How Toast Capital decides your number
Toast Capital is an embedded lending product built into the Toast POS, with loans issued by WebBank. As of 2026 standard loans run from about $1,000 to $300,000 per location, and newer accounts see a smaller introductory tier closer to $5,000 up to $100,000. You repay automatically as a fixed percentage of your daily card sales, so the payment flexes with how busy you are.
The important part is how the offer is sized. Toast looks at the actual and projected card payments you process through your Toast POS, not your total business revenue. The offer is effectively a multiple of your Toast throughput. The amount surfaces in your dashboard as a pre-qualified number, and you can only request up to that number. There is no place to show the rest of your revenue.
Why you are capped, even with a healthy restaurant
Several things quietly hold your number down, and none of them mean your business is weak.
- Cash and off-Toast sales do not count. Cash tips and tickets, catering paid by check or wire, and any card volume on a second terminal are invisible to the algorithm. A restaurant with a heavy cash mix gets sized on only the part Toast sees.
- The holdback has a ceiling. You can hold more than one Toast Capital loan, but there is a maximum combined daily holdback so most of your revenue still reaches you. That cap on holdback is the real cap on how much you can borrow, and it is pinned to your card volume.
- Seasonality shrinks the offer. Offers track projected card sales, so an off-season trough pulls your number down right when you may need capital most.
- Newer Toast accounts get less. Less time on the platform means thinner data and the smaller introductory tier.
- A loan past halfway must be refinanced. Once a loan is about 50% repaid you cannot simply add to it, you have to refinance, which is another wall when you want more now.
Cash still matters more than the card-only view suggests. The Federal Reserve's 2024 Diary of Consumer Payment Choice found cash was still about 16% of consumer payments. For a restaurant, that is a meaningful share of revenue Toast Capital never counts.
How to get more than Toast will give
The fix is to be funded on your whole business rather than your Toast card volume. Funding can be sized to total business revenue, the full picture of deposits across your bank statements, which captures cash, catering, and any sales running outside Toast. Bank-statement and revenue-based lenders typically look at several months of deposits, so a restaurant doing strong total revenue is no longer limited to the slice that happens to flow through one POS.
Independent lenders also do not require you to stay on Toast, and they do not lock the decision to one processor's rails. If you want to add capital on top of an existing Toast advance, that is workable too, though it is usually structured as a revenue or deposit-based product rather than a competing claim on your card sales, since Toast's terms restrict pledging future card sales elsewhere. Our restaurant funding guide covers what works for restaurants specifically, and you can see real options by starting an application.
For scale, the National Restaurant Association projected industry sales around $1.55 trillion in 2026. The capital is out there. The task is matching your full revenue to a lender who will size to it.