Global POS Transactions to Reach $41 Trillion by 2031

A new study from Juniper Research has found that the total value of POS transactions across payment card terminals is expected to grow from $30 trillion in 2026 to $41 trillion in 2031. This means that the compounded annual growth rate would be 6.4%.

This growth is driven by the accelerating convergence of in-store, online, and mobile sales onto unified commerce platforms, as merchants retire standalone, static terminals in favour of systems that treat every transaction, physical or digital, as part of a single customer experience. The strongest momentum is coming from verticals such as retail, hospitality, and Quick Service Restaurants (QSR), where channel fragmentation is high.

In these environments, unified commerce solutions connect previously fragmented systems across multiple payment acceptance points, allowing the merchant to consolidate multiple channels into a single inventory, payment, and customer record. As channels converge, value is migrating away from the terminal and toward the connecting platform. Hardware margins continue to compress, whilst recurring revenue from software, analytics, loyalty, and embedded finance becomes the principal return on each deployment.

“Unified commerce is no longer strictly a premium proposition; for some industries such as retail and QSR, it is a baseline expectation. Pure-play hardware vendors are expected to see their margins squeezed, and winners that emerge are those that treat the point of sale as a node in a larger system spanning store, web, and mobile, and monetise the software and data moving across it,” commented Jawad Jahan, Research Analyst at Juniper Research.