Square loyalty program cost: $49 per location

What the Square loyalty program costs right now

Loyalty is the row that decides this table. Square's pricing page marks it unavailable on Square Free, and Square's December 2025 explanation of the redesign puts "marketing, loyalty, and a customizable website" in the Plus tier. So the cheapest way to start a points program on a Square till is $49 a month, and the pricing page is blunt about the unit: "With Square Plus and Square Premium, the monthly fee applies to each location you run."

One wrinkle keeps the old price alive. Sellers who bought the standalone subscription before the change can still be holding it, which is why Square's help article on enrolling customers is addressed to two audiences at once, "Square Loyalty subscribers" and "Square Plus and Premium subscribers". A seller called Jason_S posted in the Square community on 15 November 2025 that he was on the free plan with loyalty added, and that Plus "includes loyalty and adds low volume text marketing for just a few dollars more than loyalty only". Four dollars more, to be exact.

Why $45 a month is still the number everyone quotes

Because Square still charges it, just not in the United States. The per-visit model is alive on Square's own site. Square's Canadian loyalty page publishes three bands, $60 for 0 to 500 loyalty visits, $100 for 501 to 1,500 and $140 above that, per calendar month and per location. The Australian page runs the same shape at $49, $99 and $149.

Both define the unit the same way, and it's worth reading twice if you're outside the US: "A loyalty visit includes when a customer enrols in your program, earns a loyalty point or redeems a reward." Signing up counts. So does redeeming one. A shop that puts thirty people on the card in a launch week has spent thirty visits before anyone comes back for a second coffee.

The American loyalty page carries no price table at all now. It sells the 30-day trial, then says "Get one plan for your entire business", which sends you back to the plans. Meanwhile UpMenu's 2026 Square breakdown lists "Square Loyalty: from $45 per month, based on visit volume" as an add-on billed on top of a plan, and Passtastic's 2026 review opens with "Square Loyalty runs $45 a month per location". Neither is inventing anything. They're quoting a US price Square withdrew in October 2025.

The $49 is not what Square Loyalty costs you

Not one of the reviews I read runs the next number, and it changes the answer for most shops.

Square Plus doesn't only add loyalty. It also cuts your card-present rate from Square Free's 2.6% to 2.5%, and the 15¢ per transaction is identical on both plans, so the entire difference is one tenth of a percentage point of everything you take on a card at the counter.

A shop turning over $10,000 a month on cards pays about $39 for its loyalty program, and a shop turning over $49,000 pays nothing at all. That break-even is $588,000 a year through the card reader. Two things narrow it. Cash sales earn no discount, so a cash-heavy business keeps paying closer to the full $49, and the saving only exists if you were sitting on Square Free to begin with. If you already pay for Plus, loyalty is free to switch on, which is the strongest thing anyone can say about Square's pricing here.

Online orders help even more. Plus drops the online rate from 3.3% to 2.9%, four times the in-person cut, so $5,000 a month through Square Online returns another $20.

Then measure the whole program in cents per sales dollar

The subscription is the small half of what a loyalty program costs, and the only Square seller I could find who had done the full sum said so with a number.

Chip, who runs Piper's Ice Cream Bar in Covington, Kentucky, answered a coffee shop owner asking whether Square Loyalty was worth it in January 2025. He keeps a spreadsheet of what he pays Square as a share of sales. His answer: "when taking into account my monthly fees ($45 per month at my level) AND the reward discounts that customers choose to redeem, I am currently paying 1.43 cents ($0.0143) per sales dollar." Anything under three cents per sales dollar he treats as acceptable marketing spend.

That is the unit Square's pricing page can't give you. His program hands back $1 for every ten dollars spent, a flat 10% on every point that gets redeemed, and the subscription sits alongside it as a fixed cost. The giveaway is not fixed. So the larger your program grows, the less the plan fee decides and the more the reward rate does, which is why the arithmetic on the reward itself deserves more of your attention than the plan you pick.

His numbers on the return side are worth having, with the caveat that one shop is one shop: loyalty customers were 17% of his sales and spent $27.12 a transaction against $14.03 for everyone else. Square makes a wider claim on its loyalty page, that enrolled customers "spend 53% more and visit 40% more often", and attaches it to "global Square Loyalty 2022 data". That is Square measuring Square with no control group. The controlled research on whether loyalty programs work is more modest and more useful.

Ryan Wanner of Golden Pine Coffee Roasters in Colorado Springs answered the same thread with the design detail that protects the giveaway. He gave a star per visit and a free drink on the tenth, then put a $5 minimum spend on it, because otherwise a customer buys nine drip coffees and takes a specialty drink for free. Over the years, he remembers one person complaining.

Where per-location pricing falls apart

Multiply, because Square does. Three shops on Plus is $147 a month, five is $245, and there's no volume discount anywhere on the page. Square's help center is direct about the trigger: the fee is "calculated per-location, based on your number of active locations", and deactivating a location you aren't trading from is the documented way to bring the bill down.

For some sellers that unit is brutal. A trader running weekly and quarterly market pitches wrote in March 2026 that the change would be "10x more expensive than the previous subscription", because each pitch counts as another location and "there is no way to change each location to a different subscription". A later reply on the same thread came from a seller with more than ten of them: "We can remain on the free plan but can't market to our customers anymore without plus."

Note what that seller can and can't do. Square Free lets you "create multiple locations at no additional cost", so the free tier is not what punishes a market trader. Loyalty is. A points program across ten pitches costs $490 a month.

The gaps, and the things worth paying for

Google Wallet, for one. Square's own documentation on the digital loyalty pass is plain about it: "This feature is only available for Apple Wallet on iOS devices at this time." Your iPhone regulars get a pass that checks them in when they pay with Apple Pay. Your Android regulars type a phone number at the till, every visit.

It doesn't buy portability either. Square Loyalty runs on Square's point of sale, so the program, the points and the customer list all live inside the account you'd have to leave. The plan change is one-way too: Square warns that "once you switch to a new subscription plan you will not be able to switch back to any of your prior subscriptions", and you can't mix features across tiers.

What $49 does buy is worth stating plainly, because a comparison that only lists gaps isn't one. You can set points to accrue per visit, per dollar, or on chosen items and categories, and customers earn them on cash as well as cards, because the program lives in the till rather than beside it. VIP tiers with point multipliers are included rather than sold as an upgrade, which is how Ryan runs 5% off at Silver and 10% at Gold. Texts about points go out automatically, and Plus carries 500 marketing messages before overage at 3¢ each. Nobody installs an app, and no second device sits on your counter.

Whether $49 is the right price for your shop

If you already run Square and pay for Plus, switch loyalty on today. It costs nothing extra, it stamps the card inside a transaction your staff are already completing, and no tool sitting beside the till can match that. Chip's thread is the honest version of the pitch, a self-described former skeptic who priced the program at 1.5 cents per sales dollar and kept it.

If you're on Square Free, run the arithmetic in the table above before you decide. The number that settles it is your card volume rather than the sticker price, and above roughly $25,000 a month on cards Plus nets out under $25. Only the cheapest tools we compared in August beat that.

If you don't use Square, the answer is almost certainly no. Changing your point of sale to get a points program is the most expensive way to buy one, and what we charge is $35 a month for one location with no till to replace. Past three or four locations, check the per-location multiplication before anything else, whoever you're buying from.