Restaurant Deposits in the UK: Policy, Refunds and How They Work

Seen from the guest's side, a deposit is simple: choose a date, time and party size, see the amount and the conditions, pay by card in the same booking flow, and receive a confirmation that records what was paid and on what terms. From the restaurant's side, the same payment is a commitment device — money taken when the table is promised rather than when the meal is eaten, received directly by the restaurant, and held against a booking that now carries a real cost to abandon.

What happens to the money afterwards depends entirely on terms the restaurant set in advance. Two arrangements are common: the deposit is credited against the final bill on arrival, or it is held and returned after the meal. Either is workable, provided the guest was told which one applies before paying. If the guest cancels inside the notice period, or never arrives, the restaurant may retain some or all of it — but only in the way its published terms describe.

The diagram above shows the whole subject in one picture: every branch (credited, returned, refunded, retained) was decided at the moment the guest paid, by wording the restaurant chose earlier. For guests, none of it should come as a surprise: the amount, whether it comes off the bill, the cancellation deadline and the refund position should all be visible before any card details are entered. For restaurants, a deposit only does its job if the guest understood it at the moment they agreed to it.

The scale of no-shows is measured, not felt. Zonal's "No-shows in hospitality 2024" says no-shows are "costing UK hospitality a collective £17.6bn a year in lost sales" and that "the rate of no-shows has risen from 12 to 14% over the course of the year". The figures come from a survey of 5,000 hospitality consumers, which was run with CGA by NIQ. Read the 14% carefully. Reporting the same research on 5 November 2024, Dine Out Magazine describes it as "14% of guests failing to honour bookings or inform venues in advance that they need to cancel". It measures the share of surveyed guests who admit to not turning up without telling the venue. It does not claim that 14% of your bookings vanish, and your own rate will be different. You will find your own number in your booking system, and the section on reading your no-show rate shows where.

Money up front is the tempting fix, and it brings a second set of problems. Ask for a flat, non-refundable £50 from every table of two and casual guests will go to the place down the road that does not ask. Write "deposits are non-refundable" in the confirmation email without thinking about why, and you have written a term that UK consumer law may not let you rely on. Take the deposit with a card hold and find that it lapses before the date. Pay a card fee on each deposit and a dispute fee when one guest challenges it. None of that is a reason to avoid deposits; design them instead of switching them on.

Begin with what guests say would stop them missing a booking. The Zonal and CGA by NIQ survey of 5,000 British consumers, as reported by Dine Out Magazine, put a simple cancellation process first at 30%, rewards or incentives second at 28%, reservation reminders third at 25%, and deposits fourth at 21%. Of the guests who do no-show, 29% cite cost as the main reason.

Two conclusions follow. A deposit is one of four levers, not the whole answer. A guest who finds it easy to cancel will cancel instead of vanishing, and a reminder catches the ones who forgot. Cost is the stated reason for almost three in ten no-shows, a warning about the size of the deposit.

An operator example on the Zonal page shows the other end of the spectrum: "a £20 per head pre-authorisation (the money is only taken in the event of no show)". That is a card guarantee in all but name, and it matters because it is a different instrument from a deposit. Three things look similar on a booking form, and mixing them up causes much of the confusion: the deposit, the card guarantee and the card hold, which this guide sets apart below.

There is no responsible universal figure, and no official UK body publishes one. A deposit is not a number to copy from another restaurant; it is a rule for a particular service. Decide first what commitment the deposit protects — a large party, a special menu, a private room, or another booking where preparation and table use begin before the guest arrives.

Then set the amount from the restaurant's own operating facts: what the service costs to prepare, what the table earns when it sells, and how realistically it can be resold at short notice. A busy room with a waitlist can refill a table of four at an hour's notice and needs less protection per cover; a small tasting room that preps each menu in advance realistically cannot, and can justify more. That reasoning — a genuine estimate of the direct loss a cancellation causes — is exactly the standard CMA fairness guidance applies, which is why the restaurant's own evidence matters more than any copied number.

Structure follows the same logic. A per-person amount scales cleanly with party size; a per-booking amount is simpler for fixed commitments such as a private room. Either is defensible when the exact amount and basis are shown before the guest pays.

Begin with the loss, not a round number. Suppose a table of four booked for 8pm on a Saturday cancels at 7pm. You will struggle to resell it. You have staffed and prepared for it, and the money you would have taken is gone. The deposit should roughly reflect that loss. Now suppose a table of two cancels on a quiet Tuesday and you fill it from the door. The loss is smaller, and a large deposit stops being a fair estimate.

