Bank transfer vs card vs PayPal: the cheapest way to get paid

Every payment method you offer a client is a trade-off between what it costs you and how fast it actually gets money into your account. Bank transfer looks free on paper. Card payments and PayPal clearly aren't. But "cheapest" and "gets you paid fastest" aren't always the same method, and chasing the lowest fee can end up costing you more in late payments than it saves in processing charges.

Here's how the three stack up, so you can decide what's actually cheapest for your business rather than just picking the one with the smallest percentage sign next to it.

Bank transfer: the free option with hidden costs

A direct bank transfer (sometimes called a wire, EFT or just "bank details on the invoice") usually has no fee at all for the person receiving the money — you just give the client your account number and they send it from their banking app.

The real cost isn't a fee, it's friction. The client has to open their banking app, manually enter or look up your details, double-check the amount, and remember to actually do it. Every one of those steps is a place for "I'll do that later today" to quietly turn into next week. As a rule of thumb, bank-transfer-only invoices tend to sit unpaid longer than invoices with a one-click payment option, simply because there's more for the client to do and more chances to forget.

Bank transfer works best for:

Clients you've worked with for a while, who already have a routine for paying you.
Larger invoices, where a card fee of 1.5–3% would add up to real money.
Business-to-business invoicing, where the client's own accounts payable team handles payment runs on a fixed schedule anyway.

Card payments: a small fee for a lot less friction

Card processors like Stripe set their own pricing, and it varies by country and card type, so always check the current rate rather than relying on a number you saw once. As a rough rule of thumb, expect somewhere around 1.5–3% of the invoice total, sometimes plus a small fixed fee per transaction. On a $400 invoice, that's roughly $6–$12.

What you get for that fee is a "Pay now" button the client can tap from the invoice itself — no looking up account details, no separate app, no remembering to do it later. For smaller or more frequent invoices, that convenience usually pays for itself many times over in how much sooner you're paid. Our guide on accepting card payments on invoices walks through the maths in more detail, including who typically absorbs the fee.

Card payments tend to be the cheapest effective option for:

Smaller, recurring invoices where speed matters more than shaving off a percentage point.
New clients without an established payment routine with you yet.
Overseas clients, where a card sidesteps a lot of the delay and extra bank fees that international transfers can involve — see our guide on invoicing international clients for more on that.

PayPal: convenient, but usually the priciest of the three

PayPal fees for receiving a business payment are typically higher than a standard card processor's, and PayPal's own fee schedule is the place to check current rates since they change and differ by country and currency. It's worth factoring in if a chunk of your clients already have a PayPal balance they'd rather spend than move money out of a bank account — for some service businesses and online sellers, that familiarity is genuinely worth the extra cost.

Where PayPal tends to make less sense is as your default option: if most of your clients are other businesses paying from a business bank account, the higher fee rarely buys you anything that a card payment link doesn't already cover more cheaply.

So what's actually cheapest?

"Cheapest" depends on what you're optimising for:

Lowest fee on paper → bank transfer, every time. No processing cost at all.
Lowest total cost once you count your own time chasing late payments → often a card payment, because the fee is small relative to the time and stress saved on invoices that would otherwise need two or three follow-up emails.
Matching how a particular client already prefers to pay → sometimes PayPal, if that's genuinely where their money already sits.

For most small businesses, the answer isn't "pick one." It's offering bank transfer as the no-fee default and a card option alongside it, so clients who'd rather pay instantly can, without forcing everyone through the pricier path.

A simple way to decide per client

Reliable client, larger invoice, pays by transfer on time already? Stick with bank transfer — there's little to gain from adding a fee to something that already works.
New client, smaller invoice, or one that tends to drag on? Add a card payment option. The fee is cheap insurance against a slow payer.
Client specifically asks for PayPal or you know that's where their funds are? Offer it, but don't make it your default across the board given the higher typical cost.

Making it effortless either way

You don't have to manually juggle which method to offer on which invoice. InvoiceCharlie puts your bank details and a Pay now button (via Stripe) on every invoice automatically, so each client can choose whichever suits them without you doing anything extra per invoice. Pair that with automatic reminders and the gap between "invoice sent" and "invoice paid" tends to shrink regardless of which method the client ends up using.

If you want to test this on a single invoice first, the free invoice generator lets you put one together with no account needed, and your first 10 invoices are free if you'd like reminders and payment options handled automatically from here on.