How Etsy fees actually work in 2026
Every time you sell something on Etsy, you pay five types of fees. Most sellers know about two of them. The other three add up to a lot more than people think.
Here's the full stack, in the order Etsy deducts them.
1. Listing fee, $0.20 per item
Charged when you publish a listing and again every time it renews. Listings auto-renew every 4 months, and also renew each time an item sells. If you have 10 of the same item and sell one, Etsy charges $0.20 to relist the remaining 9 as a single listing. It's small, but it compounds if your listings sell through quickly.
2. Transaction fee, 6.5% of the full order
This is Etsy's core commission. It's charged on the item price plus shipping plus gift wrap plus personalisation, not just the item price. If you sell a $30 item with $8 shipping, the 6.5% applies to the full $38. This is the biggest single fee for most sellers.
The transaction fee rate rose from 5% to 6.5% in April 2022 and has stayed there. As of April 2026, there's no announced change.
3. Payment processing fee, varies by country
Charged by Etsy Payments for handling the actual credit card or PayPal transaction. It's a percentage plus a flat per-order fee. The percentage is 3% for US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and 4% for most European countries. The flat fee is in your local currency (£0.20, €0.30, A$0.25, and so on).
Because the flat fee is per order, very small sales get hit harder. A $5 sale has roughly a 5% effective processing fee. A $200 sale has closer to 3.1%.
4. Regulatory operating fee, only some countries
If your shop is in one of these countries, Etsy adds a small percentage to cover local compliance costs (mostly digital services tax):
- Turkey, 2.24%
- Vietnam, 1.24%
- Canada, 1.15%
- Spain, 0.72%
- France, 0.47%
- UK, 0.32%
- Italy, 0.32%
- India, 0.29%
US, Australian, German, and most other sellers don't pay this.
5. Offsite Ads fee, 12% or 15% if applicable
Etsy advertises your listings on Google, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. If a shopper clicks one of those ads and buys from your shop within 30 days, you pay a cut of the full order. It's 15% if your shop made under $10,000 in the past 365 days (and you can opt out), or 12% if you're over $10,000 (and it's mandatory).
The fee is capped at $100 per order. Even so, on a $500 sale attributed to an ad, that's $60 on top of everything else — which can easily flip a profitable sale into a loss.
The shipping trick most sellers miss
Etsy's transaction fee and payment processing fee both apply to the full order including shipping. That means offering "free shipping" (by baking the cost into your item price) doesn't save you a dollar on fees.
But Etsy's search algorithm does rank listings with free shipping higher. Same total to the buyer, same total in fees, more visibility. This is why so many top sellers show $0 shipping, the shipping cost is just already in the product price.
What a typical sale actually looks like
Let's take a $30 item with $5 shipping from a US seller, no Offsite Ads:
- Gross sale: $35.00
- Listing fee: -$0.20
- Transaction fee (6.5% of $35): -$2.28
- Payment processing (3% of $35 + $0.25): -$1.30
- Total fees: $3.78 (10.8%)
- You keep: $31.23
Now the same sale with a 15% Offsite Ads attribution:
- Same fees as above: -$3.78
- Offsite Ads (15% of $35): -$5.25
- Total fees: $9.03 (25.8%)
- You keep: $25.98
A single Offsite Ads sale can take your effective fee rate from 11% to 26%. Which is why, if you're under $10k/year and doing your own marketing, opting out is usually the right call.