What are eBay seller fees?
eBay seller fees are what the marketplace keeps from a completed sale. For a standard US listing there are two of them, plus a third if you advertised.
The final value fee is the big one — a percentage of the total the buyer paid, which in most categories is 13.25%. The word "total" is doing quiet work there. It includes the shipping the buyer paid, not just the item price.
The per-order fee is flat: $0.40 on orders above $10, and $0.30 on orders of $10 or less. It's charged once per order, however many items the buyer bought.
The Promoted Listings fee exists only if you ran ads on the listing. You pick the ad rate, and eBay applies it to the same base as the final value fee.
That's the whole list for a standard domestic sale. Everything else on a payout statement — the shipping label you bought, the sales tax eBay collected, a refund you issued — is either your own cost or money that was never yours to begin with.
Sell a $100 item with free shipping and eBay keeps $13.65. You get $86.35. That gap is the reason this page exists: plenty of sellers can recite the 13.25% from memory and still can't say what actually lands in the bank.
How to use the eBay Fee Calculator
The eBay Fee Calculator is six fields, no account, no setup. The page opens on a $25.00 sale so you can see the shape of the answer before you type anything.
- Enter the sale price — what the item sold for, before shipping.
- Add the shipping charged to the buyer, if any. This field matters more than most sellers expect, because eBay's percentage fee is charged on it too.
- Check the final value fee percent. It starts at 13.25%, the standard US rate. Type your own if your category differs — the category label switches to Custom and nothing else on the page resets.
- If you ran ads, enter your Promoted Listings ad rate. It's charged on the same base as the final value fee.
- Read the payout. The rows above it show every fee that produced it, each one labelled with the rate it came from.
- Optionally add what you paid for the item and the shipping label you bought. Profit, margin, and ROI appear underneath.
Results update as you type. A sale below cost shows as a negative number instead of hiding — selling at a loss is a result, not an error. Seller-analytics platforms charge $30 to $60 a month for dashboards that most sellers open to answer this exact question. It's two multiplications and a subtraction. It shouldn't cost a subscription, and it shouldn't cost your email address.
The formula behind your eBay payout
fee base = sale price + shipping charged to buyer
final value fee = 13.25% × fee base
per-order fee = $0.40, or $0.30 when the fee base is $10 or less
payout = fee base − final value fee − per-order fee − ad fee
The fee base is the line everyone gets wrong. eBay charges its percentage on the whole amount the buyer paid, so a $100 item with $10 of shipping is charged on $110, not on $100. Sellers who price shipping separately to look cheaper in search results still pay the fee on it.
Here's a full sale, start to finish. You sell a comic for $45 and charge the buyer $6.50 for shipping. You paid $15 for the comic and $12 for the label.
- Fee base = $45.00 + $6.50 = $51.50
- Final value fee = 13.25% of $51.50 = $6.82
- Per-order fee = $0.40 (the base is above $10)
- Total eBay fees = $7.22
- Payout = $51.50 − $7.22 = $44.28
- Profit = $44.28 − $15.00 item − $12.00 label = $17.28
- Margin = $17.28 ÷ $51.50 = 33.55% · ROI = $17.28 ÷ $15.00 = 115.20%
One detail that sounds pedantic right up until your invoice disagrees: each fee is rounded to the cent on its own, and only then are they added together. eBay bills that way. Calculators that sum the raw decimals and round once at the end come out a cent off whenever two fees land on a half-cent — enough to make you think you've been overcharged. The eBay Fee Calculator rounds per fee, so the total matches the invoice.
What eBay takes at common sale prices
Standard 13.25% rate, free shipping, no ads. The last column is the fee total as a share of the sale — the number that actually tells you how expensive the sale was.
| Sale price | Final value fee | Per-order fee | Total fees | Payout | Effective rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $5.00 | $0.66 | $0.30 | $0.96 | $4.04 | 19.20% |
| $10.00 | $1.33 | $0.30 | $1.63 | $8.37 | 16.30% |
| $15.00 | $1.99 | $0.40 | $2.39 | $12.61 | 15.93% |
| $25.00 | $3.31 | $0.40 | $3.71 | $21.29 | 14.84% |
| $50.00 | $6.63 | $0.40 | $7.03 | $42.97 | 14.06% |
| $75.00 | $9.94 | $0.40 | $10.34 | $64.66 | 13.79% |
| $100.00 | $13.25 | $0.40 | $13.65 | $86.35 | 13.65% |
| $200.00 | $26.50 | $0.40 | $26.90 | $173.10 | 13.45% |
| $500.00 | $66.25 | $0.40 | $66.65 | $433.35 | 13.33% |
| $1,000.00 | $132.50 | $0.40 | $132.90 | $867.10 | 13.29% |
Read the last column top to bottom and the real lesson of eBay's fee structure shows up. The effective rate falls from 19.20% on a $5 sale to 13.29% on a $1,000 sale, and the percentage never changed — it's 13.25% in every row. The whole slide comes from that flat per-order fee getting spread over a bigger number.
