On its second-quarter earnings call on August 4, 2026, Toast reported a total take rate of 98 basis points, up five basis points from a year earlier. Management attributed the growth in payments take rate to three things: adoption of new products, cost optimisation efforts, and what it called small targeted pricing moves.
We've declined to write about Toast fees before now, because every claim we could find traced back to a competitor's marketing or an anonymous forum post. This is different. It's the company describing its own levers to its own investors.
What take rate is
Toast defines total take rate as recurring gross profit divided by gross payment volume. In plain terms, it's the share of every dollar a restaurant processes that Toast keeps after paying the card networks and issuing banks. Five basis points is $500 on every million dollars processed, on top of the roughly $9,300 per million that 93 basis points already represented a year ago.
That number is an average across about 180,000 locations. Any individual merchant's rate can have moved more, less, or not at all.
The rest of the quarter
- Revenue of $1.91 billion, up 23%.
- Gross payment volume of $60.7 billion, up 22%.
- A record 9,500 net new locations, taking the total to about 180,000.
- Annualised recurring run-rate of $2.4 billion, up 25%.
- Full-year guidance raised.
One figure sits oddly against the rest: payment volume per location was flat. Toast's growth in the quarter came from adding restaurants, not from existing restaurants processing more. The take rate is what rose per dollar.
Why a Toast merchant can't shop this
Toast requires merchants to process payments through Toast. A restaurant that finds its effective rate has drifted upward can't move the processing to someone cheaper and keep the software, because the two are one agreement. The alternative to accepting the rate is replacing the system.
That's the structural point, and it's the same one we've made about every bundled platform. When software and processing are a single contract, the fee schedule belongs to the vendor. A take rate that rises five basis points a year, on a book that can't leave without a migration, is a very good business. It's just not the merchant's business.
A Canadian footnote
Toast also announced on the call that Best Western has endorsed it as a provider for its hotel restaurants across the United States and Canada. That puts Toast in front of a set of Canadian operators who may not have been shopping for a POS. If you're one of them, the Code of Conduct gives you specific rights around fee disclosure and exit that are worth understanding before you sign anything.
What we'd suggest doing
If you're on Toast, pull this month's statement and one from the same month last year. Total fees divided by card volume, each year, credit and debit separately. If the two numbers are the same, nothing here applies to you. If the second is higher and you didn't sign anything, you've found your own small targeted pricing move. Our ten-minute guide walks through the arithmetic.
Know your number before anything changes.
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