Payment Processing · Buyer guide
A plumber, an HVAC company or a cleaning business gets paid in more ways than a shop does. A homeowner taps a card on the technician's phone at the end of a service call. A property manager pays a commercial invoice with a company card. A customer reads a card number over the phone. A $6,000 system replacement gets paid by bank transfer, or financed. Each of those carries a different price, and the field-service software most of these businesses run on sets all of them.
Two of the best-known field-service platforms, Jobber and Housecall Pro, publish their rates, and both say their payments are processed by Stripe. Stripe also sells to the same businesses directly. So do Square, QuickBooks and Helcim. What follows is what each charges for the same jobs, from each company's own US pricing page as read on 23 September 2026.
ServiceTitan, another widely used platform in the trade, does not publish a payment rate or a plan price. Its payments page says fees depend on your agreement with it, so it cannot be put on this basis.
Start with the easy case: a $350 service call, paid by the homeowner with a personal card tapped on the technician's phone.
The spread is a dollar. Paid online from an invoice instead, the same $350 costs $10.45 at Jobber and Stripe, $10.47 at Housecall Pro and QuickBooks, and $11.85 on Square's free plan. On a consumer card, none of these is expensive relative to the others, and the choice between them should be made on something else.
Housecall Pro's help centre publishes a line most home-service owners never read: American Express and "commercial, corporate, and business cards" are charged at 3.49% "with any payment method". Tapping the card in person does not bring it down to 2.59%. The advertised "as low as 2.59%" is the rate for a standard consumer card only.
That matters more in this trade than in most. Property managers, landlords, general contractors, restaurants and offices pay with business cards as a matter of course. Take a $1,200 commercial repair paid on a company card and tapped on site:
The flat-rate providers charge one price whatever the card, which means they absorb the higher interchange a business or rewards card carries and price it into everyone's rate. Housecall Pro charges it back to you. Helcim, on interchange-plus, passes the network's actual cost through, so a business card costs more there too, but by the amount the card network charges rather than by a fixed point. If a meaningful share of your revenue comes from commercial accounts, run your last three months of card payments through Housecall Pro's two rates before you compare it with anything else.
Office staff at a service business key a lot of cards: deposits taken by phone, balances charged after the job, recurring maintenance plans charged from a card on file. Keyed transactions cost more everywhere, because the card network charges more for a card that was not present. On a $350 keyed payment:
Jobber is the outlier because it publishes a single card rate and no keyed surcharge. The site's analysis of keyed-card pricing explains where the extra point goes at everyone else. For a maintenance-plan business that charges hundreds of cards on file a month, that point is real money.
A water heater, a roof, a furnace or a full HVAC replacement is where the bank payment earns its place, and where the pricing diverges most. On a $6,000 job paid by ACH:
Jobber and Housecall Pro run their payments on Stripe, and Stripe's own published price for the same bank debit stops at $5. The difference on a $6,000 job is the platform's margin on the convenience of having the payment land on the job record. That may be worth it; you should know that it is $55.
The cap is the entire difference, and the site's comparison of invoice payment fees walks through it across the accounting and bill-pay platforms too. Paid by card instead, the same $6,000 job costs $174.30 online through Jobber and $179.40 through Housecall Pro or QuickBooks, which is why the bank option is worth offering on anything large.
Service businesses buy parts before they are paid, so same-day payouts are popular in the trade. Each platform charges for them differently. On a $3,000 payout:
The fee buys back a wait of a business day or two on a standard payout. The site's piece on instant payout fees prices that convenience as a loan, which is what it amounts to.
Housecall Pro offers consumer financing through Wisetack and publishes the merchant cost: a flat 3.9% of the financed amount, on jobs from $500 to $65,000, excluding its 0% APR add-ons. The 0% APR promotions that sell best carry a higher merchant fee, which Housecall Pro says changes with the option the customer picks but does not publish. On a $12,000 system at the standard fee, you pay $468, against $358.80 if the same customer had paid the invoice by card.
Whether that is worth it depends on whether the customer would have bought the job at all without financing, which only you can judge. The site's analysis of buy now, pay later merchant fees covers the retail equivalent. Ask for the 0% APR fee schedule in writing before you offer those plans at the kitchen table.
Neither Jobber nor Housecall Pro automates a card surcharge. Housecall Pro's help article on the subject says you have to add it to invoices manually because no automated process exists, and lists states it says restrict them; the only guidance we found from Jobber is a community-forum answer suggesting a manual line item. A manual line item is still a surcharge under card network rules, with a cap, a notice requirement and state law to respect. The site's guide to credit card surcharge rules covers what is allowed. A lower price for paying by bank is a discount rather than a surcharge and needs none of that.
For most small service businesses the subscription outweighs every difference above. As of 23 September 2026, Jobber's plans run from $29 a month (Core, billed annually) to $149 a month (Grow, billed annually), or $49 to $199 month to month, with a five-user Plus plan above that. Housecall Pro's run from $59 to $299 a month billed annually, or $79 to $329 monthly. Payments are included on every plan at both. Housecall Pro's help centre says you are not restricted to its integrated processor, but the point of the built-in one is that the payment lands on the job and the invoice without anyone re-keying it, and that is what you give up by going outside it.
So the practical question is not which processor has the lowest rate. It is whether the platform's payment pricing fits your mix of customers. A residential business taking mostly consumer cards at the door will pay close to the same anywhere. A business with commercial accounts, a lot of keyed maintenance-plan charges, or big replacement jobs paid by bank will see the differences above every month.
