Stripe Fee Calculator: What You Keep, and What to Charge to Keep It

How much does Stripe charge per transaction? 2.9% + $0.30 on a standard domestic online card charge — $3.20 on $100, leaving you $96.80. Debit and credit are priced identically online; Stripe's pricing page publishes one domestic card rate, not a cheaper debit tier. There's no monthly fee, setup fee, or PCI fee on the standard plan. What moves your real number is everything around that headline rate: +1.5% international, +1% currency conversion, +0.5% keyed-in, 2.7% + $0.05 in person, and 0.8% capped at $5 on ACH. The fee you're most likely to overlook isn't on the rate card at all — it's the processing fee Stripe keeps when a customer gets refunded.

Here's the equation I make every new freelancer write on a sticky note: charge = (net + $0.30) ÷ (1 − 0.029). That's the whole secret to never eating a processing fee again. Not a plugin, not a premium plan. Ninth-grade algebra.

I run my wholesale side through Stripe — bulk lots of vintage denim invoiced to boutiques — while the single-pair sales go through marketplaces. Different worlds, same discipline: know your net before the money moves. This page covers every rate Stripe actually publishes, with the dates they changed, because half the fee pages ranking for this stuff are quietly two years stale.

The gross-up formula, worked twice

Stripe's standard online rate is 2.9% + $0.30 per successful charge. Simple to say. Sneaky to reverse. If you want to walk away with exactly $100 and you just add $3.20 to the invoice, you'll come up short — the 2.9% applies to the new, bigger total, including the part you added to cover the fee.

So you divide instead of add. To net $100, charge (100 + 0.30) ÷ 0.971 = $103.30. To net $1,000, charge $1,030.17. The reverse tab on the calculator above — "I want to net $X" — runs this equation for any rate combination, so an international card or a keyed-in number doesn't break the math.

Why do I care this much? Because the error compounds quietly. Undershoot every invoice by a fraction of a percent and by December you've donated a full invoice's worth of margin to arithmetic. I've watched sellers audit their software stack for savings while this leak ran in the background the whole time.

What this stripe fee calculator covers — it's more than 2.9% + $0.30

Most stripe fees calculator pages run one rate and call it a day. Stripe publishes a stack of them, and the surcharges add percentage points to the base rate on the same charge — they don't compound. Everything below is verified against Stripe's official pricing page as of July 15, 2026.

Two things the table understates. In-person through Terminal is genuinely cheap — 2.7% with a five-cent fixed fee matters at counter volume. And the worst case online is real: 2.9 base plus 1.5 international plus 1.0 conversion is 5.4% + $0.30 before you've done anything wrong.

What is the stripe processing fee in 2026?

The core stripe processing fee is 2.9% + $0.30 per successful online charge on a domestic card — unchanged from 2024 through 2026, which is rare; almost every platform I track raised something in that window. The percentage applies to the full amount you charge, item plus shipping plus tax combined. Stripe doesn't split the base the way marketplaces do, which actually makes the math easier to check on your payout report.

What's the stripe fee for $100?

$3.20 — that's 2.9% ($2.90) plus the $0.30 fixed fee, for a net payout of $96.80. Run the same $100 on an international card that needs currency conversion and total fees hit $5.70. The fixed fee is why small charges hurt: a $10 charge pays $0.59, an effective 5.9%.

Computed data — net-proceeds.com

How to pass stripe fees to customer — the clean way and the risky way

Two options. Option one is the visible surcharge: a "3% card processing fee" line at checkout. Where it's allowed it works, but surcharging rules vary by state — some restrict or cap credit card surcharges, and the card networks pile their own registration and disclosure requirements on top. I'm a reseller, not a lawyer. Check your state before bolting a fee line onto anything.

Option two — the one I actually use — is fee-inclusive pricing. Run the gross-up formula, quote the grossed-up number, never mention the fee at all. The boutique that owes me $1,000 for a lot of 24 pairs gets an invoice for $1,030.17. The line item says "lot of 24." Stripe's cut comes out of the extra $30.17 instead of my margin, and there's no surcharge disclosure, no state-by-state homework, no awkward footnote.

Reverse mode exists for exactly this. Type the net you want, quote what it returns, done.

Invoices over $625 belong on ACH — full stop

Stripe's ACH Direct Debit rate is 0.8% capped at $5.00, and the cap is reached at $625. Read that again: past $625, every additional dollar processes free.

