What are Etsy seller fees?
Etsy takes a cut of every order, and it takes it in four or five separate pieces rather than one. There is a $0.20 listing fee, charged per item sold. A 6.5% transaction fee on the order total. Payment processing, which for a US seller on Etsy Payments is 3.0% plus a flat $0.25. Then two that only land sometimes: a 15% Offsite Ads fee on orders that arrived through an Etsy ad, and a regulatory operating fee that sellers in the UK, France, Italy, Spain and Turkey pay and US sellers do not.
Sell a $25 item with free shipping and Etsy keeps $2.83. You are paid $22.17. That is 11.3% of the sale, not the 6.5% most sellers carry in their heads, because the transaction fee is one line on a bill with four of them.
That gap is the whole reason this page exists. Sellers rarely doubt the total on their statement. They doubt where it came from. The Etsy Fee Calculator above takes what the item sold for and returns every fee as its own row, each one labelled with its rate and the exact amount that rate was applied to, followed by the payout. Add what the item cost you to make and profit, margin and ROI appear underneath. No account, no email, nothing installed.
How to use the Etsy Fee Calculator
- Type the item price — what one unit sold for, before shipping. The field starts at $25.00 so the shape of the answer is visible before you touch anything, and every row updates as you type. There is no Calculate button.
- Set the quantity if the buyer took more than one. This matters more than it looks: the $0.20 listing fee is charged per item sold, so a three-unit order pays $0.60. The row shows the multiplication.
- Enter the shipping the buyer paid. This is the field people skip, and then cannot reconcile their statement. Etsy's 6.5% is charged on the order total including shipping, so $25 plus $5 of shipping is charged on $30.
- Tick This sale came from an Offsite Ad only if that specific order came through one. Pick the tier — 15% under $10k in trailing sales, 12% above it — and the fee appears with its cap enforced.
- Read Your payout. That is what Etsy deposits. The rows above it show how it was built.
- Optionally add what one unit cost you and the shipping label you bought. Profit, margin and ROI appear. A sale below cost shows as a negative number instead of hiding from you.
Selling from outside the US? Scroll to the rates under the answer. All six are editable, and the block marks itself Custom so you know you are no longer reading the defaults.
The formula behind your Etsy payout
Every number on the page comes out of one chain of arithmetic. Here it is in full:
Order total = (item price × quantity) + shipping charged to buyer
Etsy fees = ($0.20 × quantity) + (6.5% × order total) + (3.0% × order total + $0.25) + Offsite Ads + regulatory fee
Payout = order total − Etsy fees
Profit = payout − (item cost × quantity) − shipping you paid
Work a real one. A $25 candle, one unit, and the buyer paid $5 shipping.
The order total is $30.00, and that is the number the percentages bite on. The listing fee is $0.20. The transaction fee is 6.5% of $30.00, which is $1.95 — not $1.63, which is what you get if you apply 6.5% to the item price alone and forget the shipping. Payment processing is 3.0% of $30.00 plus $0.25, so $1.15. Total fees: $3.30. Your payout is $26.70.
Now add the parts Etsy knows nothing about. The candle cost $8 in wax, wick and jar, and the shipping label cost you $4. Profit is $26.70 − $8.00 − $4.00 = $14.70. Margin is $14.70 ÷ $30.00 = 49.00%. ROI is $14.70 ÷ $8.00 = 183.75%. Same sale, three answers, and they are answers to different questions — margin tells you how much of each sale dollar you keep, ROI tells you how hard your materials budget worked.
One consequence of that fee base is worth sitting with: a $30 item with free shipping and a $25 item with $5 shipping are charged identically. Both are $3.30 in fees and $26.70 in payout. Free shipping is a listing decision, not a fee decision.
Rounding order matters. Etsy rounds each fee to the cent on its own and then adds them up. Plenty of calculators sum the raw amounts and round once at the end, which lands a cent off whenever a fee falls on a half-cent. This one rounds per fee, the way the bill is written.
