Etsy Fee Calculator: How Much Do You Actually Keep in 2026?

I've been selling on Etsy for three years and I still had the fees wrong

I'm not going to pretend this is a dramatic revelation. But last month, I sat down to figure out my actual per-sale profit on a $10 printable, and I realized I'd been calculating fees wrong for months. Not by a huge amount — I was off by about 40 cents per sale — but across 300+ sales a month, that adds up to over $120 I wasn't accounting for.

The problem is that Etsy doesn't show you one clean fee. There are four separate charges on every sale, and one of them only shows up sometimes. So let me walk through all of them, with real math at three different price points.

The four fees on every Etsy sale

Before I get into specific numbers, here's what Etsy charges:

Transaction fee: 6.5% of the item price. This is Etsy's cut for being a marketplace. It used to be 5% before April 2022. It applies to the item price plus shipping, but for digital products there's no shipping so it's just the item price.Listing fee: $0.20 per listing. This gets charged when you first list a product and again every time it sells. For digital products that auto-renew, you pay $0.20 on every single sale. It seems tiny, but watch what it does to cheap products.Payment processing fee: 3% + $0.25. This covers the credit card processing through Etsy Payments. Pretty standard — Stripe charges about the same. The $0.25 flat fee is what hurts on lower-priced items.Offsite ads fee: 15% (sometimes). This is the one that surprises people. I'll cover it separately because it deserves its own section.

Example 1: The $10 product

Let's say you sell a digital download for $10.00. Here's what happens:

• Transaction fee (6.5%): $0.65
• Listing fee: $0.20
• Payment processing (3% + $0.25): $0.55
• Total fees: $1.40
• You keep: $8.60

That's 14% of your sale gone to fees. And notice how the $0.20 listing fee and the $0.25 flat processing fee hit harder on a $10 product. Those fixed costs eat a bigger chunk of cheaper items.

If your cost of goods is zero (which it is for most digital products), $8.60 is your profit. But if you spent 10 hours making that template and you sell 50 copies, your hourly rate is $43. Not bad. But it's not $50 — which is what you'd calculate if you forgot about fees.

Example 2: The $25 product

This is the sweet spot for a lot of digital product sellers. Here's the math:

• Transaction fee (6.5%): $1.63
• Listing fee: $0.20
• Payment processing (3% + $0.25): $1.00
• Total fees: $2.83
• You keep: $22.17

Fee percentage: 11.3%. Already better than the $10 product because those flat fees ($0.20 + $0.25) are a smaller share of a bigger sale.

This is why most experienced sellers tell you to avoid pricing below $10 on Etsy. The fixed fees make it hard to keep a decent margin on cheap products.

Example 3: The $50 product

Premium digital products — course workbooks, comprehensive template bundles, business planners with all the bells and whistles:

• Transaction fee (6.5%): $3.25
• Listing fee: $0.20
• Payment processing (3% + $0.25): $1.75
• Total fees: $5.20
• You keep: $44.80

Fee percentage: 10.4%. The best ratio of the three. If you can sell at $50, you're keeping almost 90 cents on every dollar.

The offsite ads gotcha

Now let's talk about the fee that nobody reads the fine print on until it bites them.

Etsy runs ads for your products on Google, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. If a buyer clicks one of those ads and purchases from you within 30 days, Etsy charges you 15% of the sale price. If your shop made more than $10,000 in the past year, the rate drops to 12%, but you also can't opt out.

Read that again. If your shop does well enough, you are forced into the offsite ads program. You can't turn it off.

Here's what that does to your $25 product:

• Transaction fee (6.5%): $1.63
• Listing fee: $0.20
• Payment processing (3% + $0.25): $1.00
• Offsite ads (15%): $3.75
• Total fees: $6.58
• You keep: $18.42

Fee percentage: 26.3%. More than a quarter of your sale, gone.

Not every sale triggers this. Etsy says roughly 10-15% of sales come through offsite ads. But you have no control over when it happens, and you won't know until after the sale shows up in your statement.

If you sell 200 items a month at $25 and 12% of them come through offsite ads, you're paying about $90 extra in offsite ads fees per month on top of your regular fees. That's over $1,000 a year that a lot of sellers don't plan for.

The fee nobody thinks about: opportunity cost of renewals

Here's a small one that adds up in a weird way. If you have 100 listings in your shop and they all auto-renew every 4 months, you're paying $0.20 x 100 = $20 every 4 months just to keep your shop live. Even if nothing sells.

For big shops with 500+ listings, renewal fees alone can run $100+ a year. Not a deal-breaker, but it's money that comes out whether you make sales or not.

So how do you use this information?

Price above your minimum. Figure out what you need to earn per sale to make the product worth your time. Then add 12-15% for standard fees and another 3-4% as a buffer for offsite ads. If you need to take home $20, don't price at $23. Price at $25 or even $27.Know your blended fee rate. Your actual average fee percentage across all sales — including the occasional offsite ads hit — is probably between 12-15% for most digital product sellers. Track it monthly so you're not surprised.Use a calculator instead of guessing. I got tired of doing this math by hand, so I built one. You can plug in your price and see exactly what you keep at [our Etsy fee calculator](/tools/etsy-fee-calculator). It accounts for all four fee types and shows you the offsite ads scenario too.Don't panic about offsite ads. Yes, 15% hurts. But those are sales you might not have gotten otherwise. The buyer found you through an ad you didn't pay for upfront. Think of it as a commission on a sale that wouldn't have existed. It's still money you didn't have before.Track your actual take-home, not your gross. Etsy's dashboard shows your gross revenue front and center. Your actual take-home is buried in the monthly statements. Get in the habit of checking what you actually kept, not what Etsy says you sold.

The fees aren't going to change. Etsy has raised them before and they'll probably raise them again. The only thing you can control is whether you're pricing based on real numbers or wishful thinking.