How to Charge a Cancellation Fee in Acuity Scheduling

No. Acuity Scheduling can require a card at booking and can block cancellations inside your cutoff window, but it has no setting that charges a fee when a client cancels late or fails to show. The card sits on file; charging it is a human's job — opening the appointment and making a payment against the stored card, as a deliberate action, every single time.

This surprises a lot of owners, because Acuity's no-show prevention features mention cancellation policies and cards on file. Those features exist — but they end at storing the card and displaying the policy. Enforcement is manual, and in a busy week, manual means forgotten.

A fee you never disclosed is a chargeback waiting to happen. Before touching payment settings, decide the policy and put it where clients see it before they book:

1. Pick a cutoff window. 24 hours is the norm for salons and studios; 48 hours is common for medical, wellness, and high-prep services.
2. Pick the fee. Flat fee (e.g. $25) or a percentage of the service (50% is typical for late cancels; up to 100% for no-shows).
3. Write it in plain language. One or two sentences beats a page of legalese — e.g. “Cancellations within 24 hours of your appointment are charged 50% of the service price.”
4. Publish it everywhere a client acts: your Acuity scheduling page text, booking confirmation emails, and reminder emails.

If you want ready-made wording for different business types, we keep a set of copy-paste policies in our cancellation policy templates guide.

In Acuity's payment settings, connect Stripe or Square and set appointments to require a credit card at booking. You can either charge for the appointment upfront or simply hold the card details — for a cancellation-fee policy, holding the card is what matters.

While you're in settings, set your scheduling limits so clients can't self-cancel inside the cutoff window. This forces late changes to come through you (or through a smarter front door — more on that below), which is the only point where a policy can actually be applied.

When a client cancels inside your window, the built-in flow looks like this:

1. Open the cancelled appointment in your Acuity calendar.
2. Choose the option to make a payment against the client's stored card.
3. Enter the fee amount from your policy and process the charge through Stripe or Square.
4. Record what you charged and why — Acuity won't tag it as a “cancellation fee” anywhere.
5. Follow up with the client so the card charge isn't a surprise (surprises become disputes).

It works. But notice what it depends on: a person seeing the cancellation, remembering the policy, opening the appointment, doing math, charging the card, and communicating — for every late cancellation, forever.

The pattern in appointment businesses is consistent: the policy exists, the card is on file, and the fee still doesn't get charged — because enforcement is a chore that loses to a busy front desk. Many owners are surprised to discover the fee was never going to charge itself: Acuity simply wasn't built to do it.

Tecton Scheduler connects to your existing Acuity account and your Square or Stripe account, then gives clients a branded self-serve link to change their own appointments within the rules you set:

1. Connect Acuity and your payment provider, and set your reschedule window and fee once in Settings.
2. Drop your public reschedule link into Acuity's confirmation and reminder emails.
3. Clients open the link, verify their email and phone, and pick a new slot from live Acuity availability — no account, no phone call. See the client reschedule experience.
4. If the change falls inside your fee window, the fee is collected through Square or Stripe at confirmation — before the new slot is locked in.
5. Every fee lands in your analytics dashboard as tracked revenue, alongside cancellations and no-show trends.

The policy stops being a sign on the wall and becomes a rule the system enforces — evenly, politely, and at 11pm on a Sunday.

Two principles hold across industries: the fee should sting enough to change behavior but not enough to lose the client relationship, and a reschedule should always cost less than a cancellation — you want the client to move the appointment, not abandon it. That's the economics behind fee-gated rescheduling: the revenue stays on your calendar.