How Much Does Etsy Take From a $20 Sale? Full Fee Breakdown
$2.35. That is what Etsy takes from a $20 order for a US seller using Etsy Payments — 11.75% of the sale, before you have paid for a single thing you actually sold.
Here is where every cent of it comes from, and then the part most sellers get wrong: why that percentage is completely different on a $5 sale and a $100 sale.
The rates below are Etsy’s published US rates as of writing. Payment processing rates vary by country, some countries carry a regulatory operating fee, and Etsy changes its schedule from time to time. Check yours in Etsy’s Fees & Payments policy before you price anything.
The $20 sale, line by line
| Fee | How it is calculated | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Transaction fee | 6.5% of the total order | $1.30 |
| Payment processing | 3% of the order + $0.25 | $0.85 |
| Listing fee | flat, per listing sold or renewed | $0.20 |
| Etsy’s total cut | $2.35 | |
| As a % of the sale | 11.75% | |
| You receive | $17.65 |
That $17.65 is not profit. It is the amount that arrives before your materials, your packaging, your postage and any advertising come out. On a typical handmade item costing $6 in materials with $4 of postage and packaging, the $20 sale leaves around $7.65 — roughly 38% of what the buyer paid.
The version nobody warns you about: offsite ads
If Etsy advertised your listing off-site — on Google, Instagram, Pinterest or Facebook — and the buyer clicked that ad and ordered, the same $20 sale looks like this:
| Fee | Amount |
|---|---|
| Transaction fee | $1.30 |
| Payment processing | $0.85 |
| Listing fee | $0.20 |
| Offsite ads fee (15%) | $3.00 |
| Etsy’s total cut | $5.35 |
| As a % of the sale | 26.75% |
| You receive | $14.65 |
The rate is 15% for shops that have never made $10,000 in any consecutive 365-day period, and 12% once a shop has crossed that mark. Shops below the threshold can opt out of offsite ads entirely; shops that have crossed it are enrolled permanently at 12%.
More than a quarter of the order, on an order you did not choose to advertise. This is the fee that turns a fine-looking Etsy month into a disappointing deposit, and it is the one least likely to be in a homemade spreadsheet.
Why $20 is the wrong question: the same fees at every price
Only part of Etsy’s cut scales with your price. The $0.25 processing component and the $0.20 listing fee are flat, so they land with enormous force on cheap items and barely register on expensive ones.
| Order total | Transaction (6.5%) | Processing (3% + $0.25) | Listing | Etsy’s cut | % of sale |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $5 | $0.33 | $0.40 | $0.20 | $0.93 | 18.5% |
| $10 | $0.65 | $0.55 | $0.20 | $1.40 | 14.0% |
| $20 | $1.30 | $0.85 | $0.20 | $2.35 | 11.75% |
| $35 | $2.28 | $1.30 | $0.20 | $3.78 | 10.8% |
| $50 | $3.25 | $1.75 | $0.20 | $5.20 | 10.4% |
| $100 | $6.50 | $3.25 | $0.20 | $9.95 | 9.95% |
Read that column on the right from the bottom up. Etsy’s effective take nearly doubles between a $100 order and a $5 order — and not because Etsy is doing anything different. The flat $0.45 simply cannot shrink.
This is the single most useful piece of Etsy fee maths there is, and it has one practical consequence: raising average order value is worth more than any fee you can negotiate away. Selling two $20 items as one $40 order costs $4.25 in fees. Selling them as two separate $20 orders costs $4.70. Same revenue, $0.45 saved on fees — plus one label instead of two, one package instead of two, and one trip to the post office instead of two, which is where the real money is. A shop that turns 150 pairs of single orders into bundles a year saves about $68 in fees and roughly 150 shipping labels’ worth of postage and packaging on top.
The fees that are not per-order
Three more costs sit outside the per-order maths and belong in your monthly numbers rather than your item pricing:
Listing renewals. Every listing costs $0.20 to create, and $0.20 again every time it renews. A shop with 60 active listings that all auto-renew is paying a steady trickle whether or not anything sells — and a multi-quantity listing renews automatically each time one unit sells, so a listing with 40 units sold is 40 renewal fees.
Etsy Ads (on-site). A daily budget you set yourself, charged by the click regardless of whether the click buys anything. This is genuinely optional and genuinely easy to lose money on — whether it pays depends entirely on your break-even ROAS.
Your own costs. Materials, packaging, postage, the label you bought at a different price than the shipping you charged. None of these are Etsy fees, all of them come out of the same $17.65.
Turning this into a number you can track
Three columns in a spreadsheet convert all of the above into something that maintains itself:
- Etsy fees —
= Order total × 9.5% + $0.45(transaction + processing + listing, for a US Etsy Payments seller) - Offsite ads fee —
= IF(attributed = "Yes", Order total × 15%, 0) - Net profit —
= Order total − Etsy fees − Offsite ads fee − Shipping label − COGS
Keep 9.5%, $0.45 and 15% in named cells on a settings tab rather than typing them into every row. Etsy’s schedule changes, your offsite rate drops to 12% the moment you cross $10,000, and you want that to be one edit.
The full build — order log, listing performance, monthly P&L and the tabs that go around them — is in the Etsy seller spreadsheet guide. If your next question is what to charge so these fees stop eating the margin, that is how to price Etsy items to make a profit after fees.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How much does Etsy take from a $20 sale?
For a US seller using Etsy Payments, $2.35 — a 6.5% transaction fee ($1.30), a 3% + $0.25 payment processing fee ($0.85), and the $0.20 listing fee attached to the sale. That is 11.75% of the order. If the sale came through an offsite ad, add another 15% ($3.00), taking Etsy's total cut to $5.35, or 26.75%. None of that includes your materials, your postage or your Etsy Ads spend.
Is there a single percentage Etsy takes?
No, and that is why the question is so hard to answer with one number. Only part of Etsy's cut is percentage-based. The $0.25 processing component and the $0.20 listing fee are flat amounts that do not shrink when your price does, so Etsy's effective take is 18.5% on a $5 order and just under 10% on a $100 order. The cheaper your product, the higher the percentage — which is the core reason low-priced Etsy items are so hard to make work.
Does Etsy take a cut of the shipping I charge?
Yes. Etsy's fee policy applies the 6.5% transaction fee to the total order amount, which includes shipping and gift wrap if you charge the buyer for them. So a $20 item with $5 shipping is a $25 order, and the transaction fee is $1.63, not $1.30. Free shipping does not avoid this — it just moves the postage inside the item price, where the same 6.5% still applies to it.
How do I lower the percentage Etsy takes?
Three levers, in order of effect. Raise average order value — bundles and quantity discounts spread the flat $0.45 across more revenue, which is where the biggest proportional saving lives. Second, avoid unnecessary renewals: every listing renewal is another $0.20, and multi-quantity listings renew automatically each time one unit sells. Third, if your shop has never reached $10,000 in any 365-day period you can opt out of offsite ads, which is the single largest line on any order it touches — but understand you are also switching off the traffic it brings.