Cheap items are expensive to sell. On a $5 sale, the $0.30 flat fee is 6% of the price on its own. If you're clearing out small stock, bundling four $5 items into one $20 order pays one per-order fee instead of four, which is $0.90 you keep for doing nothing but combining the shipment.
The $10.01 trap. Orders of $10.00 or less pay the reduced $0.30 per-order fee. One cent over and it jumps to $0.40. A $10.00 sale pays $8.37 into your account; a $10.01 sale pays $8.28. You charged a penny more and took home nine cents less.
What Promoted Listings adds
The ad fee is charged on the same base as the final value fee, so it stacks straight on top. Here's a $60 sale at a few common ad rates.
| Ad rate | Ad fee | Total fees | Payout |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0% (not promoted) | $0.00 | $8.35 | $51.65 |
| 2% | $1.20 | $9.55 | $50.45 |
| 5% | $3.00 | $11.35 | $48.65 |
| 10% | $6.00 | $14.35 | $45.65 |
| 15% | $9.00 | $17.35 | $42.65 |
A 10% ad rate isn't a 10% haircut on your profit — it's a 10% haircut on the sale price, which on a thin-margin item can be most of what you were going to keep. Run the ad rate through the eBay Fee Calculator with your item cost filled in before you set it, not after.
Edge cases and limitations
A few things the eBay Fee Calculator deliberately leaves out, and what to do about each.
Sales tax isn't included. eBay collects and remits marketplace facilitator tax in every US state that requires it. That money passes through your listing, but it was never yours, and eBay doesn't charge its final value fee on it. Including it would inflate both the fee and the total by an amount you never see.
Store subscriptions and international sales aren't presets. Store subscribers get discounted rates in many categories, and international sales carry an extra fee. A preset with the wrong number is worse than no preset, so instead every rate on the page is editable. Look up the effective percentage for your situation, type it into the fee field, and every row below is correct for you.
The currency labels read in dollars. eBay UK restructured its private-seller fees entirely, and other sites differ again. The arithmetic is identical, so UK and AU sellers can enter their own rate and read the amounts as their own currency.
Rates drift. eBay revises its schedule periodically. The eBay Fee Calculator prints the date its built-in rate table was recorded directly under the fee rows, so you can tell at a glance whether it predates a change — most fee calculators never tell you this, which is how a stale 12.9% quietly becomes someone's budget for a year.
Related calculations
Once you know your payout, the next questions are usually about the business behind it.
The profit margin calculator works backwards from the margin you want to the price you need to list at — useful when the eBay fee is a known cost and you're solving for the sticker. If you're sourcing inventory and want to know what a given buy price has to sell for, the markup calculator handles that side. The ROI calculator compares returns across purchases when your money could go into several lots at once.
For the rest of the ledger, the break-even calculator tells you how many units cover your fixed costs, and the sales tax calculator is there for the sales eBay doesn't collect on your behalf.
All of them are free and none of them ask who you are. Microapp gives 10% of every dollar it earns to charity, off the top, audited quarterly.
Frequently asked questions
How much does eBay take from a $100 sale?
$13.65 in most categories, leaving you $86.35. That's 13.25% of $100, which is $13.25, plus the $0.40 per-order fee. Add $10 of buyer-paid shipping and the fee base becomes $110, fees become $14.98, and the payout becomes $95.02.
Does eBay charge a fee on the shipping the buyer paid?
Yes, and this surprises more sellers than any other line on the invoice. The final value fee applies to the total amount of the sale, and shipping the buyer paid is part of that total. Only the label you buy is outside the fee — that's your cost, and it comes out of profit rather than payout.
Should I offer free shipping or charge the buyer separately?
The fees are identical, so decide it on visibility instead. A $110 item with free shipping and a $100 item with $10 shipping both get charged on $110, both cost $14.98 in fees, and both pay out $95.02. The difference is that buyers filtering for free shipping will only ever see one of them.
Is the payout the same as my profit?
No, and that's where most sellers get caught. The payout is what eBay sends you. Profit is the payout minus what you paid for the item and minus the shipping label you bought — neither of which eBay knows anything about. Enter your item cost and the profit, margin, and ROI rows appear.
Why is my real eBay invoice a cent different from an estimate?
Almost always rounding order. eBay rounds each fee to the cent on its own and then adds them up; calculators that sum first and round once at the end disagree whenever two fees sit on a half-cent. If your invoice is off by more than a cent or two, look instead for a different category rate, an international sale, or a below-standard seller surcharge.
Does this include sales tax?
Deliberately not. eBay collects and remits it on your behalf, doesn't charge its final value fee on it, and never deposits it in your account. If you're reconciling a payout statement and the totals there look higher, collected tax is usually the reason.
What if my category charges a different rate?
Type the real rate into the final value fee field. The category label switches to Custom, your other numbers stay exactly where they were, and the breakdown recalculates on the spot. eBay's published fee page is linked under the fee rows so you can check your category without leaving the tab.