So set the deposit by service and party size instead of applying one rule to the whole restaurant. The worked set below uses a made-up average spend of £35 a head. Swap in your own figure. It is an illustration, not a benchmark.

TableSpark's deposit field takes a flat amount per booking, so for a per-head policy choose the sum that matches the smallest party in the band. A party of six at £10 a head is £60, and a party of nine under the same rule is still £60, which is below £10 a head and therefore conservative. For £15 a head at ten or more, run a separate service with its own threshold.

Before you publish a number, check whether you could explain it to the guest face to face, whether it stays clearly below what the table would have spent, and whether you would refund it in full the moment you cancel. If any answer is no, lower the figure.

A deposit takes money at the moment of booking. A card guarantee — sometimes called a no-show hold — stores a payment method and charges it only in the circumstances the published no-show terms state. The deposit suits bookings where preparation starts early and the loss is certain; the guarantee suits services where most guests arrive and the restaurant only needs cover for the exception. Both are policy choices to make deliberately, per service and per party size, and both live or die on the same rule: the guest must see the term before confirming.

A card hold, or pre-authorisation, sets aside an amount on the guest's card without collecting it. It is not a charge. The catch is that it lapses.

The three suit different bookings. A deposit commits the guest with money now and suits large parties, set menus and peak dates. A card guarantee asks less and fits ordinary tables where a big up-front payment would put people off. A hold looks attractive until you use it for a table booked three weeks away.

Stripe's documentation on placing a hold states that "Card payments: The amount is typically on hold for 7 days for online payments and 2 days for in-person Terminal payments (depending on the type of transaction and the card network)." It adds: "Usually, an authorization for an online card payment is valid for 7 days." In the same documentation, the table for card-not-present transactions lists Visa at 5 days for merchant-initiated authorisations (with "The exact authorization window is 4 days and 18 hours"), and at 7 days when the customer initiates it. Mastercard and American Express are listed at 7 days for both.

Try the calendar sum. A guest books on 1 November for a dinner on 29 November, 28 days ahead and four times the usual seven-day window. A hold placed at booking would have lapsed 21 days before the dinner, so nothing stands behind the reservation on the night. Stripe's docs describe an extended hold that lengthens the validity period, but that leaves you managing authorisations instead of a policy.

Where a booking is more than a week or so ahead, the sturdy options are a captured deposit (real money already in your account) or a saved card that you charge only on a confirmed no-show. Holds are fine for same-week bookings. They are the wrong tool for Christmas parties booked in September.

The seven-day figure is the common case but not a rule. The exact window depends on two things, the card brand and how the payment was classified. A payment is customer-initiated when the cardholder is taken to be taking part at the moment of authorisation, and merchant-initiated when the restaurant charges a card it already holds. For card-not-present payments, Stripe's documentation on placing a hold lists 7 days for both on Mastercard, American Express and Discover. Visa is 5 days merchant-initiated and 7 days customer-initiated; the Visa footnote gives the operative figure of 4 days and 18 hours. Stripe and the card network classify a transaction from signals of cardholder participation, not solely from the API parameters the integration sets. Seven days is a working assumption, and the only authority for a particular payment is the capture-before field on the charge.

Stripe's extended authorisation documentation says extended validity periods can go up to 30 days depending on the card network. Conditions attach to that figure. It runs on Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover only. Users on IC+ pricing are offered it, while an account on blended pricing has to request access through Stripe support. Visa's 30 days works out at 29 days and 18 hours. A standalone restaurant on Visa falls under the "all other merchant categories" entry, which carries an additional 0.08% fee per transaction and customer-initiated transactions only. Mastercard documents 30 days for all merchant categories, excluding Maestro and Cirrus cards. American Express and Discover list lodging and travel categories without naming restaurants; no confirmation either way was located.

One condition outranks the table. For many networks, extended windows are only for cases where, at the time of authorisation, you do not know the final amount you will capture. A fixed £20 a head is known when the hold is placed. Whether it may use an extended window for it is a network-rules question for the restaurant and its processor.

The longest window in that documentation is thirty days, while a standard online hold lasts seven. Six weeks ahead is ordinary for a December table and three months is not unusual, so an un-captured hold guarantees nothing for a booking taken more than about a week out. The lapse is invisible from the floor. The payment sits with the processor. In the reservation system the booking is a status written once, and on the website the promise is a policy written at launch.

Choose the instrument for each booking rather than applying one policy to every booking.

