TikTok Shop charges a percentage of each completed order, and the percentage depends on where your shop is registered. On TikTok Shop’s own US seller pages, read on September 8, 2026, the referral fee is “6% per order” on qualified transactions, in place “Starting April 1, 2024,” and the fee table there is annotated “5%-6% based on the category.”
On TikTok Shop’s UK seller pages the equivalent charge is called a Commission Fee, and the rate stated there is 9%, “inclusive of applicable taxes, including but not limited to Value Added Tax (VAT).” Those are two different numbers for the same thing, published by the same company on the same day, because TikTok Shop runs a separate fee schedule in every market it operates.
Everything below is a dated record of what TikTok published on September 8, 2026, quoted as TikTok words it. The schedule that governs your payouts is the one inside your own Seller Center, and it is the only one worth deciding on.
What the referral fee is calculated on, and what it is not
The base matters as much as the rate. TikTok’s US referral fee page states that the fee applies to “Buyer Paid + Platform Discount – Tax.”
Read the middle term carefully. Platform discount is added back before the percentage is applied, which means that when TikTok funds a promotion and the buyer pays less because of it, the referral fee is still calculated on the pre-discount amount. Tax is subtracted, so US sales tax collected from the buyer is outside the base. That is a different construction from most marketplaces, and it is the detail that makes a TikTok settlement report hard to reconcile against a simple percentage of what landed in your account.
The UK page publishes an explicit formula instead. The commission fee is calculated as “((Net sales + Customer-paid shipping fee + Platform discount) – (Net sales refund + Platform discount refund)) * Commission Fee rate.” Customer-paid shipping is inside the UK base. Comparing that with how Etsy’s fee stack is built makes the general point clearly: two marketplaces quoting similar percentages can be charging them on quite different amounts, and the base is where the real difference usually lives.
TikTok Shop seller fees are not one rate, they are one rate per market
This is the part almost every guide flattens, and flattening it produces a number that is wrong for most readers.
| Market | What TikTok’s own seller pages showed on September 8, 2026 |
|---|---|
| United States | Referral fee “6% per order” on qualified transactions, in place “Starting April 1, 2024,” annotated “5%-6% based on the category” |
| United Kingdom | Commission Fee rate of 9%, “inclusive of applicable taxes, including but not limited to Value Added Tax (VAT)” |
| Singapore | Category commission rates published on separate schedules dated July 15 2025, October 1 2025 and April 1 2026, plus a transaction fee shown as “2.18%” before October 1 2025 and “3.27%” from that date, both GST inclusive |
The UK rate is not the US rate with a different currency symbol. It is a different rate, charged on a different base, with tax treated differently. Singapore is charged in two components rather than one. If a page tells you what TikTok Shop charges without telling you which country it is describing, it is not describing your shop.
This is also a fair illustration of what it means to build on terms someone else sets. The rate, the base, the tax treatment and the schedule dates are all decided in a document you do not control, revised on a timetable you are not consulted about, and published separately for each market.
Category exceptions, and why nobody can reproduce the full table honestly
The US category page I read carries an effective date of October 31, 2024, and the exceptions on it are specific.
| US category, as shown on TikTok’s own category page | Referral fee published |
|---|---|
| Most categories | 6% |
| Jewelry: Diamond, Gold, Jade, Platinum and Carat Gold, Ruby and Sapphire and Emerald | “lowered from 6% to 5%”, effective October 31, 2024 |
| Silver jewelry, pearls | remain at 6% |
| Pre-owned bags, watches, footwear | “5%”, with “any portion of the sale over $10K, 3%” |
| Collectibles | “6%”, with “any portion of the sale over $10K, 3%” |
There is a limit to what I can pass on, and I would rather state it than work around it. On the UK side the complete category breakdown is not published as text on the page at all. It is referenced as a downloadable spreadsheet, named on the page as “TikTok Shop UK – Commission Rates by Product Category V2.xlsx.” On the Singapore page, the category rates are published inside embedded images rather than as readable text.
So any article that hands you a complete, tidy TikTok Shop category table has either transcribed a spreadsheet at a date it usually does not state, or copied another article that did. The rate for your specific subcategory is in your own Seller Center, and that is the only version I would trust for a pricing decision.