What Etsy takes at common sale prices
Every row below is one unit, free shipping, no ads, US rates.
| Item sold for | Etsy fees | Your payout | Fees as % of sale |
|---|---|---|---|
| $10.00 | $1.40 | $8.60 | 14.00% |
| $15.00 | $1.88 | $13.12 | 12.53% |
| $20.00 | $2.35 | $17.65 | 11.75% |
| $25.00 | $2.83 | $22.17 | 11.32% |
| $35.00 | $3.78 | $31.22 | 10.80% |
| $50.00 | $5.20 | $44.80 | 10.40% |
| $75.00 | $7.58 | $67.42 | 10.11% |
| $100.00 | $9.95 | $90.05 | 9.95% |
| $250.00 | $24.20 | $225.80 | 9.68% |
The percentage falls as the price rises, and the reason is arithmetic rather than generosity. Two of the fees are flat: $0.20 to list and $0.25 on the payment. That $0.45 is 4.5% of a $10 sale and 0.45% of a $100 one. The rest is a straight 9.5% — 6.5% transaction plus 3.0% processing — that never moves.
So the whole table collapses to one line you can do in your head: Etsy fees ≈ 9.5% of the order total, plus 45 cents. Check it against the $100 row — 9.5% is $9.50, plus $0.45, is $9.95. Exactly right. That rule is also the reason $6 stickers and $8 charms are brutal to sell one at a time: the flat $0.45 eats 5 to 7% of the sale before the percentages start. Bundles and multi-quantity listings claw some of that back, though only partly, since the listing fee re-charges per item.
Offsite Ads and the $100 cap
Offsite Ads is the fee that ruins otherwise-correct spreadsheets. Etsy advertises listings on search engines and social platforms, and when an order arrives through one of those ads Etsy takes a percentage of that order. Shops under $10,000 in trailing-twelve-month sales pay 15% and can opt out. Shops above it pay 12% and cannot.
The important word is that. The fee attaches to a single order, not to your shop. Take the $25 candle again: normally $2.83 in fees and $22.17 to you. If it came from an ad at 15%, another $3.75 comes off, fees reach $6.58, and the payout drops to $18.42. That is 26% of the sale gone on one order and 11% on the next one.
Which is why the toggle here is off by default. Bake the ad fee into every order and you understate every payout you will ever calculate. Leave it out entirely and you get blindsided on the one order that had it. Modelling it as a switch is the only honest option.
Then there is the cap, which is $100 per order. On a $1,000 sale, 15% would be $150 — you are charged $100. Fees come to $195.45 and the payout is $804.55, and the Etsy fee calculator labels that row capped at $100 so you can see the clamp rather than wonder about the number. The cap starts biting above $666.67 at the 15% rate and above $833.33 at 12%. If you sell furniture, quilts or commissioned work, that ceiling is quietly the best thing in Etsy's fee schedule.
Edge cases and limitations
Things the Etsy fee calculator does on purpose:
- Quantity 2.5 becomes 2. You cannot sell half a mug. Quantity 0 or blank is treated as 1, so an order never multiplies itself to nothing.
- An item cost of zero shows ROI as a dash, not
Infinity. Dividing by a cost you did not pay has no meaning, so it declines to invent one. - Selling below cost shows a negative profit. Price a $25 item that cost you $40 and you get −$17.83 and the line You'd be selling at a loss. No error, no hiding. That is information.
- An empty item price shows nothing at all — no $0.00, no NaN. There is no order yet.
And the honest gaps. Sales tax and VAT that Etsy collects as a marketplace facilitator are not modelled, because Etsy remits them and they were never your money; putting them in a payout would inflate the exact number you are trying to trust. Currency conversion is not modelled either — Etsy does charge roughly 2.5% when your listing currency differs from your payout currency, and it is real money, but doing it properly needs a live exchange rate and would turn this page into a currency converter in disguise. If it applies to you, add it to the transaction fee percentage in the editable rates and read the total from there. Etsy Ads daily budgets and an Etsy Plus subscription are shop costs spread across many orders, not per-order fees, so they are out too.
