How much does eBay take from a sale?

For a UK business seller, eBay takes a category-dependent final value fee on the whole order — item plus postage plus any applicable taxes — plus a fixed 30p or 40p per order and a 0.35% regulatory operating fee. In a 11.9% category that is £8.66 on a £64.95 order, or 13.33% of everything the buyer paid. For a UK private seller the answer is different and much simpler: eBay’s own selling fees page states it is now free for UK-based private sellers to sell, excluding motors. Which of those two you are, and which category you list in, changes the answer more than anything else on this page — so the rest of it works both through, line by line, from eBay’s published fee tables.

The fees eBay actually charges, from eBay

eBay does not have one selling fee. It has a stack of them, and the stack is different depending on three things: whether your account is registered as a business or a private seller, which eBay site you sell on, and which category the item is listed in. Every figure below is taken from eBay’s own published fee pages, all of which are linked at the foot of this page and all of which were read on the date shown there. Nothing here is estimated, and where eBay does not publish a single number — which is most of the category table — this page says so rather than inventing one.

Start with the split that catches most people out. On eBay UK, the selling fees page states that it is now free for UK-based private sellers to sell on eBay, excluding motors — that is, Cars, Motorcycles & Vehicles listings. A UK private seller is not charged a final value fee and is not charged a regulatory operating fee. They still get charged for some things: eBay publishes 300 free listings a month, 35p per listing after that, optional listing upgrades, and an international fee of 3% of the total amount of the sale where the delivery address for the item is outside the UK.

A UK business seller is charged on a completely different schedule, and it is the one most people mean when they ask what eBay takes. Here is that stack.

One line on that table deserves reading twice, because it is the single biggest difference between how sellers think eBay charges and how it actually does: the final value fee is charged on the postage you collect as well as on the item. eBay says so plainly — the total amount of the sale includes the item price, postage, and any applicable taxes. If you charge £4.95 for delivery, that £4.95 is inside the base the percentage is applied to. There is no version of the arithmetic where postage is fee-free.

The category percentage is the whole ball game

eBay UK does not publish one final value fee. It publishes a table, category by category, and the spread across it is wide enough to change whether a product line is worth selling at all. A sample of what eBay’s business seller fees page lists:

That is a sample, not the whole table, and the whole table matters because subcategories move. Health & Beauty sits at 10.9% but eBay lists Hair Extensions at 11.9% and Electronic Smoking at 12.9%. Trainers inside Clothes, Shoes & Accessories carry reduced rates at higher item prices. Before you price anything, open eBay’s business seller fees page and find your exact subcategory, not the top-level one. The gap between 9.9% and 14.9% is five points of gross margin, which on a £40,000 year is £2,000.

Note the tiering pattern while you are there. Several categories charge the headline rate only up to a threshold and then drop sharply — Jewellery & Watches falls from 14.9% to 4% above £1,000, Home, Furniture & DIY steps down twice. This means the effective percentage on a high-value item is lower than the headline, and a seller who prices a £1,500 sofa using the 11.9% headline has overstated their own fees. The arithmetic below shows how to handle that.

Two things about VAT, and then no more about VAT

eBay’s own pages differ on this, and the difference is worth knowing about before you reconcile an invoice. The business seller fees page states that all fees displayed on it are exclusive of VAT. The private seller fees page states that all fees displayed on it are inclusive of VAT at 20%. So a business seller reading a 11.9% rate should expect the charge that actually lands to be that figure plus VAT, where VAT applies to them.

What that means for your accounts, whether you can recover it, and how it appears on your return is a question for your accountant and nobody else. This page does arithmetic; it does not do tax.

A UK business sale, line by line

Here is a real order shape, fully broken down. The assumptions are stated because every one of them changes the answer: eBay UK, a business seller, no shop subscription, the item listed in Home, Furniture & DIY (final value fee 11.9% at this order size), sold to a UK buyer, no promoted listing attached. The item is £60.00 and postage charged to the buyer is £4.95.

So eBay takes 13.33% of everything the buyer paid. Not 11.9% — that is only the headline percentage, and it is applied to a base that includes the postage. The per-order fee, the regulatory operating fee and the insertion fee add a further 1.43 points on an order this size.