The fee on the fee: sales tax on referral fees in two US states
Here is a change that almost nothing ranking for this question mentions, and it is a real line on a real invoice.
TikTok’s own US notice states that “As of November 1, 2025, TikTok Shop will begin collecting sales tax on referral fees” for sellers registered in West Virginia or Texas. The notice says “the sales tax will automatically be added to the referral fee on your seller invoice,” with no action required from the seller.
That is a tax on the service TikTok sells you, not a tax on your sale, and it applies on the basis of where your business is registered rather than where the buyer is. For a seller in either of those two states the referral fee line on the invoice is therefore not exactly the published percentage of the base, and reconciling a settlement report against a flat 6% will leave a small unexplained difference. It is a modest amount of money and a good example of why the published rate and the invoiced amount are not the same object.
What the referral fee does not cover
The referral fee is the platform’s charge for the transaction. It is not the cost of selling on TikTok Shop, and the difference is mostly made of things TikTok does not publish a rate for.
Creator commissions are agreed per campaign between you and the creator, so there is no platform rate to quote and none appears here. Advertising is bought at auction, which makes it a budget you choose rather than a schedule you are charged against. Fulfillment through TikTok’s own service is priced per unit by size and weight, and I could not read a current US rate card for it on TikTok’s own pages on the day I wrote this, so no fulfillment figure appears in this article either. Payment processing arrangements differ by market.
What that leaves is the honest shape of the thing: one published percentage you can plan around, and three cost lines that are set by your own decisions and are usually larger. The mirror image faces anyone leaving a marketplace, where the free attention disappears and what replacing marketplace traffic actually takes becomes the real number. On TikTok Shop the attention is not free either. It is bought with creator commission and ad spend that never appear in the fee schedule.
The schedule has moved, and the documentation shows it moving
You do not have to take my word that this platform’s terms drift. Its own pages record it.
The US referral fee page is written as a notice of an increase, “Starting April 1, 2024.” The category page carries a separate effective date of October 31, 2024, for the jewelry reduction. The sales tax change on referral fees is dated November 1, 2025. The Singapore page publishes three separate commission schedules, dated July 15 2025, October 1 2025 and April 1 2026, along with a transaction fee that moved from 2.18% to 3.27% on October 1 2025, and that page itself shows a last-updated date of March 13, 2026. The UK fee page I read carries a date of August 22, 2025.
Six dated changes across three markets in about two years is not unusual for a young marketplace, and it is not a criticism. It is a planning fact. A margin that only works at the current rate is a margin that depends on a document being revised in your favor, and none of these revisions was announced in advance to sellers who had already priced their catalog.
What this cost shape means if you are weighing a store of your own
A referral fee is contingent. TikTok’s page notes that “Orders that have been completed are eligible orders,” so in a month with no completed orders the referral fee is zero. That is the genuine advantage of a percentage model, and it is why the comparison with running your own store is never a simple rate contest.
A store you own inverts it. The plan renews in a quiet month exactly as it does in a busy one, which is the whole substance of what a Shopify plan costs every month. Neither shape is better in the abstract. A seller with sharp seasonality and thin months carries a real risk with fixed costs, and a seller with steady volume pays a percentage on every order forever. The question is which shape your actual sales pattern can absorb, and only your own numbers answer it.
Why there is no all-in TikTok Shop percentage on this page
Plenty of pages ranking for this question add the referral fee to a payment processing estimate, a creator commission range and a fulfillment rate, then present the total as what TikTok takes. I am not going to publish a figure like that, because it would be a stack of assumptions about somebody else’s business wearing the clothes of a platform fee.
Your market sets the rate. Your subcategory adjusts it. Your discounts, shipping and tax decide the base it is charged on. Your creator deals and your ad budget are decisions rather than rates. The one number that describes your business is in your own settlement reports, and reading three months of them beats every published estimate including this one. If it is the underlying comparison you are working on rather than the rate itself, the same fee question set out for Etsy and Shopify works through it with both sides on the table.
Last checked: September 8, 2026. All figures read that day from TikTok Shop’s own seller education pages at seller-us.tiktok.com, seller-uk.tiktok.com and seller-sg.tiktok.com, and quoted as TikTok publishes them. TikTok Shop operates a separate fee schedule in each market and revises them on its own timetable.