Stripe fee calculator

On a $100 online card payment Stripe takes $3.20 and you keep $96.80. If the card is international the fee is $4.70, and if Stripe also converts the currency it is $5.70. The same $100 paid by ACH bank debit costs $0.80. To net $100 on a domestic card you have to charge $103.30. Those are Stripe’s own U.S. rates, and they stack in ways the headline “2.9% + 30¢” does not show.

This calculator uses the standard pricing on Stripe’s U.S. page, checked on September 19, 2026. It prices one payment by any route, adds the modifiers and products that stack on it, shows what a refund or dispute costs, works out what to charge to net a target, and sets the result beside PayPal’s rates for the same amount.

Who reaches for this

Stripe’s fee is a percentage plus a fixed amount, and both depend on the payment method. Modifiers and products then add percentages on top. The calculator starts with the base rate for the payment type you pick, applies the cap where there is one, adds the international and currency-conversion modifiers when they apply, and adds any product you use on the payment: Billing, an invoice fee, or Tax Basic.

You can think of it as a Stripe pricing calculator that runs both ways. Enter what the customer pays and it shows what you keep. Enter what you want to keep and it returns the charge, with every add-on inside the price. It also lists the same amount on PayPal’s three common rows, and prices a refund or dispute, since both leave you paying fees for money you no longer have.

The rates below are from the standard-pricing section of Stripe’s U.S. page. Stripe lists no setup fees, monthly fees or hidden fees on standard pricing, and lists a single rate for cards and wallets.

Disputes have their own fees. A dispute received costs $15.00. A dispute you respond to manually costs another $15.00, returned if you win. Smart Disputes, which prepares the evidence for you, costs 30% of the disputed amount for each dispute you win, and nothing beyond the received fee on a loss. Standard payouts to your bank are free.

Stripe also offers custom pricing for large volumes, including interchange-plus pricing, volume discounts and multi-product discounts. Its page says eligibility varies by market and does not publish a threshold, so any pages that name a specific monthly volume are guessing.

A Stripe pricing calculator in one line

For a domestic online card payment: fee = 2.9% of the amount + $0.30. The effective rate is that fee divided by the amount, so it falls from 8.9% on a $5 sale to 3.2% at $100 and settles near 3% above $1,000. The 30-cent fixed fee is why small tickets cost far more than the headline percentage.

Failed and declined payments

Stripe’s standard rates are quoted per successful transaction. A card that is declined, or a payment that fails, does not incur the processing fee. The costs of failed payments show up elsewhere: lost sales, retries on subscriptions, and, for ACH, returns that arrive days later. Radar’s fraud screening, which has its own per-screen price on some plans, and dispute fees are the other place failed and fraudulent payments cost real money.

Flat rate versus custom pricing

The standard rate is a flat price that bundles the card networks’ interchange, network fees and Stripe’s margin into one percentage. Its advantage is predictability: you know the fee on any payment before it happens. Its cost is that you pay the same percentage whether a card is cheap or expensive to process. Custom pricing, including interchange-plus, separates those parts, so a business with a large volume of low-cost debit cards can pay less than the flat rate, and one with many premium or international cards may not.

The way to find out is to look at a month of your own statements. Total the fees Stripe charged, divide by volume, and compare that effective rate with what a quote offers. If the blended rate you would pay is lower by even a few tenths of a percent, it is worth asking, since on $500,000 a year a tenth of a point is $500. Stripe publishes no threshold for when it will discuss custom pricing, so the request itself is the only test.

Stripe’s pricing gets copied, summarized and mixed with older versions. Pages that rank for this topic disagree with each other on several rates, and some of the disagreements are errors. Here is where they diverge from Stripe’s page.

The first two rows matter most because they reverse two numbers. An international card that also needs conversion costs 5.4% plus 30 cents, whichever way the pages describe it, but a seller who budgets 1% for the international part and 1.5% for the conversion gets the total right by accident and each part wrong. A page that tells you Amex costs more, or that a volume discount begins at a specific figure, is repeating something Stripe’s pricing page does not say. Check your own statement, since a custom agreement can differ from anything published.

ACH Direct Debit is 0.8% with a $5 cap. The cap is reached at $625, and above that the fee stays at five dollars however large the payment gets. A card payment keeps growing.

