Short answer: probably, but not always. If customers regularly stand in front of you wanting to pay and you can only take cash, you need a card machine. If you take a handful of payments a month and most people pay by bank transfer or in advance, you might not. This is an honest look at both sides, because plenty of guides only ever tell you to buy the thing they’re selling. We’d rather you got it right.

When you genuinely need one

The test is simple. Do people stand in front of you, ready to buy, and reach for a card? If yes, you need to accept cards. Every day you don’t, you’re asking customers to solve a problem you created. Some will. Many won’t.

You almost certainly need a card machine if you run:

• A café, takeaway or food van where people buy on impulse and want to be gone in seconds.
• A shop or market stall selling to the public.
• A salon, barber or beauty studio where treatments run into three figures.
• A mobile trade — plumber, electrician, mobile groomer, dog walker — where you finish a job and want paying on the spot.

In all of these, the money you’d lose by not taking cards dwarfs the monthly cost of a machine. A single missed sale at a busy stall can outweigh a week of card fees.

When you might not

Not every business needs one, and we won’t pretend otherwise. You can reasonably skip a card machine if:

• You invoice clients who pay by bank transfer — many consultants, agencies and B2B services work fine this way.
• You take deposits or full payment in advance online, before anyone turns up.
• You handle only a few payments a month, all with regulars who are happy to transfer.

If that’s you, a monthly machine rental might sit unused. Fair enough. That said, watch for the moment things shift — your first walk-in customer, your first “can I just tap my card?” at an event. When face-to-face payments start creeping in, that’s your cue.

The real cost of “sorry, cash only”

Here’s the part that’s easy to miss, because it never shows up on a bill. The cost of not taking cards isn’t a number you can point to — it’s the sale that quietly didn’t happen.

Someone picks up a coffee, reaches for their phone to tap, and you say cash only. Now they’re rummaging, or heading to a cashpoint, or — more often — putting it back and leaving. Fewer people carry cash than they did even a couple of years ago. A “cash only” sign reads, to a lot of customers, as “don’t bother”.

There’s a second, sneakier cost: the upsell you never get. When paying is frictionless, people add the extra pastry, the bigger size, the treatment upgrade. When they’re counting out coins, they buy the bare minimum and get out. Card payments don’t just capture sales — they tend to make each one a little bigger.

Cash vs card in the UK, 2026

The direction of travel is clear and has been for years: card and contactless keep rising, cash keeps slipping. Contactless is now the default for small everyday spends, and plenty of people go weeks without touching a note.

But cash hasn’t died, and anyone telling you it has is overselling. A meaningful slice of the population still relies on it — older customers, people budgeting carefully in cash, some rural areas. If you serve those groups, dropping cash entirely costs you sales too. The honest position for 2026 is boring but correct: accept cards because that’s what most people now reach for, and keep taking cash because a real minority still needs it.

The lightweight option: Tap to Pay on a phone

If you’re a very small or occasional trader, you don’t have to jump straight to a dedicated terminal. Tap to Pay turns a compatible smartphone into a contactless reader — the customer taps their card or phone against yours, and that’s the payment done. No extra device, no counter, nothing to charge overnight.

It suits the weekend market seller, the crafter doing a few fairs a year, the sole trader who takes the odd card and doesn’t want a monthly commitment. The trade-off is that it leans on your phone’s battery and signal, and it’s built for lower volumes rather than a queue out the door. If you’re taking payments all day, every day, a proper machine is faster and sturdier. If you’re not, Tap to Pay is a sensible, low-risk start. Not sure what a terminal actually is versus a phone reader? Our plain-English PDQ machine explainer clears it up.

A quick decision framework by business type

Find yourself below for a straight steer:

• Market stall / event trader: Yes, take cards. If you only do a few events a year, start with Tap to Pay; if you’re out most weekends, get a portable machine with its own connection so you’re not chained to phone signal.
• Café, takeaway, food van: Yes, and don’t wait. Speed matters at a busy counter — a dedicated contactless terminal pays for itself in captured impulse buys and bigger orders.
• Mobile trader (plumber, groomer, cleaner): Yes. A portable machine means you get paid before you leave the job, not chasing an invoice next week.
• Salon or barber: Yes. Higher ticket prices mean people rarely carry enough cash, and card keeps the front desk moving between appointments.
• Consultant / B2B invoicing only: Probably not yet. Bank transfer covers you. Revisit if you start selling anything face to face.
• Online shop with no in-person sales: No terminal needed — your payments run through your website checkout instead.

If you land on “yes”, the next question is which type. A countertop unit, a portable one for round the premises, or a fully mobile machine for out and about all suit different setups — our guide to countertop vs portable vs mobile card machines walks through it. And once you’re taking payments, it’s worth knowing when the money actually lands in your account, because settlement times vary.

So, do you need one?

Run it through the one test that matters: do customers stand in front of you wanting to pay by card? If yes, get set up — the sales you’re missing cost far more than the machine. If your payments are all transfers and invoices, you can hold off with a clear conscience. And if you’re somewhere in between, Tap to Pay lets you dip a toe in without signing up to anything heavy.

If you’ve read this and decided you do need one, that’s where we come in. Smart Payment Solutions can compare fair rates for your type of business — use our free comparison tool and we’ll do the legwork, no pressure to buy.