PayPal Fee Calculator

This PayPal fee calculator does the easy direction every other one does, the fee on a payment you receive, and the hard direction most of them skip. Take a $100 sale through PayPal Checkout at 3.49% + $0.49 and the fee is $3.98, so you keep $96.02, which is a two-second sum. The direction that actually costs people money is the reverse: you know what you want to keep, and you need the figure to charge so the fee comes out of the customer's payment instead of your profit. Tell it you want a clean $100 to land in your account and it says charge $104.12, not the $103.98 almost everyone reaches for, which loses a little on every payment.

The error this page exists to prevent is quoting yourself a rate PayPal no longer charges. Almost every fee calculator online still defaults to 2.9% + $0.30. PayPal retired that rate on August 2, 2021, and most online commercial transactions went to 3.49% + $0.49 the same day. On a $100 sale the old number says the fee is $3.20 when it is $3.98, which is 78 cents of your money in the wrong column, and it is invisible unless you already knew the current rate. The one-tap buttons here carry PayPal's published US rows with the date they were read, and both parts of the fee stay editable, because the schedule differs by country and account type and it moves again whenever PayPal decides it does.

Everything runs in your browser, nothing you enter is sent anywhere, and it recalculates the instant you change a number.

1. Pick the direction. I'm receiving a payment when you know the amount coming in and want the fee and your net. I want to net an exact amount when you know what you need to keep and want the figure to put on the invoice.
2. Enter your amount. In receive mode that's the payment total before fees. In net mode it's what you want left after PayPal takes its cut.
3. Set your rate. Tap the published row that matches how you get paid, or type your own two numbers if your account is on something else.
4. Read the result. Receive mode gives you the fee and your net. Net mode gives you the price to charge, the fee on that price, and confirms what you keep.
5. Change anything and watch it move. Every field recomputes live, so you can test amounts or compare two rates in seconds.

Leave a box blank and you get a dash, not a broken result. Enter a fee of 100% or more, or a payment so small the fixed fee swallows it whole, and it flags the problem instead of dividing by zero or quietly handing you a negative.

There is no single PayPal fee, which is the thing most calculators paper over. These are the rows for receiving money in the US, read off PayPal's business fee schedule on August 25, 2026.

How the money arrives	Rate
PayPal Checkout and invoicing	3.49% + $0.49
Standard credit and debit card payments	2.99% + $0.49
Send or receive money for goods and services	2.99%, no fixed fee
Micropayments, by application and approval only	4.99% + $0.09

Those four are far enough apart to matter. A $100 sale costs $3.98 through Checkout, $3.48 on a standard card payment, and $2.99 as a plain goods-and-services transfer, so the same sale has a dollar of spread across three rows that all look like "the PayPal fee" from the outside. Micropayments is the odd one, because it is not a rate you switch on. PayPal requires an application and approves the account first, and once it is live it applies to every payment that comes in.

Selling to a buyer registered in another country adds PayPal's international commercial fee of 1.50% on top of the domestic percentage, so a Checkout sale becomes 4.99% + $0.49. A currency conversion sits on top of that again. Put whatever combination you actually pay into the two fields, because the arithmetic below does not care where the numbers came from.

This is the calculation nobody gets right by instinct, so it's worth seeing what the tool does.

Say you want to net $100 at 3.49% + $0.49. You add 3.49% to $100, tack on the 49 cents, and charge $103.98. It feels right, and it comes up fourteen cents short on every invoice. The reason is that the percentage fee is charged on the total you charge, not on the amount you wanted to keep. When you raise the price to cover the fee you've made the payment bigger, so 3.49% now applies to that bigger number, and covering the fee on $100 never covers the fee on the $104-and-change you're really charging.

The fix is to divide instead of add:

charge = (target + fixed fee) / (1 - rate)

For a $100 target at 3.49% + $0.49, add the fixed fee to get $100.49, then divide by (1 - 0.0349), which is 0.9651, and you come out at $104.12. Charge that, PayPal takes $4.12, and you land on $100.00. The naive add-back leaves you at $99.86. Fourteen cents feels like nothing until it's happening across a thousand payments.

Why divide by (1 - rate)? Because if the fee is 3.49% of the final price, the amount you keep is the other 96.51% of that price, minus the flat fee. So the charge is your net divided by 0.9651. Net mode runs that division for you, so you never fall back on the shortcut that quietly loses money. One honest caveat: PayPal rounds each fee to the cent, so the grossed-up charge is a whole number of cents and the tool works the fee out from that rounded figure rather than from an exact fraction, which is how the three rows on screen add up to each other.

That division is pure algebra and it is the one part of this page that cannot go stale. Everything else on it is a number PayPal publishes and can change.

A hardcoded rate is fine right up until it isn't yours. Beyond the country and account-type spread above, nonprofit and high-volume merchants qualify for discounts, some products carry their own pricing, and the whole schedule has been rewritten more than once. Raise or lower the percentage field to what you really pay and the estimate is honest again.

Small payments invert the whole thing. The fixed fee doesn't scale. Forty-nine cents is forty-nine cents whether the sale is $2 or $2,000, so on a $2 sale it is 24.5% of the payment before the percentage even starts. That flat fee is what makes tiny transactions brutal, and it is the whole reason PayPal offers a micropayment rate that trades a higher percentage for a much smaller fixed fee. On that same $2 sale the micropayment rate costs 19 cents against 56 cents at the Checkout rate. It flips past roughly $27, where the extra 1.5 percentage points start to cost more than you save on the flat fee, and a $100 sale runs $5.08 rather than $3.98. To model any of those cases, just put the two numbers you actually pay into the fields.