What an Etsy sale actually nets you

A sale at $12.99 does not put $12.99 in your account. A US seller of a digital file on Etsy pays three charges on almost every order and a fourth on some, and they are published on different pages, which makes them easy to add up wrong.

The figures here are Etsy's own, for sellers based in the United States, as published in its Fees & Payments Policy and Help Center when they were read on 20 September 2026. Fees change. Check them against Etsy's current fee page before you rely on any number below.

The charges on a digital sale

• Listing renewal: $0.20 per sale. A listing costs $0.20 and lasts four months. A digital listing with more than one in stock renews automatically each time it sells, and each renewal costs another $0.20.
• Transaction fee: 6.5% of the price the buyer sees. For US sellers it is not charged on sales tax.
• Payment processing: 3% + $0.25 per order. This one is charged on the total the buyer pays, sales tax included, so on a taxed order it is slightly more than the tables below show.
• Offsite Ads: 15% or 12%, on some orders only. It applies when Etsy credits the order to one of its own ads on another site: the buyer clicked an ad Etsy paid for and bought within 30 days. The rate is 15% while your shop has never made $10,000 in a 365-day period, and at that level you can opt out. Once the shop reaches $10,000 the rate drops to 12% and the programme becomes compulsory for the life of the shop. The fee is capped at $100 per order.

US sellers pay no Regulatory Operating Fee. A 2.5% currency conversion fee applies if your listings are priced in a different currency from your payment account.

Worked through

Without an Offsite Ads fee, the arithmetic for one order is:

fees = price × 9.5% + $0.45

net = price − fees

The 9.5% is the transaction fee plus the percentage part of processing. The $0.45 is the fixed part of processing plus the renewal.

The same four orders when Etsy charges its 15% Offsite Ads fee on them:

Each total is rounded to the cent once, at the end.

Two things stand out. The fixed $0.45 weighs most on cheap files: it is 9% of a $4.99 sale and about 1% of a $39.99 one. And from $9.99 up, an order that carries the Offsite Ads fee costs more than twice as much in fees as one that does not.

What these figures leave out

• Sales tax. Processing is charged on it; the transaction fee is not. The tables assume an order with no tax on it.
• Refunds. Whether any fee comes back when you refund an order is set by Etsy's refund rules, which were not checked for this article. Look them up before you assume either way.
• Share & Save. If a buyer reaches your shop through your own trackable Share & Save link and orders within 30 days, Etsy credits back 4% of the order, unless their last click was on an Offsite Ad.
• Your own costs. Ads you pay for yourself, software, stock assets and the hours the file took are all outside Etsy's fees.
• Other countries. Payment processing is 4% + £0.20 in the UK, 4% + €0.30 in the EU, 3% + C$0.25 in Canada and 3% + A$0.25 in Australia. Some countries add a Regulatory Operating Fee: 0.48% in the UK, 1.14% in France, 0.80% in Italy, 0.88% in Spain and 0.50% in Canada, among others.

Keeping it straight

The habit that helps is keeping each storefront's rates in one place, with the date you checked them and a link to the page you checked them on, and working every order out from there rather than from memory. When a fee changes, you change one number. That is what the fee row in Lunith Commerce OS is for; a spreadsheet tab holding the same five numbers does the same job.