Most "Etsy fees" articles explain the fees one by one and leave you to remember them all at pricing time. You won't — nobody does, which is exactly why so many sellers price against "6.5%" and wonder where the money went. So here's the other format: a straight checklist. Run down it before you set a price or trust a profit number, and tick off every line that applies to your shop. It's organized into three groups — the fees that always apply, the ones that sometimes apply, and the quiet international ones that punish non-US sellers.
Group 1: The three fees that always apply
Every single sale pays these, no exceptions. If you remember nothing else, remember these three.
- ☐ Listing fee — $0.20 per item. Charged when you publish, and renewed automatically every time the item sells. One listing that sells 40 times costs $8 in listing fees, not $0.20. Easy to forget on high-volume, low-price products.
- ☐ Transaction fee — 6.5%. Taken on the total order: item price + shipping + gift wrap. Yes, Etsy charges 6.5% on the shipping your buyer paid, not just the item. Most sellers only budget for the item.
- ☐ Payment processing fee — a % + a fixed fee, by country. In the US it's 3% + $0.25; UK 4% + £0.20; most of the EU 4% + €0.30; Türkiye 6.5% + 14 TRY. The fixed part is the quiet killer on small orders — $0.25 is 1% of a $25 sale but 5% of a $5 one.
For a typical US seller these three alone run roughly 10–11% of the order before anything else stacks on top.
Group 2: The fees that only apply sometimes
These don't hit every order, which is exactly why they surprise you when they do. Check whether each applies to your shop.
- ☐ Offsite Ads — 15% (or 12% if you've made $10k+ in the trailing 365 days). Charged on the whole order, but only when a sale is attributed to an Etsy-placed ad, within a 30-day click window. Capped at $100/order. Under $10k in sales you can opt out; at $10k+ it's mandatory for the life of the shop. You can't predict which orders get hit.
- ☐ Etsy Ads (on-site) — your daily budget. Separate from Offsite Ads. This is the promoted-listings tool you opt into with a minimum $1/day budget. Only applies if you switched it on — but if you did, it's a real cost most sellers forget to subtract.
- ☐ Currency conversion — 2.5%. Applies if you list in one currency but get paid out in another. Almost every non-US seller who lists in USD pays this and never sees it broken out.
- ☐ Refunds and partial refunds. A refund reverses the sale and adjusts the fees — but if the refund and original sale land in different payout periods, your numbers look off until you reconcile them.
- ☐ The shipping label you actually bought. Not an Etsy "fee," but a real cost that comes out of your balance — and if you under-quoted shipping, the gap is pure lost margin that never shows on the order screen.
Group 3: The quiet international charges (non-US sellers, tick these)
If your bank is outside the US, these are the lines that turn a "10% platform" into a 20–30% one on a small order. They're almost never in a generic fee calculator.
- ☐ Regulatory operating fee. A small percentage of the total order in countries like the UK, France, Italy, Spain, Canada and Türkiye. It's usually under 2%, it changes once or twice a year (the UK's rose from 0.32% to 0.48% in June 2026), and it's easy to overlook precisely because it's small.
- ☐ VAT charged on the fees themselves. The sneakiest line of all. In the UK, EU and Türkiye, if you're not VAT-registered, Etsy adds your local VAT (20% in the UK) on top of every fee above — not on your sale, on the fees. It never appears on a calculator; it's visible only in your real payment ledger. It typically adds another 2–3% of revenue in total fee impact.
One line that isn't a fee (but eats your payout)
☐ Sales tax / VAT collected from the buyer. Etsy collects this and remits it directly — it passes through your order total but was never your money. Count it as "sales" and your payout will look mysteriously smaller. It belongs on this list only so you stop mistaking it for a fee (or for profit).
How to actually use this checklist
Before you price a product, add up every line that applies to it — not just the 6.5%. Then subtract your costs (materials, packaging, labor, the real postage) to see what's genuinely left. A product that clears 30% against the transaction fee alone can be break-even once processing, the regulatory fee and VAT-on-fees stack.
You can run a single sale through every line in about thirty seconds with our free Etsy fee calculator — it's one of the few that includes the regulatory operating fee and currency conversion, not just the headline 6.5%.
The catch every checklist shares
A checklist estimates from published rates. Your real charges differ — because of refunds, exact processing amounts, which orders got Offsite Ads, and VAT-on-fees that only your own payment records show. Ticking boxes gets you a good price; it doesn't tell you what Etsy actually took last month. That's the gap Seller Profit Lens fills: it connects to your shop read-only, reads the fees Etsy actually charged — VAT included — per product, to the cent, then subtracts your costs and reconciles to Etsy's own totals so the numbers always match. It was built for exactly the non-US, VAT-heavy sellers this checklist has the most lines for. It's in free beta now. Join the waitlist →