Etsy Fee & Profit Calculator

How much does Etsy actually take from a sale?

Etsy charges three separate fees on most sales, and it's easy to underestimate how much they add up to when you're only looking at one at a time. There's a flat listing fee (currently $0.20 per listing, charged whether or not it sells, and again every time it renews), a transaction fee (a percentage of the total sale price, including whatever you charge for shipping), and a payment processing fee (a percentage plus a small flat amount, charged on the same total). None of these are optional, and all three come out before you see a cent.

The detail sellers most often miss: the transaction and payment processing fees apply to the full amount the buyer pays, including postage — not just the item price. So if you charge $4.50 for shipping, Etsy takes its percentage cut of that $4.50 too, even though it's money that's supposed to cover a shipping label, not profit.

Which leads to the second thing sellers miss, and it's the more expensive one: the shipping label you buy is a real cost, and it is not the same number as the postage you charged. Charging $4.50 for shipping and paying $4.50 for the label does not cancel out — Etsy still took its percentage of that $4.50 on the way through. It's why "free shipping" listings so often quietly lose money. This calculator asks for both figures separately for exactly that reason: what you charge is revenue, what the label costs is an expense, and only counting the first is how a busy shop ends a month with nothing in it.

Once you've subtracted all three fees, you still have to subtract what the item actually cost you to make: materials, packaging, and — the step handmade sellers skip most often — your own labour, valued at whatever hourly rate you've decided your time is worth. Skip that step and it's easy to end up "profitable" on paper while effectively paying yourself $3/hour.

This calculator does the fee math using the same model our own Etsy Seller Bookkeeping Toolkit spreadsheets use: total fees = listing fee + (revenue × transaction fee %) + (revenue × processing fee % + processing flat fee), where revenue is item price plus postage. The percentages default to Etsy's commonly cited rates, but they're editable, because Etsy's fee schedule varies by seller location and changes over time — always check Etsy's current published fees before relying on this for pricing decisions.

The "what to charge to hit a target margin" section flips the calculation around: instead of starting from a price and seeing what's left, you set the profit margin you want and it solves backward for the item price needed to get there, given everything else stays the same.