What is a Stripe fee?
A Stripe fee is what the payment processor keeps from a charge before the money reaches your balance. It comes in two parts: a percentage of the amount, and a flat fee charged once per successful transaction. On a US domestic online card that's 2.9% + $0.30. Charge $100 and Stripe keeps $3.20, so $96.80 lands.
Most people stop at 2.9% + $0.30, which is where the trouble starts. That's one row on a schedule with seven. In-person payments through Terminal are 2.7% + $0.05. ACH Direct Debit is 0.8% with no fixed fee and a $5.00 ceiling. Klarna and the other buy-now-pay-later methods are 5.99% + $0.30. Stablecoins are 1.5% flat.
Then Stripe stacks three surcharges on top of the card rates. A manually keyed-in card number adds 0.5%. A card issued outside your country adds 1.5%. A charge that needs currency conversion adds 1%. They stack, and they apply to the percentage only — the fixed fee never moves. A US business taking an international card in another currency pays 5.4% + $0.30, which on $100 is $5.70 of fee and $94.30 landing.
So "what did Stripe take" is never one number, which is what the Stripe Fee Calculator is built around. On that same $100 charge the fee runs from $1.50 to $6.29 depending purely on the rail and the card. That's a four-fold spread hiding behind a single headline rate.
How to use the Stripe Fee Calculator
The Stripe Fee Calculator opens on $100.00 at the domestic online-card rate, so the shape of the answer is on screen before you type anything. Results update as you type — there's no button.
- Type the amount being charged.
- Pick the payment method if it isn't a plain online card. Choosing one fills every rate field for you.
- Tick any surcharges that apply — manually entered, international card, currency conversion. The applied-rate line shows the sum as arithmetic, so 2.9% + 1.5% + 1% = 5.4% is visible rather than implied.
- Read the net. That's what lands in your Stripe balance. Beside it is the effective fee percent — the total fee divided by the amount charged.
- Need an exact payout? Flip the toggle to I want to receive, type the figure you need to clear, and the calculator returns what to charge.
- On negotiated pricing or a non-US schedule, type your real percentage, fixed fee and cap straight into the fields. The method label switches to Custom and nothing else resets.
That's the whole thing. No account, no export gate, no fourteen days before it answers. The pattern this replaces is familiar: a fee calculator built as bait for an invoicing product, where the number is free but your email address is the price, and the useful half sits behind a plan. Working out a percentage and a subtraction shouldn't cost a subscription.
The formula behind a Stripe fee
rate = base rate + every ticked surcharge
percentage fee = rate × amount, rounded to the cent, then capped
total fee = percentage fee + fixed fee
net = amount − total fee
Three details in that order matter more than they look. The surcharges are added to the percentage, never to the fixed fee. The rounding happens before the cap, not after. And the cap applies to the percentage part alone, so a method with both a cap and a fixed fee still charges the fixed fee in full.
Here's a real charge, start to finish. You're a US business and you sell a $2,400 annual plan to a customer in Germany paying in euros with a German-issued card.
- Base rate = 2.9%
- International card = +1.5% · Currency conversion = +1%
- Applied rate = 2.9% + 1.5% + 1% = 5.4%
- Percentage fee = 5.4% of $2,400 = $129.60
- Fixed fee = $0.30
- Total fee = $129.90 · Net = $2,270.10 · Effective rate = 5.41%
The identical charge to a domestic customer costs $69.90 and nets $2,330.10. One customer's passport is a $60.00 difference on a single invoice. Run a thousand of those a year and the surcharges you never modelled are $60,000.
Stripe's US rates by payment method
Every rate below was read off Stripe's published US standard schedule on September 21, 2026, and the tool prints that date under the fee rows. The last two columns show the same $100 charge run through each rail.
| Payment method | Rate | Fee on $100 | You receive |
|---|---|---|---|
| Online card (domestic) | 2.9% + $0.30 | $3.20 | $96.80 |
| In-person / Terminal | 2.7% + $0.05 | $2.75 | $97.25 |
| Instant bank payments | 2.6% + $0.30 | $2.90 | $97.10 |
| ACH Direct Debit | 0.8%, capped at $5.00 | $0.80 | $99.20 |
| Klarna (buy now, pay later) | 5.99% + $0.30 | $6.29 | $93.71 |
| Pix / UPI | 1.8% + $0.30 | $2.10 | $97.90 |
| Stablecoins | 1.5% | $1.50 | $98.50 |
The three surcharges sit on top of the card rates and add together:
| Surcharge | Adds | Applies when |
|---|---|---|
| Manually entered card | +0.5% | The number was keyed in rather than presented |
| International card | +1.5% | The card was issued outside your country |
| Currency conversion | +1% | Stripe has to convert to settle the charge |
All three at once takes a card charge to 5.9% + $0.30 — $6.20 on $100, against the $3.20 the headline rate implies.
The ACH cap is the biggest lever on this page. The 0.8% stops growing at $5.00, which it reaches at exactly $625. Below that you pay the percentage: $0.80 on $100, $4.99 on $624. Above it the fee is flat forever. A $10,000 ACH transfer costs $5.00 rather than $80.00 — an effective rate of 0.05%. The size of the prize scales with the invoice: on a $9 subscription, moving from card to ACH saves 49 cents; on a $10,000 invoice it saves $285.30.
How to charge so you receive an exact amount
If you need to clear a specific figure, flip the direction toggle and enter the number you want to end up with. To net exactly $100.00 on a domestic card you charge $103.30. To net $500.00 you charge $515.24. To net $1,000.00 you charge $1,030.18.