And £56.29 is not your money yet either, because you still have to post the thing. If the label actually costs you £4.20, you are left with £52.09 against a £60.00 item. If it costs £6.10 — which happens the moment a parcel goes one gram over a band — you are down to £50.19 and you have quietly funded £1.15 of the buyer’s delivery out of your own margin, plus the fee on top of it.

Why charging for postage is not free money

It is tempting to think of postage as a pass-through: the buyer pays it, you spend it, nothing to see. The fee schedule disagrees. On this order, the £4.95 of postage carried 11.9% + 0.35% = 12.25% of fee, which is 61p. Every £10 of postage you collect as a UK business seller in a 11.9% category costs you £1.23 in fees before you have bought a single stamp.

Now test the alternative. Price the same item at £64.95 with free delivery. The total amount of the sale is still £64.95, so the final value fee is still £7.73 and every other line is identical. Free postage does not save you a penny in fees. What it does is move the postage out of a line the buyer compares and into the price, which is a merchandising decision about search placement and cart abandonment, not a fee decision. Anyone telling you free delivery reduces your eBay fees has not done this sum.

The insertion fee is the one that stings on slow stock

The £7.73 above is only charged when something sells. The 30p is charged when you list. A business seller with no shop subscription listing 200 items a month is spending £60 a month on insertion fees regardless of whether anything sells, and if 40 of those items sell that is an extra £1.50 of cost carried by each successful order. On a 20% gross margin at £60 a unit that is 12.5% of your gross profit gone to listing the items that did not sell. This is the number that makes a shop subscription worth arithmetic rather than instinct, and there is a section on that below.

If you want to sanity-check the whole picture against your own cost of goods rather than just the fee line, the margin calculator takes the £56.29 figure and your unit cost and tells you the gross margin you are really running. The break-even calculator answers the other half: how many of these orders a month it takes to cover the shop subscription, the storage and everything else that does not move with volume.

The same order on eBay.com, with an ad attached

eBay US publishes its own fee schedule and the numbers are not the same. For a US seller without a Store subscription, eBay states the final value fee for most categories is 13.6% on the total amount of the sale up to $7,500 calculated per item, and 2.35% on the portion of the sale over $7,500. The per-order fee is $0.30 for orders of $10.00 or less and $0.40 for orders over $10.00. eBay defines the total amount of the sale as the item price, any handling charges, any shipping costs collected from the buyer, sales tax, and any other applicable fees. You get up to 250 zero insertion fee listings every month, and insertion fees are $0.35 per listing after that.

Now attach advertising, because most sellers do. eBay’s Promoted Listings guidance states that the ad rate is a percentage of an item’s total sale amount — including item price, postage, taxes and any other applicable fees — that you choose between 2% and 100%, and that you will only be charged when the promoted item sells within 30 days of a click on your ad.

Here is a $100 item with $8.95 shipping charged, US seller, no Store, standard category at 13.6%, within the 250 free listings, promoted at a 4% ad rate. Buyer sales tax is excluded from this example for clarity — eBay’s definition of the total amount of the sale includes it, so where tax is collected the fee base and therefore every fee line below is slightly larger.

That is 17.97% of the order gone. Then you buy the label — say $7.40 — and you are at $81.97 against a $100 item. A seller who budgeted “about 13%” is out by five points, which on a 25% gross margin product is a fifth of the profit.

What promoted listings really cost as a share of the sale

The honest way to read a promoted listings ad rate is not as a marketing spend but as an extra slice of final value fee that applies only to the orders it touches. At a 4% ad rate on the order above, the ad fee is $4.36 — which is 29.4% of the $14.82 final value fee, and it pushed the total take from 14.0% to 17.97% of the order.

Every point of ad rate is a point of gross margin, exactly. There is no leverage in it and no volume discount; the percentage lands on the whole order including the shipping you collected. That makes the decision a clean one: promoting at 12% is worth it only if it produces enough additional orders to earn back 12 points of margin across all the orders it is charged on — including the orders that would have happened anyway and simply got charged the ad fee because a click preceded them within 30 days. Because the fee only bites on a sale that follows a click, it is not a budget you can overspend; it is a margin band you have agreed to give up.