Full prepayment goes beyond a deposit. The guest pays the whole price in advance, as for a ticketed event or a fixed tasting menu. For an ordinary dinner it asks too much, and it carries the largest refund exposure.

A simple route works for most independents. Take a deposit for a large party, a set menu or a peak date. For an ordinary table on an ordinary night, use a card guarantee, or nothing, plus a reminder. Never rely on a hold for a booking made more than a week ahead. Keep policies light in a walk-in heavy venue.

Usually, yes — and the exact answer was written down before the booking, in the terms shown at payment. A deposit is normally returned in full when the guest cancels before the notice period ends, when the restaurant cancels or cannot honour the booking, or when the booking moves to a date the restaurant can fill. Where the deposit is credited to the bill, it is not refunded at all — it is simply deducted, and the guest pays the difference.

The contested case is the late cancellation or no-show. CMA guidance is that an amount retained after cancellation should be a genuine estimate of the direct loss, and should take account of the reasonable steps the restaurant took to reduce that loss — refilling the table from a waitlist, for example. A blanket non-refundable term applied to every booking regardless of circumstance sits at the risky end of this, and terms that keep the money when the restaurant itself cancels, or when the guest received nothing at all, are the kind the CMA says are unlikely to be fair.

Write down the practical detail too: how a guest asks for a refund, and where the money lands. A card refund returns to the card that paid it, and how quickly it appears depends on the guest's bank — so state the expected timescale and the request route in the terms rather than leaving the guest to guess. Guests rarely complain about the rule; they complain about not knowing it.

Trust is won or lost on refunds, so settle each case before the first dispute and not in the middle of one.

Stripe's UK pricing page states that "there are no fees for issuing refunds" apart from some bank-transfer refunds, but that "the payment processing, Connect and currency conversion fees from the original transaction are not returned." On a £50 deposit you do not get back 95p. The card-fee section below works through that cost.

Three rules do most of the work. First, the fairness test: under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, a term that creates a significant imbalance against the consumer, contrary to good faith, is unfair — and an unfair term is simply not binding. A deposit clause that fails the test does not protect the restaurant at the exact moment it was written for.

Second, the grey list. Schedule 2 of the Act lists terms which may be regarded as unfair, and two entries read like a description of bad deposit terms: keeping the sums a consumer has paid when the consumer cancels, without offering equivalent compensation if the restaurant cancels; and demanding a disproportionately high sum for services never supplied. Deposit wording that mirrors either pattern invites exactly the scrutiny it is trying to avoid.

Third, prominence. CMA price-transparency guidance says the total price presented to a customer should normally include any unavoidable charge — a booking fee is the guidance's own example — and that hiding a mandatory charge until later in the purchase flow is illegal. A compulsory deposit revealed only at the payment step is the pattern that guidance exists to stop: put the amount beside the booking action, in plain language, before the guest commits.

There is no 14-day cooling-off right for a dated table. The Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 give distance buyers a right to cancel, but regulation 28(1) lists exceptions. Paragraph (h) covers "the supply of accommodation, transport of goods, vehicle rental services, catering or services related to leisure activities, if the contract provides for a specific date or period of performance." A table booked for a particular date and time is that kind of contract. In that case your cancellation terms, not a statutory cooling-off period, govern what happens when a guest changes their mind.

What you say becomes part of the deal. Section 50(1) treats a service contract as including "anything that is said or written to the consumer, by or on behalf of the trader, about the trader or the service", if the consumer takes it into account when deciding to book or when making a decision afterwards. Your booking page, your confirmation email and the line beside the pay button are therefore terms and not decoration.

What the guidance says about deposits. GOV.UK's "Unfair terms explained for businesses: full guide", updated on 22 July 2026, sets out what is unlikely to be fair under "If the customer cancels": to "make prepayments non-refundable, regardless of why the customer cancels", or to "charge the customer to cover your costs and loss of profit, when this could mean you get compensated for the same loss twice". In the guide's words, the fairer approach is where "you set non-refundable prepayments (including deposits) or cancellation charges so they reflect a genuine estimate of what you will lose directly because of the customer cancelling".

In a press release on 17 April 2019 aimed at the holiday industry, the Competition and Markets Authority made a related point: "Examples of unfair terms can include those which allow a business to take a large, upfront deposit and refuse to refund any of the customer's money if they cancel, regardless of the amount the business is losing or the reason for the customer cancelling." That was about holidays, so treat it as an illustration and not as a rule written for restaurants.

