing other salon tools, the Booksy alternative and Fresha alternative pages compare per-staff pricing by team size, and the Vagaro pricing guide covers the add-ons.

Questions to ask before choosing Square Appointments

• Do we share rooms or equipment? If yes, price Premium, not Plus.
• How many locations will we run in two years, and what is that times 149 USD?
• How much do we take keyed or by card on file, where every plan charges 3.5% plus 15 cents?
• Are we happy to keep all payments, deposits and no-show fees on Square?
• Can we export clients, notes and booking history at any time?

The same questions apply to every booking system, ours included. The live board on the home page runs without an account if you want to test a booking first.

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