Etsy Fee Calculator

What Etsy takes on a sale

Etsy doesn't charge one fee, it charges three or four, and they stack. On a US order, here is what comes off:

• Listing fee: $0.20 every time you publish an item, and again every four months while auto-renew is on. It is charged whether the item sells or not.
• Transaction fee: 6.5% of the order total, the item price plus the shipping and gift-wrapping you charge.
• Payment processing: 3% + $0.25 per order in the US, charged on the full amount the buyer pays.
• Offsite ads: 15% if the buyer clicked an Etsy ad off-site and bought within 30 days.

Those rates come straight from Etsy's Fees & Payments Policy, and the calculator above applies each one to your numbers. The part most sellers miss is that the transaction and processing fees are charged on shipping too, so "free" shipping you bake into the price still gets taxed by Etsy. For US sellers the 6.5% does not apply to sales tax, but the payment processing fee does. The listing fee is per item, so a listing with variations that sells five units costs $0.20 × 5.

It's also worth knowing where each fee lands. The listing fee hits your account the moment you publish, the transaction and processing fees are deducted as the sale clears, and offsite ads are billed separately at the end of the month. Nothing is invoiced to you directly, which is why sellers often only notice the true cost when they add up a month of payouts.

Worked example: a $35 item with $5 shipping

Use the calculator's default numbers: a $35 item and $5 shipping, so the buyer pays $40.

• Listing fee: $0.20
• Transaction fee (6.5% × $40): $2.60
• Payment processing (3% × $40 + $0.25): $1.45
• Total Etsy fees: $4.25

Now subtract what the order cost you. If the item cost $12 and shipping cost you $4.50, your costs are $16.50. Your net is $40 − $4.25 − $16.50 = $19.25, a 48.1% margin before income tax. Etsy's cut is $4.25 out of a $40 order, 10.6%, even though the headline transaction fee is only 6.5%. That gap between the advertised rate and the real rate is exactly why sellers get surprised at payout time.

When an offsite ad turns a profit into a loss

Offsite ads are the fee that catches people out. Take the same $40 order, but the buyer clicked an Etsy ad on Google or Instagram first, so Etsy adds 15% of the order total, $6.00 on top of the $4.25 you already owed. Fees jump to $10.25 and your net falls from $19.25 to $13.25. The margin drops from 48% to 33%.

On a thinner product it gets worse. Same $40 order, but your item cost $20 and shipping cost you $5, so costs are $25. With offsite ads your net is $40 − $10.25 − $25 = $4.75, a 12% margin. One return or one price cut and that order is break-even or underwater. Sellers under $10,000 in annual sales can switch offsite ads off entirely in Shop Manager; above that threshold the 12% version is mandatory and cannot be turned off.

Etsy fees at a glance

Every fee this calculator applies, what it is charged on, and the US rate:

These are US Etsy Payments rates. Processing changes by country, a UK seller pays 4% + £0.20 instead of 3% + $0.25, and other markets differ again. Confirm your own rate in the Etsy payment-processing table before you price.

How to price so you don't lose money

The cleanest way to price is to work backwards from your costs. Strip out the fixed fees first: on a single-item order that's $0.20 listing + $0.25 processing = $0.45. The variable fees are about 9.5% of the order (6.5% transaction + 3% processing). So for a target price P and costs C, profit is roughly P − 0.095P − $0.45 − C.

To break even, P must be at least (C + $0.45) ÷ 0.905. With $16.50 in costs that's (16.50 + 0.45) ÷ 0.905 = $18.73. Sell below that and you are paying Etsy for the privilege of working. To hold a 40% margin you want profit to be 40% of the order, which pushes the required price to about $30.60. Feed your own numbers into the calculator above, it runs this arithmetic for every input, including quantity.

The parts sellers miss: quantity, tax and digital items

Three details move the numbers more than people expect. First, the listing fee is per unit sold: a listing with five variations that sells all five costs $0.20 × 5. Second, US sellers don't pay the 6.5% transaction fee on sales tax, but they do pay it on shipping and gift wrap, and processing applies to the tax as well. Third, digital products follow the same schedule, 6.5% transaction plus 3% + $0.25 processing, even though there's no shipping to subtract and no shipping cost to claim.

One thing the calculator can't do for you: this profit is before income tax. In the US, self-employment tax of 15.3% applies to net earnings, so $19.25 profit on that $35 item is not $19.25 in your pocket. The IRS self-employed tax center explains what you'll owe, and Etsy's Fee Basics article is the plain-English version of the fee schedule.

Etsy vs eBay, Poshmark and Mercari: which takes less?

If you're deciding where to list, the fee stack matters more than the headline rate. On a $40 order with no sales tax, here's roughly what each platform keeps:

Etsy lands in the middle: cheaper than eBay and Poshmark on a mid-priced item, but not as cheap as Depop's post-2024 schedule. The catch is that Etsy's fees scale with shipping, so the more you charge for postage, the more you hand over, a $40 item with $10 shipping pays $4.90 in Etsy fees instead of $4.25. Poshmark, by contrast, only charges on the item price, so heavy items are relatively cheaper to move there even at a 20% headline rate.