No single Etsy fee is large. Stacked on one order they are. On a $40 item with $6 of shipping charged to the buyer, using the figures on Etsy’s own seller page read on August 26, 2026, a US seller pays $0.20 to list, 6.5% of the $46 order total in transaction fee, and 3% plus $0.25 in payment processing. That is $4.82 of fees on a $46 order, so $41.18 reaches the bank. Nothing in that stack is advertised above 6.5%, and yet it comes to 12% of the price you actually set. If Offsite Ads triggered on that order, the fees are $11.72 instead.
Etsy changes its fees, and this is a dated record, not a permanent fact. Every figure below is what Etsy published at the time of writing (August 2026), read on August 26, 2026 from etsy.com/sell, the US version of that page, and quoted as Etsy words it. Etsy states on that same page that “the payment processing fee may also vary by bank country,” so the processing figure applies to a US bank account and to nothing else. Before you make a decision with money in it, open your own country’s version of that page and your own Shop Manager.
Etsy seller fees explained, exactly as Etsy states them
| Fee | Etsy’s own wording, read August 26, 2026 |
|---|---|
| Listing | “List your first item for just $0.20.” Listings “are active for four months, or until they sell.” |
| Transaction | “Once an item sells, there is a 6.5% transaction fee on the sale price (including the shipping price you set).” |
| Payment processing | “3% + $0.25 payment processing fee” when an item sells through Etsy Payments. “The payment processing fee may also vary by bank country.” |
| Offsite Ads | “15% Offsite Ads Fee.” “You only pay a fee when you make a sale from one of those ads.” “Offsite advertising is optional for most sellers, but may be required based on how much you make in sales on Etsy in a 12 month period.” |
| Currency conversion | “2.5% Currency Conversion fee” on funds from sales where your shop’s listing currency differs from your payment account currency. |
That is the complete list from the one Etsy page we were able to open today. Three other Etsy pages we tried, including the fees policy and the advertising policy, returned an access error to us rather than their contents. What that means for this article is set out further down, and it is the reason a few numbers you will find on other fee guides do not appear here at all.
The stack on one order, added up
Most fee guides list the percentages and stop, or run the example on the item price alone. The order is where the surprise lives, so here is one order in full.
The order: item priced at $40.00, shipping charged to the buyer at $6.00, order total $46.00. Seller with a US bank account, one listing fee counted against this sale, Etsy Payments, no Offsite Ads, no currency conversion.
| Line | Amount |
|---|---|
| Order total collected from the buyer | $46.00 |
| Listing fee | $0.20 |
| Transaction fee, 6.5% of $46.00 | $2.99 |
| Payment processing, 3% of $46.00 plus $0.25 | $1.63 |
| Total Etsy fees | $4.82 |
| Paid out to you | $41.18 |
Two ways to read that same $4.82. Against the $46 the buyer paid, it is 10.5%. Against the $40 you actually set as your price, it is 12.1%. Neither number appears anywhere on Etsy’s fee page, because neither is a fee. They are what the fees come to once they are on the same order.
Postage itself is not in that table. Buying the label is a real cost and it comes out of the same $41.18, but it is not an Etsy fee, and Etsy’s shipping label pricing is on a page we could not read today, so no figure for it appears here.
Illustration only, with the assumptions stated above. Every input is from Etsy’s published US figures on the date read. Etsy’s page states the base for the transaction fee explicitly and does not state the base for payment processing, so the example applies processing to the same order total. If Etsy charges it on a smaller base, your real fee is slightly lower than shown.
The shipping line is where sellers get surprised
Read Etsy’s transaction fee wording again: 6.5% “on the sale price (including the shipping price you set).” The percentage is not charged on your item. It is charged on the whole order.
So the $6 of shipping in the example carried $0.39 of transaction fee before you had bought a single stamp. If you charge shipping at cost, you are paying a fee on money that was never yours. If you raise shipping to cover a heavier item, the fee rises with it.
This also settles a piece of advice that circulates in seller groups: moving money between the item price and the shipping price does not change what Etsy takes. A $40 item with $6 shipping and a $46 item with free shipping produce the same $46 order total and the same 6.5%. Free shipping folded into the price is charged identically. Whatever else free shipping does for your listing, it is fee-neutral.