Payment processing rates are country-specific, and the defaults here are the US ones. The page prints the date its rate table was recorded directly above the rates, so you can tell at a glance whether it predates a change Etsy announced. Most fee calculators never tell you that, which is precisely how stale numbers survive for years.
Related calculations
Pricing decisions rarely stop at one number. If you sell on more than one marketplace, the eBay fee calculator runs the same line-item breakdown against eBay's final value fee, and the PayPal fee calculator covers the custom orders and commissions a buyer pays you outside Etsy entirely.
Working from the cost side instead? The markup calculator prices up from what materials cost you, and the profit margin calculator checks the margin on any sale, Etsy or not. The ROI calculator answers the same question this page's ROI row does, for anything that is not an order.
And when you are deciding whether a product line is worth making at all, the break-even calculator tells you how many units have to move before the fixed costs are covered — which, with a $14.70 profit per candle, is a much shorter list of options than it feels like.
Frequently asked questions
Does Etsy charge a fee if my item never sells?
Yes, but not one this page computes. Etsy charges $0.20 to publish a listing and $0.20 again when it renews, roughly every four months, whether or not anything sold. That is a shop cost spread across time, not a charge against a specific order, so putting it in a payout number would be wrong. The $0.20 in the breakdown above is the one charged on the sale itself. If you want your true cost per sale, divide your monthly listing charges by the orders you actually shipped and add that separately.
Is free shipping cheaper in fees than charging for shipping?
No. It is identical. Etsy's 6.5% applies to the order total including the shipping the buyer paid, so a $30 item with free shipping and a $25 item with $5 shipping are both charged on $30 — $3.30 in fees, $26.70 to you, exactly the same. The choice is purely about how the listing looks to a buyer filtering for free shipping. The fee math gives you no reason to prefer either.
How do I price an item to hit a target profit?
Use the rule from the table: fees are about 9.5% of the order total plus $0.45. So to clear $20 profit on something that costs $6 to make with a $4 label, you need roughly ($20 + $6 + $4 + $0.45) ÷ 0.905, or about $33.65. Type $33.65 into the Etsy fee calculator and you will see fees of $3.65 and a payout of $30.00, landing profit at $20.00 on the nose. A reverse mode that does this in one step is on the list; for now the arithmetic above gets you within a cent on the first try.
Does quantity change anything besides the listing fee?
It changes everything, because it scales the order total that the percentages are charged on. Three $12 items is a $36 order: the listing fee is $0.60 — $0.20 × 3, shown as that multiplication — the transaction fee is $2.34, processing is $1.33, total fees are $4.27 and the payout is $31.73. Compare that to three separate $12 orders, which would each pay their own $0.25 flat processing fee. Multi-item orders are meaningfully better for you, and the Etsy fee calculator makes the difference visible.
Can I use this if I don't sell from the US?
Yes, with two edits. Payment processing differs by country, so replace the 3.0% and the $0.25 with the rates on your own Etsy fee page. Sellers in the UK, France, Italy, Spain and Turkey also pay a regulatory operating fee, which defaults to 0% here because US sellers pay none — set it and a new row appears in the breakdown. Everything else recalculates on the spot, and the rate block marks itself Custom so you never mistake your numbers for the defaults.
Do I have to sign up to use this?
No. There is no account, no email field and no trial clock. The math runs in your browser, so the price of a listing you have not published yet is not sent anywhere. That is worth saying plainly, because the pattern in this corner of the web is to hand out a fee calculator as bait for a $20-to-$40-a-month seller dashboard — arithmetic used as a lead magnet. Most sellers open those dashboards to answer exactly one question: what do I keep? That question is three multiplications and a subtraction. It should not cost a subscription, and it should not cost your email address. Microapp funds itself through membership rather than lock-in, and 10% of every dollar it earns goes to charity, off the top, audited quarterly.