Etsy fees in 2026: what you actually keep on a $30 sale
Most fee guides stop at the percentages. The percentages are the easy part. What actually decides whether your shop makes money is the arithmetic after the fees, once your materials, your packaging, the postage you underestimated, and your own hours are in the same calculation.
So this page does both. First the fees, stated plainly. Then three real products worked out to the cent — including one that looks healthy and loses money.
The four fees that apply to a normal US sale
| Fee | Amount | Applies to |
|---|---|---|
| Listing fee | $0.20 | Each listing you publish, good for four months. If your listing auto-renews after a sale, you pay $0.20 again. |
| Transaction fee | 6.5% | The total the buyer pays — item price plus the shipping you charge plus gift wrapping. Not just the item price. |
| Payment processing | 3% + $0.25 | US sellers. The rate differs by country, so guides written for UK or EU shops will not match your statement. |
| Offsite Ads | 15% or 12% | Only when Etsy's off-platform ad produced the sale. 12% if your shop made $10,000 or more on Etsy in the past 365 days, otherwise 15%. Capped at $100 per order. |
The part people get wrong: shipping is taxed as revenue
The 6.5% transaction fee applies to the shipping you charge, not only to the item. Charging $5 shipping on a $30 item does not move $5 into your pocket — it moves $5 into the base that Etsy takes 6.5% of, then you pay the actual postage out of what is left. If your postage estimate is $1 low, you lose that dollar plus the fee you paid on it.
The Offsite Ads cap is worth more than it sounds
Offsite Ads at 15% is the fee sellers complain about most, and the complaints are usually about small orders where 15% of $35 feels like a lot. The cap works the other way: it protects large orders.
If you sell high-ticket work — furniture, commissioned quilts, wedding pieces — the cap changes the maths on whether Offsite Ads is worth it. Below roughly $667 per order the cap never engages and you pay the full 15%.
Three products, worked out to the cent
Same fee rules in all three. The difference is what happens when you include the costs Etsy never charges you.
Example 1: earrings at $15 plus $5 shipping
Materials $3.50, packaging $0.75, actual postage $4.50, 25 minutes of your time valued at $15/hour.
Etsy took $2.35. Your own costs took $15.00, and $6.25 of that was your labour. This is the shape of most small handmade items: the platform is not the problem, the time is.
Example 2: a candle at $30 plus $5 shipping
Materials $6.00, packaging $1.00, actual postage $4.50, 30 minutes at $15/hour.
Etsy's mandatory fees on this sale come to $3.78. Now add Offsite Ads:
One ad attribution cut this sale's profit almost in half, from $12.22 to $6.97. That is not an argument against Offsite Ads — a sale you would not otherwise have made at $6.97 still beats no sale. It is an argument for knowing which number you are looking at.
Example 3: a $75 quilt with free shipping
This is the one worth reading twice. Materials $18.00, packaging $2.00, actual postage $9.20, and three hours of work at $18/hour.
Etsy's fees were $7.58, about 10% of revenue. They are not what made this a loss. Three hours at $18/hour is $54.00, and the free shipping quietly absorbed $9.20 of postage. The seller of this quilt would see $75 arrive, feel like the day went well, and be paying for the privilege of working.
The uncomfortable version of this
If you price your time at zero, Example 3 shows a $40.60 "profit" and you will keep making quilts. The number only turns negative when you admit your hours are a cost. Most sellers we have read discover this in the same way — by finally doing the arithmetic on their best-selling item and finding out it was their worst.
What Etsy does not charge you, but still comes out of your pocket
- Your labour. Pick an hourly figure and use it consistently. Even $12/hour is infinitely better than $0/hour, because $0/hour makes every product look profitable.
- Postage you underestimated. Shipping is where free-shipping shops leak money. Weigh a finished, packed item once and use the real number.
- Packaging. Boxes, tissue, tape, the thank-you card, the sticker. Individually trivial, collectively 3–8% of a small order.
- Waste. If a yard of fabric yields three items and not four, your material cost per item is a third higher than the receipt suggests.
- Returns and remakes. One remake wipes out the profit on several good sales.
How to check your own numbers in five minutes
- Take your best-selling item and write down the price and the shipping you charge.
- Weigh a packed one and get the real postage, not the estimate.
- Add up the materials from actual receipts, and divide by how many items that quantity really makes.
- Time yourself making one, start to finish, including packing.
- Pick an hourly rate you would accept from an employer and multiply.
Then run it. Our free Etsy profit calculator applies all four fees above, has an Offsite Ads toggle with the $100 cap built in, and needs no signup or install. The three examples on this page were produced by the same code that runs it, which is why the numbers here are to the cent rather than rounded.
If the number surprised you
One sale is a spot check. Knowing it for every product, every month, is a different job — and it is the one that matters at tax time, when Schedule C asks for your cost of goods sold as a single figure. We wrote about that separately: what COGS actually means for a handmade shop.
CraftMargin is the $10/month tool we are building for exactly this: material costs, per-product profit after fees, and a year-end COGS summary. Launching September 2026. Get early access.