eBay fee calculator

On a $50 item with $5 shipping in most categories, a seller without a Store pays $7.88: a 13.6% final value fee on the $55 total ($7.48) plus a $0.40 order fee. That leaves $47.12 before the item and postage, and the fee is 15.8% of the item price. Add 8% sales tax and the fee rises to $8.48, because eBay charges its percentage on the tax too.

The calculator uses eBay’s own U.S. fee tables, including the category-by-category Store rates, and reproduces eBay’s published worked examples to the cent. It also handles the parts other tools skip: fee cliffs where the rate drops on the whole sale, the break-even sales for a Store, the ad rate you can afford, and the price that nets the profit you want.

Who reaches for this

Every eBay fee starts from the same base. eBay adds up what the buyer pays, including shipping and sales tax, and applies a percentage that depends on the category and on your Store level. It then adds a flat per-order fee, and any fees for optional services or seller-performance problems. The calculator follows that sequence, subtracts your item cost, postage and packaging, and shows profit and margin.

Two features go beyond a fee lookup. The reverse mode takes the profit you want and returns the lowest price that delivers it, taking the fee base into account, since a higher price also raises the fee. And the Store panel compares the rate in your category with and without a Basic Store and reports the monthly sales at which the subscription pays for itself. Both use the same rate tables that are on eBay’s help pages.

The rates below come from eBay’s Selling fees and Store selling fees pages as of September 2026. The last broad change took effect on February 14, 2025, when final value fees rose by up to 0.35 points in most categories. That moved the standard rate from 13.25% to 13.6%, so any page still quoting 13.25% for most categories, or 12.35% for Store sellers, is out of date.

Every rate is followed by a per-order fee of $0.30 when the order total is $10 or less and $0.40 above. The thresholds differ by Store level: without a Store, the 2.35% rate starts above $7,500, and with a Basic or higher Store it starts above $2,500 in most categories. Premium, Anchor and Enterprise Stores use the same table as Basic. The list above covers the categories most sellers use; eBay’s Store page lists more, including cameras and photo accessories, tires and vehicle parts.

Insertion fees and Store subscriptions

Sellers without a Store get 250 zero-insertion-fee listings a month, then pay $0.35 per listing. A Store subscription raises the free allowance and lowers the fee after it. The subscription is billed monthly whichever way you renew.

A Starter Store is the easy one to misjudge. It lowers the insertion fee by five cents but its final value fees are the same as having no Store, so it saves nothing on sales. The lower rates begin at Basic.

How to check the numbers

eBay publishes worked examples, and the calculator reproduces them exactly. A $400 item with free shipping and 6% sales tax has a $424 total, so the fee is 13.6% of $424 plus $0.40, or $58.06, and with a $0.35 insertion fee $58.41. The seller keeps $341.59. A $9,500 trading card with free shipping and 6% tax has a $10,070 total, and the fee is 13.25% of $7,500, plus 2.35% of $2,570, plus $0.40, or $1,054.55. A Basic Store handbag at $400 pays 13%, so $55.52. Match your own statement against these if a fee looks wrong.

Auctions and optional upgrades

Auction-style and fixed-price sales pay the same final value fee. The differences are in the extras. A reserve price costs $5 or 7.5% of the reserve, whichever is greater, up to $250, and it is charged whether or not the item sells. A one-day or three-day auction adds $1. Bold costs $2 on an auction and $4 on a fixed-price listing. A subtitle costs $1.50 on an auction up to a $150 start and $3.00 above, and $2 or $6 on a fixed-price listing. Gallery Plus costs $0.35 on an auction and $1 on a fixed-price listing, and is free in art, antiques, collectibles and pottery and glass.

Upgrades are charged at listing and are not refunded if the item does not sell, so they belong on items with enough margin to absorb them. A $6 subtitle on a $200 jacket is 3% of the price before any final value fee. Basic and higher Stores also have auction insertion fees credited back when the auction sells, which softens the cost of testing prices with auctions.

eBay defines the fee base as the total amount of the sale: the item price, any handling charges, shipping collected from the buyer, sales tax, and other applicable fees. That has three practical effects.