A US Store changes the percentage

eBay publishes a separate fee table for Store subscribers, and for most categories it is 12.7% on the total amount of the sale up to $2,500 and 2.35% on the portion above, against 13.6% up to $7,500 without a Store. On an order under $2,500 in a standard category that is 0.9 percentage points of difference — $900 a year on $100,000 of sales, before you have counted a single insertion fee.

Two cautions on that. First, the thresholds differ, so on a very high-value item the comparison is not a simple subtraction and you need to work both schedules through. Second, not every category is lower with a Store: eBay’s Store fee table lists Books, Movies & Music at 15.3% up to $2,500, Jewelry & Watches at 13% up to $5,000 and 7% above, Guitars & Basses at 6.7% up to $2,500, and Video Game Consoles at 7.35%. Look up the category you actually sell in on both pages before you assume a subscription saves you anything.

What you keep on orders of different sizes

The most useful version of this question is not “what percentage” but “what do I bank on a sale of this size”, because the fixed per-order fee means the percentage is not constant. Here is a UK business seller in a 11.9% category — final value fee plus the per-order fee plus the 0.35% regulatory operating fee, no promoted listing, insertion fee excluded because it is charged on listing rather than on the sale.

Read the last column downwards. The effective rate falls from 18.40% to 12.33% purely because the fixed fee is being spread over a bigger order, and it converges on 12.25% — the sum of the two percentage fees — without ever quite reaching it. That is the whole shape of eBay’s pricing in one column: small orders are disproportionately expensive, and they never get cheaper than the percentage floor.

The practical consequence is that a £5 item is a different business from a £50 item. At £5 you lose nearly a fifth of the order before postage and packaging, which is why sellers of low-value items end up bundling, setting minimum order quantities, or leaving the platform. If you are listing a lot of sub-£10 stock, run that first row against your unit cost before you list any more of it.

Working backwards to the price you need

Pricing forwards from cost and then discovering the fees is the wrong order. Split eBay’s fees into a percentage part and a flat part and the sum runs backwards cleanly:

Price = (what you want to keep + flat fees) ÷ (1 − percentage fees)

For that UK business seller in a 11.9% category, the percentage part is 11.9% + 0.35% = 12.25% and the flat part is the £0.40 per-order fee plus the £0.30 insertion fee = £0.70. To bank £50.00:

(£50.00 + £0.70) ÷ (1 − 0.1225) = £50.70 ÷ 0.8775 = £57.78

Check it. £57.78 × 11.9% = £6.88, × 0.35% = £0.20, plus £0.40 plus £0.30 gives £7.78 of fees, leaving exactly £50.00.

Now add a 5% promoted listings ad rate. The percentage part becomes 17.25% and the same target needs £61.27: (£50.00 + £0.70) ÷ 0.8275. That £3.49 gap is what advertising costs expressed the only way that matters — as a price rise you have to survive in a search result full of people who did not take it. Promoted listings is a pricing decision wearing a marketing decision’s clothes.

The same formula runs for the US seller. Without a Store, no ads, the percentage part is 13.6% and the flat part is $0.40, so banking $80.00 needs ($80.00 + $0.40) ÷ 0.864 = $93.06. At a 4% ad rate the divisor becomes 0.824 and the price becomes $97.57. Remember that the price you set is not the base the fee is charged on — postage and tax go in too — so if you charge separately for delivery, run the formula on the whole order and then subtract the postage to get the item price.

If you would rather not run this by hand for every line, the margin calculator does the forward version from your own numbers, and the pattern is the same one used for what Etsy takes, where the percentages differ but the algebra does not.

Shops, international sales and the fees people forget

The final value fee is the one everybody models. The fees below are the ones that turn up on a payout statement and cause an argument with the spreadsheet.

Shop subscriptions and the point at which they pay for themselves

eBay UK publishes its shop subscription tiers with a monthly price and a listing allowance. Those are, as published: Basic at £27 a month with 250 free fixed price listings and 100 free seven-day auction-style listings; Featured at £77 a month with 1,500 free fixed price and 600 auction-style; and Anchor at £437 a month with unlimited fixed price and 1,000 auction-style. With no shop, eBay lists no free allocation for business sellers and charges 30p per listing.

