How Etsy Fees Work: A Complete Breakdown for Sellers

Every time you list an item on Etsy, you pay a $0.20 listing fee. This fee applies whether or not the item sells. Listings last for four months or until the item sells, whichever comes first.

If you have auto-renewal turned on, Etsy will relist the item automatically when it expires and charge another $0.20. If you sell a multi-quantity listing, each individual sale also triggers a new $0.20 listing fee for the renewed slot. This means high-volume sellers with many active listings can accumulate meaningful listing costs even before making a single sale.

When an item sells, Etsy charges a transaction fee of 6.5%. This fee is calculated on the total sale amount, which includes the item price, the shipping price the buyer pays, and any gift wrapping charges. It does not include sales tax collected on behalf of the buyer.

This is one of the larger fees Etsy charges and it applies to every sale regardless of how the buyer found your shop. If you offer free shipping by building the cost into the item price, the transaction fee is still calculated on that higher item price, so the dollar amount stays roughly the same.

Etsy Payments handles the actual money transfer from buyer to seller. For each order processed through Etsy Payments, sellers pay a payment processing fee of 3% plus a flat $0.25 per transaction. The percentage is calculated on the total order amount including shipping and applicable taxes.

This fee is comparable to what independent sellers would pay using a third-party processor like Stripe or PayPal. However, because Etsy requires most sellers to use Etsy Payments, it is not a fee you can avoid by switching to a different processor. The flat $0.25 component means that very low-priced items lose a proportionally larger share of revenue to processing.

Etsy runs advertising campaigns on platforms like Google, Facebook, and Instagram to drive traffic to listings. If a buyer clicks one of these ads and purchases from your shop within 30 days, Etsy charges an offsite ads fee of 15% on the order total.

Sellers who earned $10,000 or more in the previous 12 months are automatically enrolled in offsite ads and cannot opt out. Sellers below that threshold can opt out in their shop settings. The 15% fee is significant and can substantially reduce margin on affected sales, so it is important to factor it into pricing even if only a fraction of your orders come through offsite ads.

• Below $10,000 in trailing revenue: You can opt out of offsite ads entirely.
• $10,000 or above: Offsite ads are mandatory at a 15% fee rate.

Consider a handmade item listed at $40.00 with $5.00 shipping. Here is how the fees add up for a standard sale that does not come through an offsite ad:

• Listing fee: $0.20
• Transaction fee: 6.5% of ($40.00 + $5.00) = $2.93
• Payment processing fee: 3% of $45.00 + $0.25 = $1.60
• Total Etsy fees: $0.20 + $2.93 + $1.60 = $4.73

On a $45.00 order, you would pay $4.73 in fees, which is about 10.5% of the total sale. If the same sale came through an offsite ad, an additional $6.75 (15% of $45.00) would apply, bringing total fees to $11.48 or about 25.5% of the order.

This is exactly why understanding your fee structure matters before setting prices. Use the Etsy fee calculator to model different price points and see how fees affect your actual take-home profit.