Square Appointments does not have a price of its own any more. Booking comes inside a Square plan, and there are three: Square Free at $0, Square Plus at $49 a month per location and Square Premium at $149 a month per location, read on squareup.com/us/en/appointments/pricing on November 11, 2026 in US dollars. The second number that moves is your card processing rate, which gets cheaper as the plan gets dearer — and for most salons and barbershops that rate, not the subscription, is the bigger line on the bill.
How much does Square Appointments cost a month?
| Plan | Monthly, per location | In person (tap, dip, swipe) | Online or invoice | Appointments features |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Square Free | $0 | 2.6% + 15¢ | 3.3% + 30¢ | Booking site, unlimited staff calendars, text and email reminders, deposits and prepayments |
| Square Plus | $49 | 2.5% + 15¢ | 2.9% + 30¢ | Adds no-show fees, waitlist, multi-staff booking, class packages, Google Calendar sync |
| Square Premium | $149 | 2.4% + 15¢ | 2.9% + 30¢ | Adds resource management, service cost tracking, 24/7 phone support |
| Square Pro | Custom | Custom | Custom | Sales-led, if you process over $250,000 a year |
USD, squareup.com/us/en/appointments/pricing, checked November 11, 2026.
Three rates apply on every tier, Free included: a manually keyed payment or a saved card on file costs 3.5% + 15¢, Afterpay costs 6% + 30¢, and a card issued outside the US adds 1.5%. Cash and cheques are free. Plus and Premium each come with a 30-day free trial, a figure that appears in the page’s FAQ rather than on the plan cards.
The per-location fee only bites on the paid plans: Square’s support notes say Free subscribers can create multiple locations at no extra cost, while Plus and Premium are billed per active location.
The old Appointments prices are gone
If you have seen Square Appointments quoted at $29 and $69 a month, that was the old structure, and we recorded those figures ourselves on October 8, 2026. Square has since consolidated the products it used to sell as separate subscriptions, Appointments among them, into the one Free, Plus and Premium ladder, priced per location.
Two things in Square’s migration notes matter if you are already a customer. The switch is one-way: once you move to a new plan you cannot go back to your old subscription. And features moved between tiers, so a thing you have today may sit a tier above where it used to. Square says existing sellers get notice before their pricing changes, so watch for that email.
What you get on Square Free
More than most free plans, and it is a genuine free plan rather than a trial. One flat $0, unlimited staff calendars with no employee limit, a booking website you can customise, a Book Now button for Instagram, Facebook and your Google Business Profile, and automatic text and email appointment reminders. Square Assistant is included too, so a client can reply to a reminder text to confirm or cancel and the calendar updates itself.
You can also take deposits and require prepayment on Free, and clients can pay with Apple Pay or Google Pay in the booking flow. Nobody has to create an account to book.
Four gaps matter. Free has no cancellation policy or no-show fee, so you cannot hold a card and charge for a missed appointment. It has no waitlist and no multi-staff booking, where one appointment runs across two stylists. Custom notifications are email-only; customising the texts is a paid feature. And there is no two-way Google Calendar sync, so an appointment you block out at home will not stop a client booking over it.
Phone support on Free runs 6am–6pm PT weekdays for your first 90 days, then stops. Chat and email stay.
What Plus and Premium add
Plus at $49 is the no-show plan. Cancellation policies with a card required at booking, a late-cancellation or no-show fee you can charge to that card, a waitlist that notifies clients when a slot frees up, daily booking limits, class bookings and prepaid packages, multi-location management, two-way Google Calendar sync and customised text notifications. It also drops your in-person rate by 0.1 points and your online rate by 0.4.
Premium at $149 is aimed at large salons, and its appointment-specific additions are narrow: resource management, so a service can be tied to a room, chair or station, service cost tracking for back-bar expenses, and future bookings and team performance reports. The rest of the jump is 24/7 phone support, a 0% gift card load fee and the lowest processing rates. For a three-chair shop there is little in Premium worth $100 a month over Plus.
What it actually costs: a barbershop on Square
Take a shop turning over $3,000 a month, 60 cuts at $50, all tapped at the counter.
- Square Free: no subscription, 2.6% + 15¢ on $3,000 across 60 payments is $78 plus $9. About $87 a month.
- Square Plus: $49 plus 2.5% + 15¢, which is $75 plus $9. About $133 a month.
So Plus costs roughly $46 more a month on that volume, and what you buy is the ability to charge no-shows. One missed $50 cut a week is $200 a month, so if no-shows are your problem the maths is easy. If they are not, Free is doing the same job for nothing.
Take the deposits online instead and the gap narrows: Free’s 3.3% + 30¢ on the same money is $117, where Plus is $105 plus the $49 subscription. Online money is where Square’s free tier is expensive.
How bbook compares
bbook charges per user rather than per location, with no commission and nothing added to a booking. The free plan covers one user and 30 appointments a month with your own booking page, email reminders, cancel and reschedule links and the iOS and Android apps. Paid plans are per user a month and show in your own currency on the pricing page, so what you see is what your market pays.
The structural difference is payments. Square’s booking is free because Square processes your cards and earns on every one; bbook connects your own Stripe account and you pay Stripe’s published rates with nothing on top, which also means your payout timing is not set by your booking software. Reminders go by SMS, WhatsApp and email, and an AI receptionist can answer the phone as an add-on.
The feature-by-feature table is on the Square Appointments alternative page. If deposits are what brought you here, should barbers take deposits? compares what Square, Fresha, Booksy and bbook each take out of one.
FAQ
How much does Square Appointments cost per month?
Square Free is $0, Square Plus is $49 a month per location and Square Premium is $149 a month per location, in US dollars on squareup.com/us/en/appointments/pricing as of November 11, 2026. Booking is now part of a Square plan, so there is no separate Appointments subscription to buy.
Is Square Appointments free?
Yes. Square Free has no subscription and no end date, and it includes a booking site, unlimited staff calendars and automatic text and email reminders. You pay card processing instead: 2.6% + 15¢ in person and 3.3% + 30¢ online, and you cannot charge no-show fees on the free tier.
Does Square Appointments charge a fee per booking?
No, there is no commission or per-booking fee, and no marketplace charge for a new client. The cost is card processing on whatever you take: 2.6% to 2.4% + 15¢ in person depending on plan, 3.3% or 2.9% + 30¢ online, 3.5% + 15¢ for a keyed payment or a card on file, and 1.5% extra on cards issued outside the US.