Etsy fees in the UK: what you really pay on a £20 sale

Etsy’s fees are not complicated one at a time. The trouble is that there are several of them, charged at different moments, one of them in US dollars, with VAT added on top for most small UK sellers. This guide goes through each fee, then works through a real £20 sale so you can see exactly where the money goes.

We run a UK marketplace, so we have included a short comparison at the end. Most of this guide is simply about Etsy, though, because plenty of makers sell there and should price for it properly. Figures were checked on 16 October 2026. Etsy’s own fees page is the authority if anything changes.

Every Etsy fee, in one place

Etsy’s seller fees for UK shops. Checked 16 October 2026.

Scroll sideways to see the whole table →

Fee	How much	Charged on	When
Listing fee	$0.201	Each listing	When you list, when it renews, and when a multi-quantity listing sells
Transaction fee	6.5%	Item price, postage and gift wrap	Every sale
Payment processing	4% + 20p	The full order total	Every sale
Regulatory operating fee	0.48%2	Item price, postage, gift wrap and personalisation	Every sale
Offsite Ads	15% or 12%3	The order, up to $100 per order	Only on sales from an Etsy ad on another site
Currency conversion	2.5%	The sale	Only if your listings are priced in a currency other than your bank’s
VAT on fees	20%	Etsy’s fees	If you are not VAT registered4
Etsy Ads	Your daily budget	Clicks on promoted listings	Optional

¹ Charged in US dollars, so the sterling amount moves with the exchange rate. At current rates it is about 15p.

² Raised from 0.32% on 22 June 2026, as reported by several seller publications.

³ 15% if your shop made under $10,000 in the past year, and you can opt out. 12% once you pass $10,000, and you cannot opt out.

⁴ Etsy adds UK VAT to its seller fees for shops that are not VAT registered. Your monthly statement shows exactly which fees carried VAT.

A £20 sale, fee by fee

Say you sell a £20 candle with £3.50 postage to a customer in the UK, they pay by card, the sale did not come from an ad, and you are not VAT registered. The customer pays £23.50.

• Listing fee: about 15p. You paid it when you listed the candle, and if you have more in stock, Etsy charges it again now to renew the listing.
• Transaction fee: 6.5% of £23.50, which is £1.53. Postage counts, so “free postage” built into your price costs the same.
• Payment processing: 4% of £23.50 plus 20p, which is £1.14.
• Regulatory operating fee: 0.48% of £23.50, which is 11p.
• VAT on those fees: 20% of £2.93, which is 59p.

That is £3.52 in fees, and you keep £19.98, about 85% of what the customer paid.

Now say the same customer found the candle through an Etsy ad on Google. Add the Offsite Ads fee of 15% (£3.53) and VAT on it (71p). The fees come to £7.76 and you keep £15.74, about two thirds. That one sale cost more than twice as much to make, and you had no say over the ad that brought the customer in.

This example assumes VAT applies to all of Etsy’s fees. If your payment processing fee is not charged VAT, you keep about 23p more.

The fees that catch people out

Listing fees on renewals. Listings expire after four months. If auto-renew is on, Etsy charges another 20 cents each time. On a listing with a quantity of five, every sale also charges a new listing fee for the next one. A shop with 100 listings that renew three times a year spends about $60 a year before selling anything.

Postage is included in the transaction fee. 6.5% applies to what you charge for postage too. It is easy to forget when working out whether to offer free delivery.

Offsite Ads you cannot switch off. Once your shop passes $10,000 in sales over a year, you are in Offsite Ads for good, at 12%. Below that, you can opt out in your shop settings. If you are under the threshold, check whether you are in. Many sellers are opted in by default and only notice when they read a statement.

Currency conversion. If your listings are priced in US dollars but your bank account is in pounds, Etsy takes 2.5% to convert every sale. Price in pounds to avoid it.

Payment reserves. Etsy can hold back a share of your sales for a while, usually for new shops or after a run of problems. It is not a fee, but it affects your cash flow when you can least afford it.

How to price for Etsy fees

A simple way to cover Etsy’s standard fees is to work out the price you need, then divide by 0.85. If £17 covers your materials, time, overheads and profit, list at £20 (£17 divided by 0.85). That builds in roughly 15% for fees and VAT on them.

If your shop is in Offsite Ads, the safe divisor is closer to 0.67, because any sale might arrive through an ad. Many sellers settle somewhere in between and accept a thinner margin on ad sales.

Our guide to pricing handmade items goes through the whole calculation, from materials to profit.

Are Etsy’s fees worth it?

For many makers, yes. Etsy has the largest audience of people shopping specifically for handmade, and that audience is worth paying for while you build your own. The question is whether it should be your only shop.

Here is the same £23.50 sale on a few other marketplaces, from our full comparison:

What you keep from the same £23.50 sale.

Marketplace	You keep
Etsy, standard sale	£19.98
Etsy, sale from an Offsite Ad	£15.74
Folksy, free plan	£21.33
Amazon Handmade	£20.56
Crafter’s Market UK, Basic That’s us	£21.77
Crafter’s Market UK, Plus or Premium	£22.95

Plus and Premium have a monthly fee (£5 and £10) instead of commission, so they suit shops selling more than about £100 a month. Most makers who sell well on Etsy keep it and add a lower-fee shop alongside. If that is you, our guide to moving your listings across shows how to bring them over in an afternoon without touching your Etsy shop.

Figures checked on 16 October 2026 against Etsy’s published fees and seller reporting. Etsy changes its fees from time to time, so check its fees and payments policy before you price. Nothing here is tax advice.