Together, these points make a defensible policy. The amount relates to a real loss and there is a stated, reasonable window in which cancelling costs the guest nothing. You refund when you are the one who cancels. You show it all before the guest pays.

Stripe's published UK rate for standard cards is "1.5% + 20p". Premium UK cards cost "2.8% + 20p". EEA cards cost "2.5% + 20p" plus 2% for currency conversion. International cards cost "3.15% + 20p" plus 2% for currency conversion. Stripe's page, checked on 2026-10-08, says "Stripe does not charge setup fees, monthly fees, or any other hidden fees like closure fees." The arithmetic below is ours; the rates are Stripe's.

A £10 deposit on a standard UK card costs 1.5% of £10, which is 15p, plus 20p, so 35p, or 3.5% of the deposit. A £50 deposit costs 75p plus 20p, so 95p, or 1.9%. A fixed 20p is part of every payment, so small deposits lose proportionally more.

Is it worth it? Take one illustrative Saturday table of four at the made-up £35 a head, which makes £140 of takings (before your costs). Suppose a £40 deposit on that booking. The Stripe fee is 1.5% of £40, which is 60p, plus 20p, so 80p. One prevented no-show protects £140 of takings, and £140 divided by 80p is 175, so it covers the card fee on 175 such deposits. The numbers are illustrative, but the shape is not. The card fee is small next to one empty table, so the cost to watch is less the fee than the guests you put off with a clumsy policy.

Refunded deposits cost money too. If you refund a £50 deposit, you have paid 95p to take it and get nothing for it. That is a good reason to keep the free-cancellation window honest, and to make the deposit small enough that you do not mind refunding it.

With a card guarantee you pay the fee only if you charge, so the 20p never applies to the guest who turns up.

Which of Stripe's two UK domestic rates applies is decided by the guest's card and not by the restaurant. No figure for how a UK restaurant's guests split between the two was located, so the sums below show both rates for each amount. That gives the range a deposit falls into. Stripe's UK pricing page lists 1.5% + 20p for standard UK cards and 2.8% + 20p for premium UK cards (read on 3 October 2026). The £10 and £25 figures are illustrations and not a recommendation for any restaurant's deposit.

• £10 deposit at 1.5% + 20p: 35p (3.5%); the restaurant keeps £9.65.
• £10 deposit at 2.8% + 20p: 48p (4.8%); the restaurant keeps £9.52.
• £25 deposit at 1.5% + 20p: 57.5p (2.3%); the restaurant keeps about £24.43.
• £25 deposit at 2.8% + 20p: 90p (3.6%); the restaurant keeps £24.10.

The £25 standard-card row leaves £24.425 on paper. The way the half penny is rounded on a real statement was not located, so the honest figure is about £24.42 or £24.43.

The gap between the £10 and £25 deposits is 1.2 percentage points at either rate, and all of it comes from the fixed 20p, which is 2% of a £10 deposit and 0.8% of a £25 one.

Because a restaurant takes deposits in volume, the count of payments matters. Collect £100 as ten £10 deposits at the standard rate and the charges come to ten times 35p, which is £3.50. Collect it as four £25 deposits and they come to four times 57.5p, which is £2.30. The totals at the premium rate are £4.80 and £3.60. Either way the difference is £1.20, which is the fixed 20p charged six more times. The percentage part of the charge is the same on £100 however it is split.

None of this shows that a bigger deposit is the right one. What a larger figure does to how many guests complete the booking was not located, and a deposit that is too high for the room may cost more in abandoned bookings than it saves in fixed charges.

The card charge is calculated on the deposit per booking, but looking per head makes it clearer whether the figure does its job. A booking for six at £10 comes to about £1.67 a head, and the same booking at £25 to about £4.17 a head.

Some guests will challenge a deposit or a no-show charge with their bank. Stripe's UK pricing page lists "£20.00 for each dispute you receive" and "£20.00 for each dispute you respond to manually", and it says "You get this fee back for won disputes." A single dispute therefore costs at least £20 on top of the money at stake. That sum matches the card fee on 25 deposits of £40 at 80p each (£20 divided by 80p).

What you wrote before the guest paid is your best defence. Keep the booking confirmation, a timestamp and the policy text as it appeared on the page at the time. In TableSpark, the booking record carries a History timeline that shows, in the product's wording, "booked, edited, tables assigned or cleared, deposit paid, reminder sent, moved, and every status change". That answers "who changed this and when" in one place. Marking a booking No-show keeps an honest record and deletes nothing, and the diary shows a guest's earlier no-shows on the booking row.