That gives an arithmetic answer to “is a shop worth it” on the insertion fee alone:

Break-even listings per month = shop subscription ÷ insertion fee per listing

For Basic: £27 ÷ £0.30 = 90 listings a month. List 90 items in a month and the subscription has paid for itself in avoided insertion fees; list 250 and you have avoided £75 of insertion fees for £27, a saving of £48. Above 250 listings the marginal ones are charged again, which is where Featured starts to make sense: £77 ÷ £0.30 = 257 listings to break even, and its allowance runs to 1,500. Anchor needs 1,457 listings a month to justify itself on insertion fees alone, so if you are looking at Anchor the decision is being made on something other than listing fees and you should be explicit about what.

Two honest caveats. First, this break-even counts insertion fees only — whatever else a subscription tier includes has to be valued separately and is not something this page can put a number on. Second, eBay’s shop subscription page publishes monthly pricing; if you want annual billing terms, read them there rather than assuming a discount. In the US the calculation is different again, because as shown above a Store also changes the final value fee percentage in many categories, so the subscription can pay for itself on fee rate rather than on listing volume.

Selling abroad costs more than you think

There are two separate charges here and they stack. For UK-registered business sellers eBay publishes an international fee of 1.05% for Eurozone and Northern Europe, 1.8% for the US and Canada, and 2.0% for all other countries. On top of that, a currency conversion charge of 2.5% applies for UK-registered sellers where a conversion happens.

Put that on the £64.95 order from earlier, sold to a buyer in Australia with a conversion: 2.0% is £1.30 and 2.5% is £1.62, so £2.92 on top of the £8.66 domestic stack. Total take £11.58, or 17.83%, and you bank £53.37 before an international label that will cost several times the domestic one. The effective rate on an overseas order in this category is roughly four and a half points worse than the same order sold at home.

The private seller schedule is different again: eBay charges UK private sellers an international fee of 3% of the total amount of the sale where the delivery address is outside the UK, on an account that pays no final value fee at all. For US-registered sellers, eBay publishes an international fee of 1.65% of the total amount of the sale where the delivery address or the buyer’s registered address is outside the US and eBay International Shipping is not used, and a currency conversion charge of 3%.

The dispute fee

eBay charges business sellers £14 per dispute. This is charged per payment dispute, and it is separate from the money you refund. A £64.95 order that goes wrong is not a £64.95 problem: it is the refund, plus £14, plus the postage you already bought, plus the item if it does not come back. Two disputes a month is £336 a year that never appears in anyone’s margin model.

Optional upgrades, and the quiet ones

eBay sells listing upgrades — subtitles, gallery enhancements, reserve prices, extra categories, international site visibility — and each is priced separately on eBay’s fee pages. They are individually small and collectively invisible: a £2 subtitle on 200 listings is £400. Whatever you are using, price it per listing and multiply by your listing count before you decide it is cheap.

Then there is the category of thing that is not an eBay fee at all but eats the same margin: the packaging, the label, the returns you accept out of goodwill, the stock that never sells, and the hours. None of that is on a fee page, which is exactly why it gets left out. A shop that tracks fee-aware proceeds per item and reviews it monthly finds the losing lines in weeks rather than in a year-end accounts meeting.

The one-line version

For a UK business seller, budget your category rate plus 0.35% plus 40p, all charged on the item and the postage, and add the ad rate on anything promoted. For a UK private seller, eBay’s page says selling is free excluding motors. For a US seller without a Store, budget 13.6% plus 40p on the whole order including tax. Everything else on this page is the detail underneath those three sentences.

What this page cannot tell you

Four things here depend on facts this page does not have, and a number invented to fill the gap would be worse than the gap.

Your category rate. eBay UK publishes dozens of final value fee percentages and many of them are tiered by item price, with subcategories that differ from their parent. The sample table above is a sample. Open eBay’s business seller fees page, find the exact subcategory your listing sits in, and use that number — not the one for the department it belongs to.

Your seller type and your site. The difference between a private and a business account on eBay UK is the difference between no final value fee and a double-digit one. Which one you should be registered as is determined by what you are doing, not by which is cheaper, and eBay and HMRC both have views on it. That is a question for your accountant.

VAT on the fees. eBay’s business seller page states its fees exclusive of VAT and its private seller page states them inclusive of VAT at 20%. What that means for your accounts and your return depends entirely on your own VAT position. Ask your accountant; do not take a number off a guide.

