Square Loyalty: what it costs, and what a wallet card does instead
Square Loyalty costs £25 to £65 a month on a POS plan, and messaging needs a second product. What that adds up to, and what a wallet card does differently.
If you already ring up sales on Square, turning on Square Loyalty looks like the easy choice: it is one toggle inside a dashboard you already use. The catch shows up on the invoice.
Square prices Loyalty by how many visits it tracks each month, on top of the POS subscription you are already paying for. And the moment you want to actually write and send a customer a message, rather than just track their points, a second product with its own bill joins the stack.
This piece adds up exactly what that costs, in the numbers Square itself publishes, and lays out what a loyalty card built outside the till does differently.
Key takeaways
- Square Loyalty alone costs £25 to £65 a month per location in the UK ($45 to $105 in the US), billed by how many visits it tracks. It only works on top of an active Square POS subscription.
- Loyalty’s one automatic message is a transactional text confirming a point or a reward. Writing and sending your own campaign needs a second product, Square Marketing.
- Square Marketing’s email tier starts at £9 a month and rises with your subscriber count. Its text campaigns are billed separately again, and both products require Loyalty to already be switched on.
- A wallet-based card keeps loyalty off the till entirely: no POS integration required, and push, email and SMS all sit behind one subscription.
What Square Loyalty actually costs
Square bills Loyalty by the number of “loyalty visits” it tracks at a location each month, where a visit counts an enrollment, a point earned, or a reward redeemed. As of October 2026, Square’s own pricing pages give three tiers:
| Loyalty visits per month | UK (GBP) | US (USD) |
|---|---|---|
| Up to 500 | £25 | $45 |
| 501 to 1,500 | £45 | $75 |
| 1,501 and over | £65 | $105 (capped at 10,000) |
Source: Square Loyalty and Square’s Loyalty FAQ, retrieved October 2026.
A busy café easily clears 500 visits inside a quiet month, so most shops land in the middle tier or above well before they are a large business.
The subscription this sits on top of
Loyalty is an add-on, not a standalone product. It only works for a business already running Square Point of Sale and processing payments through Square, and it cannot be added to another till system.
That POS subscription is its own line item. Square’s entry-level paid plans start around £49 to £69 a month in the UK, and from roughly $29 a month in the US, depending on which Square product you run.
Retail, Restaurants and Appointments are each priced separately. So the real starting cost of “turning on Loyalty” is the Loyalty tier plus whichever POS plan your business already needs to qualify for it.
Source: Square’s software and subscription pricing, retrieved October 2026.
What the price buys, and what it doesn’t
For that fee, a customer earns points by spending, by visiting, or by the items they buy, and can unlock VIP tiers at no extra cost once they are set up. Enrollment happens by phone number, at the register, on an invoice, or online: there is no app for the customer to download and no pass that lands on their phone.
The one message Loyalty sends on its own is automatic: a transactional text confirming that a point was earned or a reward redeemed. You do not write it, time it, or choose who gets it.
If the plan in your head involves an actual campaign, an actual Tuesday discount, or an actual win-back message, Loyalty does not do that. That is a different product.
Square Marketing: the piece that actually messages a customer
Email campaigns, including automated birthday, welcome and “haven’t seen you in a while” sends, live in Square Marketing, billed separately from Loyalty and scaled to the size of your subscribed list:
| Subscribed customers | Monthly price (GBP) |
|---|---|
| Up to 500 | £9 |
| 501 to 1,000 | £19 |
| 1,001 to 2,000 | £29 |
| 2,001 to 4,000 | £39 |
Source: Square Marketing pricing, retrieved October 2026.
Text campaigns are a further step. Square’s own help pages state that sending a text blast requires subscribing to both Square Marketing and Square Loyalty, with text usage billed on top of the Marketing subscription rather than bundled into it.
So the three channels most loyalty programs eventually want (an automatic confirmation, an email, a text) come from three separate billing relationships. Two of those sit on top of the one you started with.
Source: Square Marketing and text campaign documentation (community.squareup.com, squareup.com/help), retrieved October 2026.
Adding it up
Take a single-site shop in its first few hundred visits a month, with a subscriber list under 500: the smallest tier on every product.
Eighty-three pounds a month, three separate billing relationships, and that is before a single text message goes out. Scale the list or the visit count up and every one of those three numbers moves independently.
What a wallet card does instead
A loyalty card that lives in Apple Wallet or Google Wallet rather than inside a POS doesn’t ask which till you run. There is nothing to connect to a payment processor, because there is no payment processor in the loop at all: the card identifies the customer, not the transaction.
Passumo is built that way. One subscription covers the card itself and all three ways of reaching a customer afterwards: push to the lock screen, email, and SMS. That replaces a loyalty tier, an email tier, and a separate text-billing relationship stacked on top of each other.
What the three channels are for is worth reading before assuming you need all three on day one. Most shops start with one and add the others as they find a use for them.
It is fair to say what Square does better. Because Loyalty lives inside the register, a reward is applied automatically at checkout.
A wallet card asks a staff member to glance at the pass or scan a code instead, a real extra half-second at a busy counter. It also means the program keeps working if the business ever changes till systems.
Who should pick which
Already happy running everything through Square, and rarely messaging beyond an occasional campaign. Square Loyalty plus Marketing will do the job, and the convenience of one dashboard for sales and rewards is real. Budget for both products once visit count or list size grows past the smallest tier.
Wants push, email and SMS behind one card without three separate bills. A wallet-based program is built for exactly that, and it runs independently of whichever POS system is at the counter.
Doesn’t use Square, or runs more than one till system. Square Loyalty isn’t an option at all here: it only works with Square’s own POS. A wallet card has no such requirement.
Frequently asked questions
Does Square Loyalty send email or text campaigns on its own? No. Loyalty’s only automatic message is a transactional text confirming a point earned or redeemed. Writing and sending an actual campaign, by email or text, requires the separate Square Marketing product.
Can I use Square Loyalty without a Square POS subscription? No. Loyalty is an add-on to an active Square Point of Sale subscription with live payment processing through Square. It cannot be used on its own.
Does Square Loyalty work with other point-of-sale systems? No. It is built into the Square ecosystem and does not connect to another till.
What counts as a “loyalty visit,” and why does it change my bill? Square counts an enrollment, a point earned, or a reward redeemed as one visit. Its three pricing tiers are set by how many of those a location generates in a month. A quiet month costs less, and a busy one can push a shop into the next tier.
Where to go next
Digital loyalty cards for small businesses covers how a wallet card works from the ground up. Apple Wallet vs Google Wallet for loyalty cards explains the two wallets a card like this actually lives in.
Automated loyalty campaigns and push or email: which one to send cover what to do with the messaging once it is in place. Current plans and what each one includes are on the pricing page.
Sources: Square’s own pricing pages, Square Loyalty (UK), Square Loyalty FAQ, Square’s software and subscription pricing, and Square Marketing pricing, all retrieved October 2026. Figures were cross-checked across Square’s own pages, including its community help forum, rather than read from one page alone. The linked URLs are Square’s own pages, so a reader can verify any figure directly.