The effective rate moves with order size, and small orders lose most
The $0.20 listing fee and the $0.25 of processing are flat. A flat charge is a small share of a large order and a heavy one on a small order, which is why two shops with the same monthly revenue can be paying Etsy quite different rates.
| Order total | Total Etsy fees | Effective rate | With Offsite Ads on that order |
|---|---|---|---|
| $15 | $1.88 | 12.5% | $4.13 (27.5%) |
| $25 | $2.83 | 11.3% | $6.58 (26.3%) |
| $46 | $4.82 | 10.5% | $11.72 (25.5%) |
| $75 | $7.58 | 10.1% | $18.83 (25.1%) |
| $150 | $14.70 | 9.8% | $37.20 (24.8%) |
Same assumptions as the worked example: one listing fee per order, US bank account, Etsy Payments, no currency conversion, sales tax excluded, postage excluded.
A shop selling $12 stickers and a shop selling $150 lamps are on the same published fee schedule and are not paying the same rate. If your average order sits under about $25, the flat components are doing real work against you, and that changes what the fee question even means for your business. It is the same effect that makes the revenue you need before leaving Etsy a different number for every shop. If you would rather put your own order values in than read a table built on ours, the fee calculator on this site runs the arithmetic against your figures.
The conditional layer, which is where the real money goes
Everything above is universal. The next three are conditional, and a seller who ignores them is budgeting for the floor of the stack rather than its ceiling.
Offsite Ads takes a share of the whole order
Etsy’s published figure is a “15% Offsite Ads Fee,” charged only “when you make a sale from one of those ads.” Look at what that does in the last column of the table above. It is not 15% of your margin. It is 15% of the order total, landing on top of the 6.5% and the 3%, which is how a $46 order goes from $4.82 of fees to $11.72.
The part that matters more than the percentage is Etsy’s own sentence about who has a choice: “Offsite advertising is optional for most sellers, but may be required based on how much you make in sales on Etsy in a 12 month period.” Read plainly, that is a fee you can opt out of while you are small and cannot opt out of once you are successful. Growing past a threshold changes the terms you sell on, in a direction you did not choose.
We are not going to print the dollar threshold or the reduced percentage that circulates elsewhere. Etsy’s advertising policy page did not open for us today, and a threshold is exactly the kind of number that must come from the platform’s own page or not at all.
Payment processing depends on where your bank is
The “3% + $0.25” above is what the US version of Etsy’s page shows. Etsy’s own note is that the fee “may also vary by bank country,” and separately that fees “vary according to the location of your bank account.”
That is more than a footnote. A fee guide that gives one processing rate for the whole world is wrong for most of its readers, and a seller banking outside the US who budgets from that number has budgeted from someone else’s country. There is no rate quoted here for any country other than the US, because we did not read one.
Currency conversion is 2.5% for anyone listing in a currency they do not bank in
Etsy publishes a “2.5% Currency Conversion fee” where your shop’s listing currency differs from your payment account currency. Sellers outside the US who list in USD to reach US buyers are the group this lands on, and it sits on top of everything else in the stack rather than replacing any of it.
The optional subscription
The Etsy page we could read makes no mention of any subscription plan and quotes no price for one, so none is stated here. If you are being billed for one, the amount is in your own Shop Manager, and that is the only source we would trust for it today.
What we could not read today, and will not state anyway
This is the section the ranking fee guides do not have, and the reason they look more complete than they are. A complete-looking fee schedule is easy to publish if you are willing to fill the gaps with figures you did not verify. On August 26, 2026 these Etsy pages returned an access error to us: etsy.com/legal/fees, etsy.com/legal/advertising, etsy.com/sell/fees, and the Help Center fee article in both its US and UK versions.
So the following appear in other guides and appear nowhere above, as names only, with no number attached: the Offsite Ads sales threshold, the reduced Offsite Ads rate for larger shops, the regulatory operating fee, listing renewal pricing, shipping label pricing, and any subscription price. Each of them may well be real and current. We did not read any of them from Etsy today, so we do not publish them. Your own Shop Manager and your own country’s Etsy pages will settle every one of these for your shop specifically, which is more than any article can do.
