Etsy Fees Explained: Every Fee From Listing to Deposit

You made a $35 sale on Etsy, and somehow $31 and change landed in your account. Where did the rest go? If you’ve ever squinted at your payment account trying to reverse-engineer the deductions, you’re not alone — Etsy’s fees are individually small, numerous, and scattered across several policy pages.

That scattering is the real problem. Most sellers know about the 20-cent listing fee and have a vague sense of “the transaction fee,” but the full stack has seven-plus distinct charges, and the ones you forget are precisely the ones that quietly erase your margin.

This guide walks through every fee in Etsy’s published Fees & Payments Policy, follows one $30 product sale from list price to deposited amount, and flags the fees sellers most often leave out of their pricing. Every number comes from Etsy’s official policy and help pages consulted during research — and since Etsy adjusts fees periodically, always confirm against the current fee policy before setting prices.

Disclosure: some links on Craft Seller Compass may be affiliate links. This never changes rankings or the price you pay — see our affiliate disclosure for details.

How to think about it

Three principles make Etsy’s fee stack much easier to reason about.

1. Fees stack on the same dollars

Etsy’s transaction fee and payment processing fee both apply to your item price and your shipping charge. An Offsite Ads fee, when it applies, hits that same total again. So the question is never “what does this one fee cost?” — it’s “what percentage of the buyer’s total leaves before it reaches me?” For a typical US seller, the baseline answer is around 10–11%, before any advertising fees.

2. Some fees are per-listing, some per-order, some per-month

The $0.20 listing fee is charged per listing and per renewal — it accrues even when nothing sells. Transaction and processing fees are per-order — they scale with revenue. Subscriptions like Etsy Plus are per-month. Mixing these up is why so many pricing spreadsheets are wrong: a slow month still burns listing renewals, and a great month multiplies every percentage fee.

3. Percentages hit the buyer’s total, not your profit

A 6.5% transaction fee sounds small until you remember your profit margin might be 30%. If you net $9 on a $30 sale, the roughly $3.30 of baseline Etsy fees on a $35 order (item plus shipping) is more than a third of your actual profit. Fees must be priced in from the start — as a cost of goods, not an afterthought. Our print-on-demand profit margins guide shows the same principle applied to POD economics.

Every Etsy fee at a glance

Rates below are for a US seller with a US bank account, from Etsy’s Fees & Payments Policy and help center at the time of research. Non-US sellers pay different payment processing rates and may owe regulatory operating fees — check the policy for your country.

Now let’s take each one apart.

Listing fees: $0.20, more often than you think

Publishing a listing costs $0.20, and the listing stays live for four months or until it sells. The fee is charged whether or not the item ever sells. Three mechanics catch sellers out, all documented in the fee policy:

• Auto-renewal. By default, listings renew automatically every four months at $0.20 each. A 200-listing shop on autopilot spends about $120 a year on renewals alone.
• Multi-quantity relisting. If you list 10 units of the same item, you pay $0.20 up front — then another $0.20 each time a unit sells and the listing auto-renews. Selling all 10 costs $2.00 in listing fees, not $0.20.
• Editing is free; renewing is not. You can update photos, tags, and prices without charge. Only publishing and renewing trigger the fee.

For digital sellers with large catalogs — printables, SVGs, templates — renewal drip is a real line item; our digital products on Etsy toolkit covers how high-volume shops manage it.

Transaction fee: 6.5% of more than you’d expect

When an item sells, Etsy charges 6.5% — not just on the item price, but on the price displayed plus shipping plus gift wrap, per the fee policy. Two details matter:

• Shipping is not a loophole. Pricing a mug at $10 with $20 shipping still incurs 6.5% on the full $30. (Etsy’s search also tends to favor reasonable shipping prices, so inflated shipping hurts twice.)
• Personalization counts. If you charge extra for personalization, that amount is added to the listing price and takes the same 6.5%.

One piece of good news for US sellers: the transaction fee does not apply to sales tax, which Etsy collects and remits on your behalf for US orders.

Payment processing: 3% + $0.25 per order

Every order paid through Etsy Payments — effectively all orders, since Etsy Payments is mandatory where available — carries a payment processing fee. For US-based bank accounts it’s 3% + $0.25 at the time of research; the rate varies by country and is listed in the Etsy Payments Policy.

The commonly missed detail: per the payments policy, this fee is assessed on the gross order amount, including shipping and sales tax. Even though Etsy collects the tax and sends it to the state, you pay processing on the tax dollars passing through. It’s small per order — pennies — but it means the processing fee on a taxed order is slightly higher than 3% + $0.25 of what you actually receive.

