Digital downloads have no shipping — but the fixed fees hit just as hard. Enter one price and see every fee Etsy takes on a download, and what you actually keep.
All rates verified against Etsy's published fee schedule. Last checked 1 October 2026. Every figure below is reproducible — see the worked examples at the bottom of this page.
Net payout
$0.00
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| Fee | Amount |
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Two of Etsy's fees are fixed, not percentage-based — the $0.20 listing fee and the $0.25 payment processing component. They do not shrink when your order does.
So the same fee structure takes a very different bite out of a cheap item than an expensive one:
| Order total | Etsy fees | Effective rate |
|---|---|---|
| $10 | $1.40 | 14.0% |
| $30 | $3.30 | 11.0% |
| $50 | $5.20 | 10.4% |
| $100 | $9.95 | 9.95% |
If you price a $10 item using the "Etsy takes about 10%" rule of thumb, you are understating your costs by 40%. That is the single most common pricing error on the platform.
The 6.5% transaction fee is charged on item price + shipping charged + gift wrap — not on the item alone. Sellers who treat shipping as a pass-through cost lose 6.5% of it on every order. If you charge $6 shipping to cover a $6 label, you are $0.39 short before anything else.
If an order comes from an ad Etsy ran on your behalf, Etsy takes an additional 15% (12% once you have sold over $10,000 in a year). The charge is capped at $100 per order.
The Regulatory Operating Fee applies in some countries and not others. The US, Germany and Australia currently have none. The highest rate Etsy lists is Hungary at 1.97%, followed by Turkey at 1.67% and France at 1.14%. It is charged on the same base as the transaction fee — item price plus shipping plus gift wrap.
Selling a download removes shipping from the equation, which sounds like it should make fees trivial. It does not — the fixed fees stay exactly the same, and on a cheap file they dominate.
Digital downloads carry the same $0.20 listing fee and the same fixed processing charge as a physical item. Neither shrinks because the file is cheap. A $0.20 listing fee on a $50 product is 0.4% of the sale — on a $3 file it is 6.7% before Etsy has charged anything else.
| Digital item price | Etsy fees | Effective rate |
|---|---|---|
| $3.00 | $0.74 | 24.5% |
| $5.00 | $0.93 | 18.5% |
| $10.00 | $1.40 | 14.0% |
| $20.00 | $2.35 | 11.8% |
Nearly a quarter of a $3 download goes to Etsy. The answer is not to price it higher — it is to bundle. Four $3 files sold as one $12 pack pay those fixed fees once instead of four times, and the effective rate falls from 24.5% toward 12%.
Digital downloads have no shipping, which sounds like it should make the math simple. Yet the calculators ranking for this phrase mostly get it wrong in one of two ways.
Error 1: the $0.25 processing fee quietly disappears. One of the most-visited calculators in the current results shows a $10 download costing $1.15 in fees. The correct figure is $1.40 — payment processing on Etsy is 3% plus a flat $0.25, and that fixed charge applies to digital items exactly like physical ones. On a $10 sale it is 2.5% of the order, hidden inside their headline number.
Error 2: the rates are pre-June 2026. Etsy revised the regulatory operating fee in several countries on 22 June 2026 (the UK went from 0.32% to 0.48%, France from 0.47% to 1.14%). The leading calculators still show the old figures — one lists a German fee that does not exist, and another lists Turkey’s old 2.24% rate (Turkey is now 1.67%) as if it applied across the whole EU.
That is why every number on this page is recomputed live in your browser and checked against published worked examples every time it loads. The verification table at the bottom of this page is the receipt.
Every listing runs for four months. If it does not sell and auto-renew is on, Etsy charges the $0.20 listing fee again — and again — whether or not anyone has bought it.
A product that flops is not free. It keeps billing you.
| Dead listings kept live | Per year | Over 3 years |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | $0.60 | $1.80 |
| 25 | $15.00 | $45.00 |
| 100 | $60.00 | $180.00 |
$60 a year is small next to a bad inventory buy — but it is not refundable, it compounds, and it is easy to forget. A seller who tests thirty product ideas a year and leaves the losers live is renting that shelf space forever.
What to do: review any listing that has completed a full renewal cycle with no sales. If you would not list it again today, deactivate it. Killing a dead listing costs nothing; keeping it costs $0.20 every four months, indefinitely.
Last verified: 1 October 2026 · Source: Etsy Fees & Payments Policy
| Fee | Rate | Charged on |
|---|---|---|
| Listing | $0.20 per item | Each listing, renewal, and each unit sold in a multi-item order |
| Transaction | 6.5% | Item price + shipping charged + gift wrap (excludes sales tax) |
| Payment processing (US) | 3% + $0.25 | Order total including sales tax |
| Payment processing (UK) | 4% + £0.20 | Order total |
| Payment processing (EU) | 4% + €0.30 | Order total |
| Regulatory operating (UK) | 0.48% | Item price + shipping + gift wrap |
| Regulatory operating (CA / FR / IT / ES) | 0.50% / 1.14% / 0.80% / 0.88% | Same base |
| Regulatory operating (HU / TR / VN / IN) | 1.97% / 1.67% / 1.24% / 0.05% | Same base |
| Regulatory operating (US / DE / AU) | None | — |
| Offsite Ads | 15% or 12% | Attributed order total, capped at $100 |
| Currency conversion | 2.5% | When listing currency differs from payout currency |
Shop setup fees ($15–$29 one-time for new shops) and optional subscriptions (Etsy Plus $10/mo, Pattern $15/mo) are not per-sale fees and are not included above.
These eight cases are computed live in your browser every time this page loads — including one with shipping charged, to prove shipping sits inside the fee base. If any row says FAIL, the formula on this page is wrong — and you should not trust the result above.
| Order (US, no ads) | Listing | Transaction | Processing | Total | Check |
|---|
For a US seller with no Offsite Ads and no currency conversion, roughly 10% of the order — but it is not a flat 10%. The listing fee ($0.20) and the fixed part of payment processing ($0.25) do not scale, so the real rate runs about 14% on a $10 order and about 10% on a $100 order.
Yes. The 6.5% transaction fee applies to the item price plus shipping charged plus gift wrap. Shipping is not a fee-free pass-through.
If you have sold less than $10,000 in the past 365 days, you can opt out of Offsite Ads. Once you cross $10,000, participation is mandatory and the fee drops from 15% to 12%. The fee only applies to orders attributed to an Etsy ad, and it is capped at $100 per order.
No. The 6.5% transaction fee is calculated on item price, shipping and gift wrap — sales tax is excluded. The payment processing fee, however, is charged on the tax-inclusive order total. This calculator handles the two bases separately.
A country-specific surcharge Etsy adds in some markets to cover local regulatory costs. The UK rate went from 0.32% to 0.48% on 22 June 2026. The US, Germany and Australia currently have no equivalent fee.
The rates are the same: $0.20 listing, 6.5% transaction, and the same payment processing. What changes is the base — there is no shipping charge, so fees are calculated on the item price alone. The practical consequence is that cheap digital files carry a punishing effective rate: a $3 download loses about 24.5% to fees, while a $20 one loses about 11.8%. Bundling low-priced files into one listing is the usual fix.
No. Everything runs in your browser. There is no signup, no email capture and no tracking of the figures you enter.
Looking for physical items or other currencies? Use the full Etsy fee calculator with 12 country rate tables, or the euro edition.