Here is the effect of tax on the running example, a $50 item with $5 shipping. With no tax, the fee base is $55 and the fees are $7.88. At 8% sales tax the base is $59.40 and the fees are $8.48, sixty cents more, and the seller’s payout falls from $47.12 to $46.52. The seller’s state does not matter here. The buyer’s state does, which is why the same item costs a seller slightly different fees in different orders.

Two exceptions on shipping

When you offer 1-day or international shipping alongside a cheaper or free domestic option, the fee base uses the cheapest domestic option. With eBay International Shipping, the final value fee on shipping is calculated on your cost to send the item to the U.S. hub, not on what the buyer pays for international delivery, and a free domestic option means no final value fee on shipping. Authenticated sneakers sold with a free label have no fee on the flat shipping charge.

Payment processing is already in the fee

eBay collects payment itself, and its help page says sellers do not have to worry about third-party processing fees. Older calculators that add a PayPal fee of 2.9% plus $0.30 double-count. If a tool shows a separate processing line for an eBay sale, check its date.

Most eBay rates work like tax brackets: the lower rate applies only to the slice above a threshold. A few categories work differently. Above the threshold, the lower rate applies to the whole sale. Three categories do this: jewelry and watches at $5,000, women’s bags and handbags at $2,000, and coins and bullion at $7,500. The effect is a jump in what you keep.

Raise a jewelry piece from $5,000 to $5,001 and the fee falls by $300 while the price rises by a dollar. The comparison that matters is with lower prices. A piece listed at $4,900 nets $4,164.60 after the 15% fee and the order fee. At $5,001 it nets $4,550.51, which is $386 more for a buyer price only $101 higher. The same pattern holds for handbags, where $2,001 keeps $205.91 more than $1,900 would, and for bullion, where $7,501 keeps $582 more than $7,400. In each case the last hundred dollars below the cliff are the most expensive you can sell.

The threshold is applied to the total amount of the sale, not the listed price. A handbag at $1,950 with $30 of shipping and 8% sales tax has a $2,138.40 total, which is over $2,000, so it pays 9%. The same handbag in a state with no sales tax totals $1,980 and pays 15%, and the seller keeps about $105 less. Buyer location can push a sale across the line. Because the line depends on the buyer, pricing to stay just under a cliff is not reliable, but knowing where it sits explains fees that look inconsistent between two similar sales.

Other threshold rules

Athletic shoes have a cliff at $150. At $150 or more the fee is 8% with no per-order fee and no insertion fee, while below $150 it is 13.6%. A $160 pair pays $12.80. A $140 pair pays $19.04 plus $0.40, and $0.35 if you have used your free listings. Watches, parts and accessories use three marginal tiers instead: 15% to $1,000, 6.5% from $1,000 to $7,500 and 3% above. Heavy equipment, commercial printing presses and food trucks pay 3% to $15,000 and 0.5% above, with a $20 insertion fee.

A Basic Store costs $27.95 a month, or $21.95 on a yearly plan. It pays for itself when the fees it saves exceed that cost. The saving depends entirely on your category, because the Store discount is category-specific. For most categories the difference is 0.9 points, from 13.6% to 12.7%. For electronics it is far larger.

The figures assume an average order of $60. A reseller of laptops selling $6,000 a month saves 6.25 points, or $375 a month, against a $27.95 fee. A seller of general merchandise at $6,000 a month saves $54 and clears the fee comfortably, but at $1,500 a month saves $13.50 and does not. A book seller saves nothing on the rate and would only benefit from the larger free-listing allowance.

Do the arithmetic for your own mix. Take last month’s sales in each category, apply the two rates and subtract the subscription. The calculator’s Store panel does it for the category you choose. There are also indirect benefits worth pricing separately: a Basic Store gets 1,000 free fixed-price listings a month in every category against 250 without one, a lower per-listing fee after that, and auction insertion fees credited back when an auction sells.

Two cautions. The rate table only applies to categories where eBay lists a Store rate, so confirm yours on eBay’s Store fees page before subscribing. And a Store adds monthly overhead that does not shrink when sales do. A seller with lumpy sales should compare the yearly plan’s lower price against the risk of a slow quarter.

Promoted Listings

With the general campaign strategy you set an ad rate between 2% and 100%. eBay charges that percentage of the total amount of the sale, including shipping and tax, when the promoted item sells within 30 days of a click. The ad fee stacks on top of the final value fee. A 5% ad rate on the running example’s $55 total adds $2.75 and takes total fees to $10.63.

