PayPal fee calculator

On a $100 payment, PayPal takes $3.98 through Checkout, $3.48 from a standard card payment, $2.99 on goods and services, and $1.00 if the customer pays an invoice by bank. The same customer, the same $100, and a fourfold difference in cost. To net $100 through Checkout you have to charge $104.13. A buyer outside the U.S. adds 1.5% to that rate, and a currency conversion adds another 3% or 4%.

PayPal does not have one fee, and the pages that quote one number disagree with each other. This calculator uses the rates on PayPal’s own U.S. merchant fee page, last updated September 1, 2026, and shows what your payment costs by every route, what to charge to net a target, and what a refund or dispute costs you.

Who reaches for this

Every PayPal commercial fee has the same shape: a percentage of the payment plus a fixed fee per payment, and both are set by the payment type. The calculator applies the percentage and the fixed fee for the type you choose, adds the international fee when the buyer is in another market, adds the conversion spread if PayPal converts currency, and shows what you receive. It handles the two oddities in PayPal’s table: the Pay by Bank invoice rate is capped at $10, and goods and services has no fixed fee.

Three extras go beyond a lookup. The comparison lists the same payment under the other common routes, sorted by cost. The reverse mode returns the amount to charge to net a target, solving the fees inside the price. And the refund panel shows what a refunded payment, a dispute or a chargeback costs, since PayPal does not return the fee you paid to receive the money.

The table below is PayPal’s domestic schedule for U.S. accounts receiving U.S. dollars, from the fee page PayPal last updated on September 1, 2026. The fixed fee is $0.49 for most rows and $0.09 for QR codes, and it differs by currency, so a Canadian or euro account has different numbers.

Beyond the payment fee, PayPal lists: an international fee of 1.50% added to any commercial or invoicing rate, a currency conversion spread of 3% or 4%, a $15 standard dispute fee ($30 for high-volume sellers), a $20 chargeback fee, and a 1.50% fee (minimum $0.50) for an instant withdrawal from a business account. Standard withdrawals to a linked bank are free. There is no monthly fee on a standard account.

What other pages say, and what PayPal’s table says

The rates on pages that rank for this topic differ from each other. Here are the disagreements that matter, next to what PayPal’s table shows.

Some of the gaps are genuine differences between account types or older schedules, and some are copying errors. The goods and services row is the one most worth checking against your own statement. PayPal’s table shows no fixed fee for it, and the calculator follows the table, but if a $100 goods and services payment in your account shows a $3.48 fee, the fixed fee applies to you and the calculator’s toggle will match it.

The rate you pay is set by how the customer chooses to pay, not by what you sell. The same $100 costs $3.98 if the customer clicks the PayPal button, $3.48 if they enter a card, $2.99 if they send it as a goods-and-services payment, and $1.00 if they pay an invoice from their bank. Card payments cost half a point less than the PayPal button.

Invoices are where the choice is worth the most. Pay by Bank is 1% capped at $10, so the cost stops growing at $1,000.

A $5,000 invoice paid by bank saves $164.99 against PayPal and $139.99 against a card. A freelancer with ten $2,500 invoices a year gives up $777 by letting clients pay by PayPal instead of by bank, or $652 if they pay by card. Pay by Bank has eligibility and availability limits, and the customer has to choose it, so it belongs on the invoice as the option you recommend, not as a guarantee. A short note such as “paying by bank saves us both time” is fair. Reducing the number of steps for the client usually matters more than the fee.

Goods and services from a U.S. buyer

The goods-and-services row is the cheapest percentage in the table at 2.99%, and for small payments it is far cheaper than Checkout because it carries no fixed fee. It only applies when the buyer sends money to you as a goods-and-services personal payment. PayPal’s own help notes that a U.S. business account can only receive goods-and-services payments from U.S. PayPal accounts, so international buyers will come through Checkout or an invoice instead.

Which route fits which business

No route is cheapest for everyone. The best one follows from the size of your payments, where your customers are, and how they like to pay.

You rarely control the route completely, because the buyer picks it at checkout. What you do control is which options appear, in what order, and what the invoice recommends. A checkout page that lists cards first and the PayPal button second, and an invoice that mentions bank payment, move part of your volume to cheaper rows without saying a word about fees.

A $0.49 fixed fee is small on a large sale and heavy on a small one. On a $5 Checkout payment, PayPal takes 13.29%. The percentage part falls only slowly, so the effective rate stays above 5% until about $32.

Micropayment pricing, 4.99% plus $0.09, is available by application for sellers with many small payments. It beats Checkout only below $26.67 and beats a standard card payment only below $20. It never beats goods and services, whose flat 2.99% is lower at every amount, but that route is only open to U.S. buyers who choose it. If your average sale is under $20, the application is worth making. If it is $50 or more, it costs you.

The other way to fight the fixed fee is to raise the size of the sale. A $5 add-on that raises the order from $45 to $50 costs 3.49% of $5, or $0.17, in fees and keeps $4.83. Selling a $5 item alone costs $0.66. Bundling, minimum orders and combined shipping all help, and each removes a fixed fee that would otherwise be charged again.

Three months of fees, side by side

Averages hide the effect of volume. Three sellers, each on the route that costs the most or the least for them, show how large the differences get.

The freelancer saves the most in dollars by moving clients to bank payment, and the digital seller saves the most in percentage terms, a third of the fee bill, by applying for micropayment pricing. The store saves the least, because a $35 order sits near the point where routes converge. Each of the three answers is available in a few minutes with the calculator, and each is worth more than most pricing changes.

