Please expose item prep times through the API

Feature Requests
1

Hi,

I’m building kiosk and customer-ordering apps that create pickup orders through Square’s Orders API.

Square Online calculates an order’s prep time using the longest prep time among the items in the cart. The resulting value is written to fulfillments[].pickup_details.prep_time_duration.

The problem is that the item-level prep time shown under Fulfill orders → Item prep time is not available through the public Catalog API. I tested the current Production API using version 2026-08-19, and it is also absent from Square’s public GraphQL schema.

Previous Square forum answers confirm that these catalog preferences cannot be retrieved:

Could Square expose the following through a supported API?

  • The item’s effective prep time

  • Whether it uses the location default or an item override

  • The location’s default prep time

This would let external ordering applications calculate accurate pickup estimates and send the correct order-level fulfillment duration.

One quick note before Square Dev AI responds: it is currently convinced that CatalogItem.fulfillment_details.prep_time_duration exists. It does not appear in the documentation, live API responses, or current schema. Any AI response repeating that field without an official reference or real API payload will be cheerfully ignored. :slight_smile:

3

I’m happy to submit this over as a product request. If you have your merchant id I can include it on the request as it helps our triage team, if not I’ll submit it through anyway.

5

Thanks for the reply. Not 100% sure how to get this but I think it is this?

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6

That looks good on my end. I’ll post this over to our product team, thanks for flagging it!