Whether the price works at all. The arithmetic on this page tells you what lands in your account after eBay has taken its cut. It says nothing about whether the item was worth sourcing, whether the postage band you assumed holds, what your return rate is, or what your time is worth. Those numbers are yours, they change monthly, and they are the reason a fee calculation done once at launch stops being true by the second quarter.

Arithmetic and general information only — not financial, tax, legal or investment advice. Your own figures, and your own accountant, decide what any of this means for you.

Frequently asked questions

How much does eBay take from a sale in the UK?

It depends on your account type. eBay's UK selling fees page states that it is now free for UK-based private sellers to sell on eBay, excluding motors, so there is no final value fee. A UK business seller pays a category-dependent final value fee on the total amount of the sale, which eBay says includes the item price, postage and any applicable taxes, plus a per-order fee of 30p on orders of 10 pounds or less or 40p above that, plus a regulatory operating fee of 0.35%. In an 11.9% category a 64.95 pound order costs 8.66 pounds in fees, or 13.33%.

Does eBay charge fees on postage and shipping?

Yes. eBay states that the final value fee is calculated on the total amount of the sale, which includes the item price, postage and any applicable taxes. On eBay US the total amount of the sale is defined as the item price, any handling charges, any shipping costs collected from the buyer, sales tax and any other applicable fees. For a UK business seller in an 11.9% category, every 10 pounds of postage collected carries about 1.23 pounds of fees. Switching to free delivery does not reduce the fees, because the fee base is the whole order either way.

How much does eBay take from a 100 dollar sale?

For a US seller without a Store subscription in a standard category, eBay publishes a final value fee of 13.6% on the total amount of the sale up to 7,500 dollars plus a per-order fee of 40 cents on orders over 10 dollars. On a 100 dollar item with 8.95 dollars of shipping collected, the total amount of the sale is 108.95 dollars, the final value fee is 14.82 dollars and the per-order fee is 40 cents, so eBay takes 15.22 dollars and you bank 93.73 dollars before you buy the label. Sales tax, where collected, is included in eBay's fee base and would raise every line.

What do promoted listings actually cost on eBay?

eBay states that the Promoted Listings ad rate is a percentage of the item's total sale amount, including item price, postage, taxes and any other applicable fees, that you choose between 2% and 100%, and that you are only charged when the promoted item sells within 30 days of a click on your ad. Every point of ad rate is one point of the order taken off your margin, with no volume discount. On a 108.95 dollar order a 4% ad rate is 4.36 dollars, which pushes the total eBay take from 13.97% of the order to 17.97%.

When does an eBay shop subscription pay for itself?

On insertion fees alone, divide the monthly subscription by the 30p insertion fee a UK business seller pays without a shop. eBay publishes Basic at 27 pounds a month with 250 free fixed price listings, which breaks even at 90 listings a month; Featured at 77 pounds with 1,500 free listings, breaking even at 257; and Anchor at 437 pounds with unlimited fixed price listings, needing 1,457. In the US the calculation differs because eBay's Store fee table also lowers the final value fee percentage in many categories, for example 12.7% up to 2,500 dollars in most categories against 13.6% without a Store.

Sources

• eBay UK Help — Fees for business sellers (final value fee by category, per-order fee, regulatory operating fee, insertion, international and currency conversion charges, dispute fee, VAT treatment) — checked 2026-09-25
• eBay UK Help — Selling fees and fees for private sellers (free selling for UK private sellers excluding motors, free listing allowance, 3% international fee, non-UK private seller rates) — checked 2026-09-25
• eBay UK Help — eBay Shop subscriptions (Basic, Featured and Anchor monthly prices and listing allowances) — checked 2026-09-25
• eBay UK Help — Promoted Listings general campaign strategy (ad rate range, what the ad rate is charged on, when the ad fee applies) — checked 2026-09-25
• eBay US Help — Selling fees (13.6% final value fee without a Store, per-order fee, definition of total amount of the sale, zero insertion fee listings, 1.65% international fee) — checked 2026-09-25
• eBay US Help — Store selling fees (Store subscriber final value fee percentages by category and currency conversion charge) — checked 2026-09-25

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