Selling to a buyer in another market stacks two charges. The first is the international fee: 1.50% added to whatever the domestic rate would have been. The second is a currency conversion spread, 3% or 4%, charged when PayPal has to convert money. The international fee applies even when the buyer pays in U.S. dollars, because it is based on the markets of the two accounts, not on the currency. The conversion spread applies only when PayPal converts money.

The conversion spread is the largest and least visible part. It is built into the exchange rate PayPal shows the buyer or the seller, so it does not appear as a line on a statement and it is easy to miss. The difference between the mid-market rate and the rate PayPal applies is the fee. On a $1,000 invoice from a European client paid by card, with the international fee and a 4% spread, the fees are $85.39, or 8.5%, against the 3.0% a domestic client would cost.

Ways to shrink it

This is the fee that catches sellers out. PayPal does not charge a fee to send a refund, but the fees you paid to receive the original payment are not returned, for full and partial refunds. A $100 Checkout sale that is refunded still costs you $3.98, and a partial refund returns none of the fee either.

These are losses on top of the goods you may not get back. A dispute on a $30 product costs $1.54 in fees plus the $15 dispute fee, $16.54 before the item itself is counted, which is more than half of the sale. That is why disputes matter most on low-priced items. Clear descriptions, tracked shipping, and a quick response to questions cost less than the dispute fees they prevent.

Sellers with a high rate of complaints, reversals or chargebacks can be moved to a higher rate. PayPal’s fee page for its card payment services reserves the right to raise the percentage components by up to 5% per transaction after 30 days’ notice. A single bad month is unlikely to trigger it, but a consistent pattern can, and the cost would dwarf any rate difference in the tables above. Treat the refund rate as a fee driver: a business that refunds 4% of sales pays about 4% of its fees for nothing.

Receiving a payment and moving it to your bank are separate steps. A standard withdrawal to a linked bank account is free when no currency conversion is involved, and typically takes one to three business days. An instant withdrawal on a business account costs 1.50% of the amount, with a $0.50 minimum. Moving $96.02 instantly costs $1.44, and moving $1,000 costs $15.00. For money you do not need today, the wait is free.

Personal accounts have a different instant-transfer schedule, so check which account you have. Withdrawing into a different currency adds the conversion spread again. If your bank account is in dollars and your balance is in dollars, there is no spread on the withdrawal.

Most people price by adding the fee to the price. That undercharges, because the fee is itself a percentage of the higher total. The correct method solves for the price: charge (net + fixed fee) ÷ (1 − percentage rate). To net exactly $100 you have to charge more than $100 plus the fee on $100.

The naive method is short by a few cents at domestic rates and by almost a dollar at international ones, which adds up over a year. The calculator’s reverse mode returns the exact figure for any type and includes the international fee and the conversion spread.

Passing the fee to the customer

There are two different ideas here. One is a single price that already includes your payment costs for every customer and every payment method. That is ordinary pricing, and it is how most businesses recover processing costs. The other is a separate line item or a higher price only for customers who pay with PayPal. PayPal’s user agreement contains a no-surcharge clause that restricts adding a fee for accepting PayPal as a payment method, and some states limit card surcharges too. The wording has changed over time, so read the current agreement before adding anything at checkout.

For a freelancer, the simplest approach is to set rates that include the cost of getting paid. The freelancer profitability calculator shows how much of a rate a given fee percentage takes, and the hourly to salary calculator shows what the remainder is worth.

Sending money as Friends and Family from a PayPal balance or a linked bank account is free in the U.S. It is designed for personal transfers, such as splitting a dinner bill or paying back a roommate. It has a cost when the payment is funded by a card (commonly listed at 2.9% plus $0.30, paid by the sender) or when it is international (5%, with a minimum of $0.99 and a maximum of $4.99, plus a conversion spread).

Its price is not the issue. Friends and Family carries no buyer or seller protection, so a buyer cannot dispute a purchase and a seller cannot rely on PayPal if something goes wrong. Business PayPal accounts in the U.S. can also only receive goods-and-services payments from U.S. accounts, which means a business asking customers to “send it as Friends and Family” is asking them to give up their protection to save the seller a fee.

It is also a tax and account risk. Income from selling is taxable whether or not it arrives through a personal payment, and misclassifying business payments as personal transfers can get an account limited. Personal transfers are not reported on a Form 1099-K the way goods-and-services payments are, but that is a reporting rule, not a reason to avoid tax. The honest use of Friends and Family is for friends and family.

PayPal fees are a business expense. Tax applies to profit, not to gross receipts, and the distinction matters because of Form 1099-K. PayPal issues one when you receive more than $20,000 in payments for goods and services and have more than 200 transactions in a year. The form shows the gross amount, before PayPal’s fees and before any refunds, so it overstates what you earned.

Take a freelancer with $60,000 of PayPal receipts from 300 invoices of $200, each paid through Checkout. PayPal’s fees are $7.47 per invoice, $2,241 for the year. With $17,759 of other business costs, profit is $40,000, and federal tax for a single filer is about $7,427. Taxed on the $60,000 with no expenses, the same person would pay $12,037. The fees are deductible, the reconciliation between the form and your books is yours to make, and the fees are one of the items that belong in it.

Once profit is regular, tax stops being a surprise if you plan for it. The 1099 tax calculator estimates the annual bill, the quarterly estimated tax calculator turns it into payments, and the self-employment tax calculator shows the payroll-tax part. Sellers on marketplaces also pay their fees inside the marketplace, as on Etsy and eBay, where PayPal is no longer a separate charge.

Comparing processors? See the Stripe fee calculator. Selling on a marketplace? See the Etsy fee calculator and the eBay fee calculator, or price a Shopify order with the Shopify order profit calculator.