Refund mechanics are also worth knowing: if you refund a buyer, the processing fee is recalculated on the adjusted amount rather than fully returned in every case — the policy spells out how the difference is applied.

Offsite Ads: the fee you can’t fully control

Etsy runs ads for your listings on external platforms — search engines, social networks — at its own expense. If a buyer clicks one of those ads and orders from your shop within 30 days, you pay an Offsite Ads fee on that order:

• 15% if your shop has always made under $10,000 USD in sales in any consecutive 365-day period. At this level you’re enrolled automatically but may opt out.
• 12% once your shop has ever crossed $10,000 in a 365-day period. Participation then becomes mandatory for the lifetime of your shop, per Etsy’s help center — even if sales later fall back below the threshold.
• The fee applies to the order total (item + shipping + gift wrap) and is capped at $100 per order.

You can’t choose which orders come through Offsite Ads, so treat it statistically: if you’re enrolled, some percentage of orders will carry an extra 12–15% fee. Established shops often see a meaningful minority of orders attributed. Build a blended allowance into your prices — for example, if roughly 1 in 10 orders is attributed at 15%, that’s an average of 1.5% across all orders.

Currency conversion: the quiet 2.5%

If you list items in a currency different from your payment account’s currency, Etsy charges a 2.5% currency conversion fee on the sale amount to move funds into your account. The fix is stated in the policy itself: list in the same currency as your payment account. Buyers still see prices in their own currency automatically. US sellers listing in USD with a US bank account never pay this — but international sellers listing in USD to look “standard” often do, without realizing it.

Shipping label fees: variable, not really a “fee”

Etsy sells shipping labels (USPS and others for US sellers) at rates that depend on carrier, origin, destination, weight, and dimensions. Signature confirmation and insurance cost extra. This is less a fee than a purchase — often at rates better than walk-up post office prices — but it’s deducted from your payment account like everything else, which is why a busy shipping day can make your balance look alarming. Return labels, where offered, are charged after the returned package is delivered.

Subscriptions: Etsy Plus and Pattern

Two optional monthly charges exist in the fee policy:

• Etsy Plus — $10/month. Includes 15 listing credits (about $3 of value), $5 in Etsy Ads credit, and extra customization and restock-notification tools. It does not reduce the transaction, processing, or Offsite Ads percentages. Whether the roughly $2 of net cost after credits is worth it depends entirely on whether you’d use the ad credit and features anyway.
• Pattern — $15/month after a 30-day trial. A separate standalone website built from your Etsy inventory. Pattern-only listings skip listing fees and don’t expire. If you’re considering Pattern, it’s worth first reading our comparison of Etsy vs Shopify for handmade sellers — for a similar monthly cost, a full ecommerce platform may serve you better.

Also in the optional column: Etsy Ads, Etsy’s on-platform advertising, where you set a daily budget with a minimum determined by Etsy. Unlike Offsite Ads, you control the spend entirely.

Worked example: one $30 sale, list price to deposit

Let’s follow a single order through the whole stack. Setup: US seller, US buyer, $30 handmade item, $5 shipping charge, paid through Etsy Payments. No sales tax in this first pass, no Offsite Ads attribution. Rates as published at the time of research.

Buyer pays: $35.00

Deposited to you: $31.22 — Etsy’s cut is about 10.8% of the buyer’s total.

From that $31.22 you still pay for postage (roughly the $5 you collected, if you priced it accurately), materials, and your time. If your materials cost $8 and actual postage is $5, you’ve netted about $18.22 before labor.

Now the two variations that change everything:

With sales tax. Say the buyer’s state adds 8% tax, making their charge $37.80. Etsy remits the $2.80 of tax, and the transaction fee still applies to $35.00 only — but payment processing is now 3% × $37.80 + $0.25 = $1.38. Your fees rise 8 cents to $3.86. Trivial on one order; a real number across a thousand.

With an Offsite Ads attribution (15% tier). Add 15% × $35.00 = $5.25. Total fees jump to $9.03 — nearly 26% of the buyer’s payment — and your deposit falls to $25.97. On the same $8 materials and $5 postage, your pre-labor profit just dropped from about $18 to about $13. This is why sellers who ignore Offsite Ads in their pricing get blindsided.

