Funding options, 4 min read

Square Loans: small, fixed-fee, and repaid from every card you swipe.

For cafés, counters and small full-service rooms on Square, this is probably the first offer you'll see. It's a fair product with a fixed fee. It's also capped and it draws from your regulars.

At a glance

as of November 2026

Typical size: $100 to $350,000; 18-month maximum
Speed: Days
Guarantee or collateral: Check your offer
Cost structure: Fixed fee; reported factor of about 1.10 to 1.16
Best for: Square sellers; smaller or quick-service concepts

How it works

Square underwrites you from your own processing history and offers a loan with a fixed fee, repaid by a set percentage of daily card sales, with a minimum payment every 60 days and an 18-month cap. Factors reported in the 1.10 to 1.16 range mean a $100,000 loan costs $10,000 to $16,000, which is reasonable for money that arrives in days.

Like Toast, the repayment is a slice of every sale, and the effective annual rate climbs the faster you repay. If you're a $1.5M café it fits. If you're funding a buildout, the ceiling is the problem.

Square and Clover offer these only to their own merchants. We can't refer you and we earn nothing from them.

The trade

For

✓Fast; no application beyond the offer
✓Fixed fee
✓Good fit for small-ticket concepts

Against

✕Capped at $350K
✕Repaid from all card sales
✕Short term pushes the effective rate up

How we're paid

We don't earn anything if you choose Square Loans. It's on this site because for the right restaurant it's the better answer, and we'd rather you take it than take inKind for the wrong reasons.

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Find out which of these we'd place for your room.

Covers Advisory is an independent capital advisory, not a lender. We do not make funding decisions, and we are compensated by funding partners when a placement we arrange closes. Our recommendation is the same whether or not a partner pays us. How we're paid.