Confirm the cut-off in the email and make the refund route easy, and disputes will also fall, because a guest who can cancel properly has less reason to ask their bank.

This is the same setup in TableSpark, shown on Maison Rouge, the demonstration restaurant on the platform. Deposits are on the Growth plan, at £39 a month excluding VAT, and they are taken on the restaurant's own booking page at 0% TableSpark commission. Stripe's standard card-processing fees apply to online payments.

Step 1. Open Bookings, then Services & rules. The rules that decide what a booking is do not live in Settings. They sit on the Bookings page, behind the Services & rules button, with one row for each service, such as Lunch or Dinner. That row holds the seating window, slot length, capacity, party limits, lead time and the deposit rule together.

Step 2. Set the party size and the amount on the service row. Deposit for party over and Deposit (£, per booking) work as a pair. Any booking at or above that party size pays the deposit at the time of booking. Each amount runs from £1 to £500, and a threshold with no amount, or an amount with no threshold, will not save. The screenshot shows example values typed into the Dinner row (a party of 8 and £25 per booking), not saved.

Step 3. Use a card guarantee where it suits the service better. The same row carries Card guarantee for party over and No-show fee (£). This pair holds the card rather than charging it: nothing is taken until your team marks the booking a no-show and then confirms the charge, so nobody is billed automatically for running late or ringing to cancel. If both pairs are on, the deposit takes priority, so fill in the one that matches the terms you publish for that service.

Step 4. Connect your own Stripe account. Deposits are collected through the Stripe account you link once in Settings → Payments, the same connection that takes online orders and gift-card sales. TableSpark takes 0% commission, and only Stripe's fee applies. A refunded deposit goes back the way it came, through Stripe to the original card, without passing through a TableSpark-held balance.

Step 5. Put the same terms into the Deposit received email. TableSpark sends the booking emails automatically, including one when a deposit is paid. Your part is the wording, look and sender. Open Settings → Email, expand Deposit received under "What your emails say", and edit the subject line, heading and message so they repeat the amount, the deadline and the refund rule from your policy. For clause wording, see deposit policy wording you can adapt.

Step 6. Follow deposit bookings in the diary. A booking still waiting on its deposit shows Awaiting deposit and offers only a cancel until it is paid. Take a phone booking for a service with a deposit and TableSpark creates a payment hold with a link you copy and send to the guest. On their side, a guest holding a deposit booking is asked to call the restaurant rather than offered self-service Change and Cancel buttons, so every change to a paid booking goes through your team.

The guest's view decides whether a deposit feels fair or feels like a trap. On a TableSpark site the guest reaches the booking form from a Reserve a table button. They pick a date, a party size and a time from real slots, then enter contact details. If the service has a deposit rule that applies to their party, card details are taken securely at booking. A booking confirmation follows, and the day before, a plain reminder with the same details goes out on its own. TableSpark's guest emails also include a deposit receipt, a cancellation notice and a rescheduled-booking notice, and their wording is yours to edit.

Tips for running it in the product:

• Run ordinary dinner and large parties or set menus as separate services, so each has its own threshold and amount.
• Start with the nights that hurt most, usually Friday and Saturday. Widen only if the Bookings report shows a problem elsewhere.
• In the confirmation email, put the cut-off date and time, not only the rule.
• Before you change anything, give it a month and compare the no-show rate by service.

A short policy can still be complete. State the deposit amount, whether it is per booking or per person, how it is applied to the bill, the change and cancellation deadline, and what happens when the restaurant is at fault. If the booking changes size, explain whether the deposit changes too.

Avoid blanket wording that keeps every payment in every circumstance. The CMA says amounts retained after cancellation should reflect a genuine estimate of direct loss and the reasonable steps a business can take to reduce it. That is why the restaurant's own evidence matters more than a copied number — and why the safest policy is one whose every outcome was written down before the first booking, not during the first dispute.

Section 50 turns what you say into a term, so write the policy once, plainly, and use the same words wherever the guest looks: beside the booking form, in the confirmation email and in the reminder. A policy buried in a PDF does not help you.

A workable structure has five lines: what is taken and when, what it covers, the free-cancellation cut-off, what happens after the cut-off, and what happens if you cancel. For example:

"For parties of 6 or more we take a £60 deposit when you book. It counts towards your bill on the night. Cancel or change your booking up to 48 hours before and we will refund it in full. If you cancel later, or do not arrive, we keep the deposit to cover the table we held for you. If we have to cancel, we refund it in full."