An agency that bills eight $6,000 invoices a month pays $1,394.40 in card fees and $40.00 through ACH. Add Stripe Invoicing’s 0.4% per paid invoice, and the monthly bill for $48,000 of invoices is $1,586.40 by card (3.31%) and $232.00 by bank (0.48%). The difference is $1,354.40 a month, or $16,252.80 a year. That is a very large saving for changing the default payment method on an invoice.

ACH has costs that do not show in the fee. It works with U.S. bank accounts, needs the customer’s authorization, and settles more slowly than a card. A payment can also fail or be reversed after it looks complete, so a seller should decide how long to wait before treating a large ACH payment as final. Those are reasons to use it for invoices, subscriptions with a trusted customer base and business-to-business payments, not for one-off consumer checkouts where speed and conversion matter more than fees.

Cards in person

Terminal payments are cheaper because a present card is safer: 2.7% plus 5 cents. On a $100 sale that is $2.75 against $3.20 online. Tap to Pay on a phone adds 10 cents per authorization, so $2.85. International cards on Terminal add 1.5%. Keyed-in card numbers cost more everywhere, which is why the calculator prices a manually entered online card at 3.4% plus 30 cents, $3.70 on $100.

The two processors publish rates in different shapes, so the comparison depends on the size of the payment. All figures below are domestic U.S. payments in dollars, with PayPal on its schedule of September 1, 2026.

Stripe beats PayPal’s Checkout button and standard card payment at every amount in the table. The only PayPal row that is ever cheaper is goods and services, which PayPal lists at 2.99% with no fixed fee. Against Stripe’s 2.9% plus 30 cents, the two are equal at $333.33. Below that, goods and services costs less, and above it Stripe does. That row is available only when a U.S. buyer sends the money as a personal goods-and-services payment, which is not how most online checkouts work.

A shop with 20 orders of $50 a month pays $35.00 through Stripe and $44.70 through PayPal’s Checkout button, a $9.70 difference. That is small at low volume and material at scale: at 2,000 such orders it is $970 a month. The comparison also changes with international buyers, since both processors add 1.5% for them, and with currency conversion, where PayPal’s spread is 3% to 4% against Stripe’s 1%. The PayPal fee calculator works through PayPal’s rows in the same detail.

Price is one input. PayPal is a payment method many buyers trust and have a balance in, and offering it can lift conversion even when the fee is higher. Many stores offer both, and the practical question is which one to put first on the page. The calculator lets you price the same amount both ways before you decide.

Which route fits which business

The cheapest option depends on the size of the payment, who is paying, and how much friction the customer will accept.

Few businesses have one answer. A software company can take cards at checkout, ACH on annual invoices and Terminal at a conference, and each is priced correctly by the same calculator. What matters is that the default a customer sees is not the most expensive one for a payment that could have used a cheaper route.

Base rate is the smaller part of a Stripe bill for many businesses. Each modifier and product adds a percentage to every payment it touches. Here are three monthly bills computed with the same engine as the calculator.

The assumptions matter. The SaaS bill has 20% of charges on international cards and 10% needing conversion, and every charge carries the 0.7% Billing fee: $1,460 of base fees, $120 for international cards, $40 for conversion and $280 for Billing. The store has 5% international orders and Tax Basic at 0.5% on every order. The agency bills through Stripe Invoicing at 0.4% with no cap assumed.

Two things stand out. Billing alone raises a $40 subscription charge from $1.46 to $1.74, and the effective rate on the SaaS example is 4.75% against a headline of 2.9%. And the agency example shows the largest lever in the whole schedule: the same revenue costs $1,354.40 less a month when clients pay by bank. If your product is subscriptions, the MRR and ARR calculator and the SaaS break-even calculator show how a point of processing cost moves margin.

Where the money goes

Breaking each bill into base fees, modifiers and add-ons shows which lever to pull first.

For the SaaS business the base fee is 77% of the bill, so moving annual plans to ACH would matter most. The store’s Tax Basic fee of $165 a month is larger than its international modifier, which suggests checking whether the sales tax service is doing work the business would otherwise pay for. The agency’s add-on cost is the same on either route, and only the base fee changes. The order of the levers is a reminder that the percentage on the price list is rarely the biggest number on the statement.