A $1,000 invoice costs $29.30 by card and $5.00 by ACH. A $5,000 invoice: $145.30 by card, still $5.00 by ACH. That's $140.30 back on a single large invoice, for the price of asking a client to click a bank link instead of typing a card number. My wholesale accounts didn't blink when I switched them — most preferred it.

Caveats, because there are always caveats: ACH settles slower than cards, and Stripe's documentation lists ACH failure and dispute fees that the main pricing page doesn't show. Confirm those in the docs before moving a recurring client over. But for invoice-based work, this is the single biggest processing saving available, and it costs nothing.

Chasing a cheaper processor is a rounding-error hobby

Every freelancer forum has the thread: someone found 2.6% somewhere and swears the 2.9% crowd is getting robbed. Run the numbers. On $5,000 a month of card volume, the spread between 2.9% and 2.6% is $15 a month. That's a mispriced shipping label, not a business decision. Meanwhile the same person is taking every payout instant at 1.5% and keying card numbers in by hand at +0.5%.

The levers that actually move money, in the order they've paid me: move big invoices to ACH ($24.30 saved on every $1,000 versus card); stop taking instant payouts (standard bank payouts are free — the instant fee went from 1% to 1.5% on June 1, 2024); and stop keying cards in. Rate-shopping is what you do after those three, if you're bored.

And if you sell physical goods, the comparison that matters isn't Stripe versus a 2.6% rival at all — it's direct checkout versus marketplace. eBay takes 13.6% + $0.40 on most categories, so a $100 sale nets $86.00 there against $96.80 through Stripe. The eBay fee calculator shows the full math — the marketplace brings the buyer, but you should know exactly what that buyer costs. You can also compare fees across every platform from one input.

Refunds and chargebacks: the fees that arrive after the sale

Ask "does Stripe charge a fee for refunds?" and the technically correct answer is no — Stripe's pricing page states there are no fees for issuing refunds on card payments (bank transfers are the exception). That answer is also misleading, because the money still leaves. Stripe's refund documentation is blunt about it: the processing fees from the original transaction aren't returned.

So run a refund on a $100 charge. Your customer gets $100 back, Stripe pulls $100 from your balance, and the $3.20 it already took stays taken. You are out $3.20 on a sale that no longer exists. Refund a $1,000 invoice and you've donated $29.30 for nothing. Twenty refunded $100 orders in a month is $64 of pure evaporation, and it never appears as a line item called "refund fee" — it's just a payout that doesn't reconcile.

Stripe publishes the fix in its own cost-optimization guidance: if you refund a lot of orders soon after they're placed, use manual authorization and capture. A payment you cancel before it's captured costs nothing at all. Authorize at checkout, capture when the item actually ships, and a cancelled order becomes free instead of costing you 3.2%.

Chargebacks are the expensive version of the same story. A disputed charge costs $15 whether you win or lose, plus another $15 if you respond to the dispute manually — that second fee comes back only when you win. Lose a disputed $100 sale without contesting it and the damage is the $100 you refund, the $15 dispute fee, and the $3.20 you already paid to process it: $118.20 gone on a $100 order. Contest it and lose and you're at $133.20. One lost chargeback erases the margin on roughly forty clean $100 charges. Worth noting from the same documentation: chargebacks aren't possible on a card charge you've already fully refunded, so a fast refund on a shaky order is often cheaper than the fight.

Three dated changes older fee pages miss

June 1, 2024: Instant Payouts went from 1% to 1.5% of the payout, with a $0.50 minimum. June 17, 2025: Stripe added a $15 dispute-countered fee on top of the existing $15 dispute fee — the first $15 isn't returned even when you win; the second is refunded only if you win. July 10, 2024: the Billing plans consolidated to a single 0.7% rate, and Invoicing now runs 0.4% per paid invoice on Starter (0.5% on Plus), layered on top of normal processing. The core card rates, to Stripe's credit, haven't moved at all in that window.

One more honest note: below roughly $25, Stripe's fixed fee makes it the wrong tool for casual payments anyway. On a $25 charge Stripe takes $1.03 where Venmo's goods-and-services rate takes $0.75, no fixed fee — the Venmo fee calculator covers that side, and the Cash App fee calculator handles its 2.6% + $0.15 business rate ($2.75 on $100).