Two details are easy to miss. The base includes shipping and tax, so a 5% rate costs more than 5% of the item price. And eBay’s current overview says the fee is charged when a buyer purchases an item from a general ad that any buyer clicked in the last 30 days, so the buyer who clicked and the buyer who purchased need not be the same person. That widens what you pay for, which is why many sellers now keep rates low and watch the numbers.

The ad rate you can afford

Your profit before advertising sets a ceiling. In the example, the item cost $18, postage $6 and packaging $1. The sale nets $47.12, leaving $22.12 of profit, or 40% of the $55 total. Any ad rate above 40.2% turns the sale into a loss. That is the break-even. A more useful line is your profit target. To keep $15, the ad rate cannot exceed 12.9%. At 5%, profit is $19.37. Compare that with the extra sales the ads actually bring: a promoted sale that would not have happened is worth its full profit, and one that would have happened anyway costs you the ad fee for nothing.

Fees that apply in specific situations

The performance surcharges are the expensive ones. On a $100 sale, Below Standard raises the fee from $14.00 to $20.00, a 43% increase, and it applies to every sale in the following month. A Below Standard account and a Very High “not as described” rate do not stack: eBay charges only the Below Standard fee. Keeping the seller dashboard clean is a cost-control measure as much as a reputation one.

The effective fee rate is not 13.6%. The order fee is fixed, so it weighs most on cheap items. With no shipping or tax, the total fee as a share of the item price is:

A $5 item pays nearly 20% of its price to eBay before postage, which is why low-priced items usually need to be bundled or sold in lots. Above $100 the effective rate settles at the category rate.

Pricing backward from the profit you want

Fees rise with the price, so working backward is not a simple subtraction. For the example item, which cost $18 with $6 of postage and $1 of packaging, the price that nets $15 of profit with $5 of shipping charged is $41.76. If you offer free shipping and charge nothing for it, the price needed is $46.76. With a 5% ad rate on the sale, the price rises to $44.64. The calculator solves this for any category and Store level, and it accounts for a cliff if the price crosses one.

The Store effect on a real item

A $100 consumer electronics item that cost $60, with $8 of postage and $1 of packaging, nets $17.00 with no Store, since fees are $14.00. With a Basic Store the fee is 9.35% plus $0.40, $9.75, and profit is $21.25. That is 25% more profit on the same sale, a larger effect than most price changes.

Refunds and returns

If you refund a buyer or cancel a sale you may be eligible for fee credits under eBay’s fee credits policy, but the rules have conditions, and the calculator does not model them. Treat return-heavy categories as carrying an extra cost: the postage, the time and any fee not credited. The Below Standard and “not as described” surcharges show what eBay thinks of high return rates.

eBay fees are a business expense, and so are the cost of the goods you sell, postage and packaging. Tax applies to profit, not to gross sales. That distinction matters because of Form 1099-K. Platforms report gross payments to the IRS when you receive more than $20,000 and have more than 200 transactions in a year. The form shows the gross amount and does not know your costs.

Take a single seller with $60,000 of gross eBay sales. The cost of goods was $28,000, eBay fees $8,400, postage $6,000 and other costs $1,500, so profit is $16,100. Federal tax on that profit is about $2,275, all of it self-employment tax at 14.13%, because the profit is below the standard deduction. If the same seller reported the $60,000 without the expenses, the tax would be $12,037. The form is a starting point for a reconciliation, not the answer.

Two things follow. Keep records of what you paid for every item and every shipping label, since the deduction is only as good as the documentation. And if your profit is steady, treat the tax as a cost of doing business: the 1099 tax calculator estimates the annual bill, the quarterly estimated tax calculator splits it into payments, and the self-employment tax calculator shows the payroll-tax piece. If you drive to buy inventory, the mileage deduction calculator prices those trips.

Selling personal items at a loss, such as used furniture or clothing, is a different case. It is not a business, and the loss is generally not deductible, but a 1099-K can still arrive for it. Keep the purchase records that show the items sold for less than you paid, so the form’s gross figure can be matched to your return.

Comparing channels? See Etsy’s fees, the Amazon FBA calculator, and the Etsy vs. Shopify vs. Amazon comparison.