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POS Lease Buyout Calculator
Run the pos lease buyout math — remaining payments, fair market value, and whether switching saves more than staying.
Most Merchants Never Run the Math Before Calling the Lessor
A pos lease buyout is rarely the decision merchants think it is. Most expect to find out they are trapped; some discover the buyout is cheaper than they imagined; others learn the opposite and stay. The difference between those three outcomes is a five-minute calculation that almost nobody runs before calling the lessor for a quote.
This calculator runs that math. Enter your monthly lease payment, the number of months remaining, and what you would save each month on a new processor. It returns the full buyout cost under the two methods used by nearly every commercial POS lease, compares it against the savings you would earn by switching, and tells you which side of the break-even line you are on.
Calculate Your POS Lease Buyout Cost
Monthly payment, remaining months, and monthly savings from the new processor quote. The verdict updates as you type.
If Your Contract Specifies Method C, Do Not Sign It Next Time
A small number of commercial lease contracts specify a third buyout method: the merchant pays the remaining balance in full AND returns the equipment. This is the worst of both worlds — the merchant ends up with neither the money nor the hardware, while the lessor keeps both. Method C does not typically appear in contracts from First Data Global Leasing or Northern Leasing, but it does appear in some smaller regional lessors and in a few ISO-specific paper structures.
Look for the “Surrender” or “End of Term” clause in your lease agreement. If it says the merchant must return the equipment AND pay any remaining balance, that is Method C. In that case the only usable math is Method A — treat the pos lease buyout as the remaining-payments total and accept that you lose the hardware either way.
Reading the Paperwork Before You Run the Calculator
Full context on what each of these numbers means and how to negotiate them is in the companion post, how to get out of a POS lease. The pos lease buyout math is only half the decision — the other half is whether the new processor quote is real, which the post walks through.
More on the Switching Decision
If the Calculator Says Pay, Run the Numbers Against a Real Quote First
Ray Thompson ran this same math at Third Watch Brewing and the answer came back “stay.” Plenty of merchants in the middle of a lease run it and the answer is “pay the buyout.” Either way, the math is only useful against a real, written quote from a competing processor — not a rough estimate. We will read your current statement, run the pos lease buyout comparison against a real interchange-plus quote, and give you the breakeven date in writing.
The alternative to flat-rate processing is interchange-plus pricing, which passes the network cost through transparently and adds a fixed processor markup.
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