The arithmetic is less obvious than it looks, because the fee is charged on the larger amount. Adding 2.9% to $100 gives $102.90 — which nets $99.62, thirty-eight cents short. The right approach divides your target by one minus the rate, then adds the fixed fee before dividing.
On a capped method even that formula breaks. Solve a $10,000 ACH target with the standard gross-up and you get $10,080.65, when the correct answer is $10,005.00 — a $75.65 error on the headline output, because above $625 the fee has stopped growing and the formula doesn't know it. The Stripe Fee Calculator picks the right branch and then forward-checks itself, recomputing the fee on its own answer to confirm the net lands on your target to the cent.
Where the fee number goes wrong
Small payments lose far more than the headline rate. The $0.30 is three tenths of a percent on $100 and three percent on $10. A $10 card charge costs $0.59 — an effective 5.90%, double the advertised rate. A $5 charge costs $0.45, or 9.00%. Bundling five $10 items into one $50 charge costs $1.75 instead of $2.95, purely because you paid the fixed fee once instead of five times.
The fee can exceed the payment. Charge $0.25 on a card and the fee is $0.31, so you finish six cents down. Break-even against the fixed fee alone is $0.31. This calculator shows that as a negative number rather than clamping it to zero — a tip jar or a verification hold really can cost you money, and rounding it away would hide the one thing worth knowing.
Refunds don't return the fee. Issuing the refund is free, but Stripe keeps the original charge's fee. A refunded $100 card payment still cost you $3.20, and partial refunds work the same way. A store with a 10% return rate is paying full processing on every returned item, which is an argument for treating fee cost as a percentage of gross volume rather than of net revenue.
This page prices the transaction, not the account. Disputes are $15.00 whether or not you counter. Instant Payouts are 1.5% with a 50-cent minimum. Invoicing adds 0.4% per paid invoice on the starter plan, Billing 0.7% of volume, and Radar starts at $0.05 per screened transaction. Currency conversion is modelled here as the 1% Stripe charges, but the exchange-rate spread itself is separate and isn't included — that honestly needs a live rate feed, and a calculator that guesses at exchange rates is worse than one that tells you it doesn't do them.
Related calculations
Once you know the fee, the next question is usually whether the sale was worth making. The profit margin calculator takes your net and your cost and returns margin and markup, and the break-even calculator tells you how many of those sales cover your fixed costs.
If you're comparing processors before you commit, the PayPal fee calculator runs the same amount through a different schedule, and the eBay fee calculator covers marketplace sellers, where the final value fee is charged on shipping too.
For pricing work upstream of all of this, the markup calculator sets a sale price from a target margin, and the invoice generator produces the document you send once the number is settled.
Frequently asked questions
How much is the Stripe fee on $100?
On a domestic online card, $3.20 — $2.90 of percentage plus the $0.30 fixed fee — and $96.80 lands. If that card was issued abroad and needed currency conversion, the rate is 5.4%, the fee is $5.70, and $94.30 lands. Taken in person on a Terminal reader it's $2.75; by ACH it's $0.80. The answer depends on the rail, which is why the method and the surcharges are controls here rather than assumptions.
Does Stripe charge a monthly fee?
Not on standard pricing. The per-transaction fee is the whole cost for a basic integration, which is why a calculator that gets the transaction right gets most of your bill right. Add-on products change that — Billing, Invoicing and Radar each layer their own percentage or per-event charge on top — but those are opt-in and priced separately, so they're deliberately not folded into this number.
Why is my payout smaller than the calculator says?
Three usual causes. The card was issued abroad or needed conversion, so your real rate was 4.4% or 5.4% rather than 2.9%. The payout bundles several charges, each of which paid its own $0.30. Or an account-level charge landed in the same window — a $15.00 dispute, or an Instant Payout's 1.5%. Tick the surcharges that match the actual card and the number usually reconciles.
How do I pass the Stripe fee on to the customer?
Switch the toggle to "I want to receive" and enter the amount you want to clear. To end up with $100.00 on a domestic card you charge $103.30. Don't just add 2.9% — $102.90 nets $99.62, because the fee is charged on the larger figure. Check your local rules first, though: surcharging is regulated in several US states and prohibited outright in some countries.
Is ACH cheaper than a card?
On fee alone, always — 0.8% with no fixed fee beats 2.9% + $0.30 at every amount, and the gap widens past $625 where the $5.00 cap binds. A $10,000 invoice costs $5.00 by ACH against $290.30 on a card. What ACH costs you instead is speed and certainty: bank debits take days to settle and can be returned after the fact, where a card authorises immediately. Run both through the Stripe Fee Calculator and the dollar saving is easy to weigh against that.
Are these rates current?
The date the rate table was recorded is printed under the fee rows, so you can tell at a glance whether it predates a schedule change — the rates in the Stripe Fee Calculator were read on September 21, 2026. That matters more than it should, because a lot of pages ranking for this search carry a date two years stale or no date at all. Every rate is editable regardless: on negotiated pricing, or reading one of the other country schedules, type your real percentage, fixed fee and cap and everything recalculates.
Is the Stripe Fee Calculator free to use?
Yes, and there's nothing to sign up for. It runs in your browser — no amount you type is sent anywhere. Microapp gives 10% of every dollar it earns to charity, off the top and audited quarterly, which is a better reason to be here than a trial countdown.