Treat the 48 hours and the amounts as examples, not recommendations. State each element before payment, in words the guest can quote back to you. Avoid "non-refundable" as a blanket label: the GOV.UK guidance above describes prepayments non-refundable "regardless of why the customer cancels" as unlikely to be fair.

One more habit helps. Give the cut-off as a date and time in the confirmation email ("free changes until Thursday 12 November, 7.30pm") so the guest never has to calculate.

A deposit policy is easier to follow when the guest does not have to search for it again. The confirmation should record the amount paid, the booking details, the relevant deadline and the route to change or cancel. A reminder can repeat the operational points close to the service — and a guest who is reminded in time either arrives or frees the table while it can still be resold, which is precisely the loss-reduction step CMA guidance expects a business to take before keeping money.

Keep that reminder factual. The ICO says an appointment reminder can be a service message when it is informational and contains no promotion. If the restaurant wants to market another service, use a separate route that meets the applicable marketing rules.

The restaurant should explain what guest information it collects, why it needs it, how long it keeps it and who receives it. Collect the details needed to manage the reservation and payment, not an open-ended profile.

The ICO's data minimisation principle requires personal data to be adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary. TableSpark keeps the direct booking and guest record in the restaurant's own operating route, with exportable data and a clear privacy link.

• Name the service and party sizes that require a deposit.
• Show whether the amount is per booking or per person.
• Explain how the payment is applied to the final bill.
• State the change, cancellation, refund and restaurant-cancellation terms.
• Place the material terms before the payment action.
• Repeat the amount and relevant deadline in the confirmation.
• Keep the reminder factual and give the guest a working contact route.
• Review the amount against the restaurant's actual loss and resale experience.

Deposits are not free in every system, and the way they are packaged matters when you compare quotes. The table below uses only what each provider's own page says in this research, checked on 2026-10-08.

The prices are not like-for-like, because providers charge for different things. One lists a payments add-on on top of a plan whose price is not in the row. One puts payments in its top tier. One quotes a starting price for a whole system. The honest comparison is the full monthly bill for the plan that actually includes deposits, plus the payment provider's fee.

On the published pages, that leaves two questions for any quote: which plan includes deposits, and what the payment provider charges on top. TableSpark's answer is Growth, at £39 a month excluding VAT, with Stripe's standard card-processing fees as the only payment fee.

A deposit system is more than a field in a booking form. Before you go live, work through each of these.

On the last item, a page being live at a working link is not the same as it being discoverable by Google. Misconfigured robots or noindex directives, conflicting canonicals, orphaned pages and missing structured restaurant data can leave important pages undiscovered or misunderstood, and guests searching your name may reach directories or commission-charging platforms first. TableSpark bundles crawlable structured restaurant content, titles and descriptions, canonical URLs, sitemaps, robots controls, Restaurant and LocalBusiness schema, internal linking, mobile-first output and managed search-verification set-up, so the page that takes deposits is one search engines can read. Indexing and ranking stay decisions for Google.

This guide covers the whole subject. The narrower questions each have a guide of their own:

• Deposit policy wording you can adapt
• The 14-day cancellation right and booking deposits
• A guest disputing a deposit with their card issuer
• A deposit payment that fails its authentication step
• Deposits paid by bank transfer
• Taking a deposit on a phone booking

Keep the deposit terms consistent with a clear restaurant no-show policy, and see the Reserve with Google setup guide.

TableSpark is the best-value complete restaurant website and booking choice for an independent UK restaurant, and it treats the deposit as part of the booking rather than a bolted-on payment link. TableSpark starts at £19 a month excluding VAT; the Growth plan, at £39 a month excluding VAT, adds live bookings, table inventory, floor plans, table assignment, deposits and reminders.

The steps above are the whole job: the rule sits on the service row, the guest books and pays on the restaurant's own website, the money settles in the restaurant's own Stripe account, and the booking stays with the same table operation used during service, so the deposit, the table and the guest history are in one place. TableSpark commission is 0%. Stripe's standard card-processing fees apply to online payments.

Compare the Growth plan, review the commission-free booking model, or see how bookings and table operations connect.

This guide provides operational information, not legal advice. Consumer terms and payment handling depend on the wording, the service and the circumstances. Use current CMA and ICO guidance and obtain independent legal advice for the restaurant's final deposit policy where needed.

If the bookings themselves are the part you want off your plate, a restaurant booking system that runs against your real tables, takes deposits where a service needs them and sends the reminders for you is the practical next step, and TableSpark includes it on the relevant plan at 0% TableSpark commission.