Managed Payments

Managed Payments makes Stripe the merchant of record. It takes on indirect tax compliance in more than 75 countries, fraud prevention, dispute management and customer support. It costs 3.5% on top of the payments fees, so an online card payment is 6.4% plus 30 cents: $6.70 on $100. To net $100 you would charge $107.16. For a business selling digital goods across many countries, that may be cheaper than doing the tax work itself. For one selling only in the United States, it is a large premium.

Adaptive Pricing and local currency

Stripe’s Adaptive Pricing, included with payments, shows customers prices in their own currency. Stripe’s page says customers are presented a conversion fee starting at 2%. The 1% conversion charge in the schedule applies when conversion is required on your account, so check Stripe’s currency documentation for how the two interact on your account before assuming either number.

Stripe does not charge a fee to issue a refund on most payment methods, but the processing and currency conversion fees from the original payment are not returned. A $100 card payment refunded in full still costs you $3.20. A refund is therefore not free even when the customer is right, and a business with a 5% refund rate pays about 5% of its processing fees for nothing.

A dispute, also called a chargeback, costs more, and the outcome matters. The table shows what a $100 dispute costs beyond the processing fee.

Responding manually costs $15 when you lose and gets the $15 back when you win, so it is the cheapest way to fight a dispute if you have the evidence and the time. Smart Disputes costs $30 on a $100 dispute you win, on top of the $15 received fee. It is worth it when the amount is large and your time is worth more than the fee, and when it is small it is often better to respond yourself or accept the loss.

Prevention is cheaper than either. Clear billing descriptors, tracked shipping, prompt refunds for unhappy customers and a visible cancellation path all reduce disputes, and Stripe lists dispute-prevention tools, some included and some at $15 to $29 per resolution. A refund costs $3.20 on a $100 sale. A dispute costs at least $15 and can cost the sale.

Stripe moves your balance to your bank on a schedule you choose, and standard payouts are free. An Instant Payout to an eligible debit card or bank account costs 1.5% of the amount with a minimum of 50 cents. Moving $96.80 instantly costs $1.45, and moving $1,000 costs $15.00. For money you do not need today, the schedule is free, so instant payouts are worth paying for only when cash flow forces the timing.

Instant currency conversion, if you settle in a different currency, starts at 0.5% of the converted amount, so a multi-currency balance can defer that cost. If your bank account and your balance are both in dollars, there is no conversion on payout at all.

Adding the fee to the price undercharges, because the fee is itself a percentage of the higher total. The exact charge is (net + fixed fee) ÷ (1 − total percentage). To net $100 you have to charge more than $100 plus the fee on $100.

The gap between the two columns is small on a domestic card and grows as the total percentage rises: $0.33 on the international example and $0.46 on Managed Payments. Over thousands of payments it is real money, and getting it right is one line of arithmetic that the calculator does for any combination.

Building fees into a price is ordinary pricing. Adding a card surcharge is different, since card networks and some states restrict it and require disclosure. If you want to cover processing costs, the safest route is a price that covers them for every customer. The freelancer profitability calculator shows how much of a rate a given fee percentage takes, and the Shopify order profit calculator does the same for a store order.

Stripe’s fees are a business expense, and tax applies to profit, not to gross receipts. Stripe issues a Form 1099-K 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 Stripe’s fees and before refunds, so it overstates what you earned.

Take a single seller with $60,000 of Stripe receipts from 1,200 payments of $50. The fees are $1.75 a payment, $2,100 for the year. With $17,900 of other business costs, profit is $40,000 and federal tax is about $7,427. Taxed on the $60,000 with no expenses, the same seller would pay $12,037. The fees are one of the items to reconcile between the form and your books.

Once profit is regular, plan for the tax. The 1099 tax calculator estimates the annual bill and the quarterly estimated tax calculator turns it into payments. The self-employment tax calculator shows the payroll-tax piece. Marketplace sellers also pay their fees inside the marketplace, as on Etsy and eBay.

Comparing processors? See the PayPal fee calculator. Selling on a marketplace? See Etsy and eBay.