The fees sellers most often forget in pricing

Based on the structure of the published policy, these are the charges most likely to be missing from a seller’s pricing spreadsheet:

1. Offsite Ads. The single most damaging omission — 12–15% on orders you can’t predict. Price with a blended allowance (attribution rate × fee rate) rather than pretending it won’t happen.
2. Fees on shipping. Both the 6.5% transaction fee and 3% processing apply to your shipping charge. If you charge $5 for shipping that costs you $5, you lose roughly 48 cents on shipping alone with every order.
3. Auto-renewal drip. $0.20 × active listings × three renewals a year, plus a renewal after every sale of multi-quantity listings. Small shops barely notice; 500-listing shops pay hundreds annually.
4. Processing on sales tax. The 3% applies to the tax-inclusive total per the payments policy — a few cents per order you never see.
5. The $0.25 per-order flat fee. On a $5 digital download, $0.25 is 5% by itself. Flat fees punish low prices — bundle cheap items or raise prices to compensate.
6. Currency conversion (international sellers). 2.5% for listing in a currency that doesn’t match your payment account — entirely avoidable.
7. Refund asymmetry. Some fees aren’t fully returned when you refund an order, per the policy’s refund provisions — factor a small allowance if your category sees returns.

Pricing checklist

Run every product through this before you set a price:

• Confirmed current fee rates against Etsy’s Fees & Payments Policy (they change — verify, don’t assume)
• Added 6.5% transaction fee on item + shipping, not item alone
• Added payment processing for your country (US: 3% + $0.25) on the full order total
• Added $0.20 listing/renewal cost per expected sale (not per listing published)
• Added a blended Offsite Ads allowance (your estimated attribution rate × 12–15%)
• Checked the flat $0.25 doesn’t crush margin on low-priced items
• Listing currency matches payment account currency (or 2.5% is priced in)
• Actual postage and packaging costs covered by the shipping charge after the fees on that charge
• Materials, labor, and profit target still intact after all of the above — if not, the price is too low

A workable rule of thumb from the math above: for US sellers, set aside 11% of the buyer’s total plus $0.45 per order as baseline Etsy costs, then add your Offsite Ads allowance on top.

Frequently asked questions

How much does Etsy take from a $100 sale?

For a US seller with no Offsite Ads attribution: 6.5% transaction ($6.50) + 3% + $0.25 processing ($3.25) + $0.20 renewal = about $9.95, or roughly 10%, at the rates published at the time of research. If the order came through an Offsite Ad, add $12–$15 more. Shipping charges, if any, would also be fee’d at 9.5% combined.

Does Etsy charge fees if nothing sells?

Yes — the $0.20 listing fee is charged when you publish or renew, regardless of whether the item sells, and renewals recur every four months by default. Optional subscriptions (Etsy Plus, Pattern) also bill monthly regardless of sales. Everything else — transaction, processing, Offsite Ads — only applies when you make a sale.

Are Etsy fees cheaper than Shopify’s?

They’re different shapes: Etsy has no required monthly cost but takes roughly 10–11%+ of every sale; Shopify charges a monthly subscription with lower per-sale processing. Below several hundred dollars of monthly revenue Etsy is usually cheaper; above that, Shopify wins on raw fees but provides no marketplace traffic. We run the full side-by-side math in Etsy vs Shopify for handmade sellers.

Can I opt out of Etsy’s Offsite Ads fee?

Only while your shop has always made under $10,000 USD in sales in any consecutive 365-day period — under that threshold, enrollment is automatic but you can opt out of the 15% fee. Once your shop crosses $10,000, Etsy’s help center states participation is required for the lifetime of your shop at the discounted 12% rate, capped at $100 per attributed order.

Do Etsy fees come out before or after my deposit?

Before. Fees are deducted from your payment account as they occur — the amount that reaches your bank is already net of listing, transaction, processing, and any advertising fees. Your monthly statement in Shop Manager itemizes every deduction, which is the best way to audit what you’re actually paying.

The bottom line

Etsy’s fee stack isn’t hidden — it’s just distributed. Pull the pieces together, as in the fee table and the $30 worked example above, and the picture is simple: plan on roughly 11% plus $0.45 per order as your baseline, add a realistic Offsite Ads allowance, and price your shipping to survive the fees applied to it.

Get those numbers into your pricing before you list, not after your first confusing deposit. If you’re just setting up, our start an Etsy shop checklist sequences the whole process — and when you’re ready to weigh the marketplace against your own store, the Etsy vs Shopify comparison picks up exactly where this guide leaves off. And whatever you do, bookmark Etsy’s current fee policy: the numbers above were accurate at the time of research, but the policy page is always the final word.