The honest framing: the stack is the price of Etsy’s traffic
Add it up and Etsy takes roughly a tenth of a normal order, and around a quarter of an order that came through Offsite Ads. Written down cold, that sounds like a lot. Whether it is depends entirely on one question, and it is not a question about fees.
Etsy’s cut is what you pay for being inside a marketplace where buyers are already searching. On a sale to a stranger who typed a description into Etsy’s search bar and found you, the fee bought that stranger. That is a service, and roughly a tenth of the order is a defensible price for it.
On a sale to a customer you brought yourself, from your own Instagram post or your own email list or a repeat buyer who already knew your name, the same fee bought nothing. You supplied the traffic and paid the marketplace rate on it anyway. This is the split that decides whether your fee bill is a cost of sales or a leak, and it is visible in your own stats rather than in any fee table. If most of your orders arrive from Etsy search, the stack is buying you something real, and that is also marketplace dependency rather than a customer base, with everything that implies about who controls your income. Some categories genuinely depend on that search traffic more than others, which is worth knowing before you price a move: some products really do only sell on Etsy.
Two closing notes rather than a recommendation, because what you do with this is your call. First, a lower fee bill is not automatically more money, and a seller who moves for the fee saving without a plan for the traffic can end up with cheaper sales and fewer of them, which is why it can simply be too early to leave. Second, the fee is only one column of the comparison. The other column is the work Etsy currently does for you that you would be doing yourself, and that is set out in what running your own store looks like day to day.
Last checked: August 26, 2026. All Etsy figures read that day from etsy.com/sell, the US version of the page, and quoted as Etsy publishes them. Payment processing figures apply to US bank accounts only. Etsy changes fees without notice and publishes different figures in different countries.
FAQ
How much does Etsy take per sale? On the figures Etsy published on August 26, 2026, a US seller pays a $0.20 listing fee, a 6.5% transaction fee on the order total including the shipping you charge, and 3% plus $0.25 in payment processing. On a $46 order that is $4.82 in total, which is 10.5% of the order and 12.1% of the $40 item price. Offsite Ads, currency conversion and a seller’s own country’s processing rate can push it higher.
Does Etsy charge fees on shipping? Yes. Etsy’s own wording is that the 6.5% transaction fee applies to “the sale price (including the shipping price you set),” read August 26, 2026. That means the percentage is charged on the whole order, not on the item alone. It also means shifting money between your item price and your shipping price does not change what Etsy takes, because the order total is unchanged.
Are Etsy Offsite Ads optional? Etsy’s page states that “offsite advertising is optional for most sellers, but may be required based on how much you make in sales on Etsy in a 12 month period,” and that the fee is 15% when a sale comes from one of those ads. The dollar threshold at which it becomes mandatory is published on Etsy’s advertising policy page, which did not open for us on the day of writing, so no threshold figure is quoted in this article.
Why is my Etsy payment processing fee different from the one I read online? Because it depends on where your bank is. Etsy states that “the payment processing fee may also vary by bank country.” The “3% + $0.25” figure here is what the US version of Etsy’s seller page showed on August 26, 2026, and it applies to US bank accounts. Any guide quoting one worldwide processing rate is quoting the wrong one for most sellers.
What is the real percentage Etsy takes once everything is added up? There is no single number, because two of the fees are flat and two are conditional. On the published US figures, a straightforward order lands between about 9.8% and 12.5% depending on order size, with small orders paying the highest effective rate. An order that came through Offsite Ads lands near 25%. Those are calculations from Etsy’s published figures, not fees Etsy quotes.
Research Notes & Limitations
- Figures we deliberately omitted. Four Etsy pages returned an access error to our fetcher on August 26, 2026 (
etsy.com/legal/fees,etsy.com/legal/advertising,etsy.com/sell/fees, and the Help Center fee article in en-us and en-gb). The Offsite Ads threshold, the reduced Offsite Ads rate, the regulatory operating fee, listing renewal pricing, shipping label pricing and any subscription price are therefore absent. If you can read any of them from inside your own Etsy account, each would strengthen the piece and each must carry the date you read it. - Country. Everything here is the US version of Etsy’s page, and processing rates are US only. A UK or EU version is map row 2-14 and needs its own reads.