Where do your eBay fee rates come from?

From eBay's own help and fee pages, read separately for each of the seven marketplaces we cover. We do not take rates from third-party summaries, aggregators or other calculators.

How often are the rates checked?

Each marketplace carries its own fee data version date, and every manually verified item carries the date we opened the page and read the value. Both dates appear alongside the figures we publish.

Can I cite your figures?

Yes. Please link to the page you took the figure from and name the verification date, because rates change and an undated number stops being true.

What do you do when eBay's own pages disagree?

We record both values as published and say so rather than picking one. It happens more often than you would expect, particularly between business and private seller fee pages in the same market.

How We Verify eBay Fee Rates

Every rate we publish comes from eBay's own fee pages, read separately for each of the seven marketplaces we cover, with the source URL and the date we read it recorded next to the value. We do not take rates from other calculators, aggregator articles or fee summaries. This page explains the method, and it is honest about what the method does not cover.

We wrote it because most eBay fee content on the web is stale, and stale fee content is worse than no fee content. A seller who prices from a rate that changed eighteen months ago loses money on every listing and never finds out why.

The rule that shapes everything else

A number that is not traceable to an official eBay page does not get published. Not in the calculator, not in an article, not in a meta description.

That sounds obvious. In practice it is the rule that costs the most, because it means we cannot write about anything until it has been verified, and verification is slow. When we find an interesting figure in a secondary source, it does not go into an article. It goes into a queue, someone opens eBay's own page for that marketplace, and the value either gets confirmed and recorded or it gets dropped.

The reason is competitive as much as editorial. We have compared our tables against other public fee calculators and found rates more than a year out of date, tiered structures flattened into a single percentage, and fees that apply in one market presented as if they applied everywhere. Accuracy is the only thing a fee calculator actually sells.

Seven marketplaces, read separately

We cover the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, Canada, France and Italy.

Each one is read on its own. eBay does not run a single global fee schedule, and the differences are structural rather than cosmetic. Some markets charge sellers value added tax on top of every fee and some do not. Some charge a regulatory operating fee and some do not. Some have a separate private seller schedule, some make private selling free, and three have no private seller category at all. Reading one market and assuming the others follow is the single most common error in cross-market fee writing.

Private selling shows the split most clearly. Two markets charge private sellers nothing at home, two charge them a percentage on every sale, and three run no private seller category at all. Anyone who has read that eBay went free for private sellers has read about one of those groups and assumed it covered the rest. Our United Kingdom and Germany pages carry one model, our France and Italy pages carry another, and the United States page carries a schedule with no private tier in it at all.

We read each marketplace's fee pages in that marketplace's own language, and we keep eBay's own category names rather than translating them. A German seller looking for Sammelkartenspiele should find Sammelkartenspiele.

Two files, two jobs

Our figures live in two places, and the split matters.

The first is generated directly from the fee engine that powers the calculator. If the calculator charges it, this file describes it: final value fee structures per category, per-order fees, international fees, regulatory fees, value added tax on fees, seller performance surcharges, Top Rated discounts, store rate overlays and private seller schedules. Because a script generates it rather than a person writing it, it cannot drift away from what the calculator actually does.

The second is a manually maintained ledger for everything the calculator does not compute but articles still need. Listing and insertion fees, free listing allowances, store subscription prices, vehicle category fixed fees, buyer protection fees, currency conversion charges, per-item fee caps and time-based seller performance escalation all live here. Every row carries six fields: the marketplace, the item, the value exactly as published, the official URL, the update date printed on eBay's own page, and the date we read it.

A row with an empty value cannot be used in any content. The build enforces that rule; it is not an aspiration.

What we record when eBay contradicts itself

Occasionally eBay's own pages disagree with each other. The clearest example we have hit is store subscription pricing in France and Italy, where the business seller fee page and the private seller fee page publish different monthly prices for the same entry-level store, and neither page explains the gap. Both values sit in our ledger, and both feed the France and Italy calculators.

We do not resolve these by choosing. We record both values, note which page each came from, and say in the text that the two official pages differ. Picking one and presenting it as settled would be inventing certainty that does not exist.

What this method does not cover

Four honest limits.

Category coverage is a defined set, not every eBay category. Each marketplace has a category list in the calculator, and anything outside that list falls to the market's default rate. The default is correct for most inventory, but a seller in an unusual category should check eBay's schedule directly.

Rates change, and our data carries a date for that reason. A figure verified in July is a figure verified in July. eBay adjusts schedules several times a year, sometimes with a month of notice, and any fee content without a date on it should be treated as unverified.

We model fees, not taxes you owe. We model the value added tax eBay charges on its own fees wherever it applies. Income tax, corporation tax, sales tax registration and trading thresholds are not, and nothing we publish is tax advice.

Some fees depend on account history we cannot see. Seller performance surcharges, Top Rated status and promotional credits depend on your own account state. We show what each one costs when it applies, not whether it applies to you.

Corrections

If a figure on this site does not match what you see on eBay's own page today, tell us. Use the contact link in the footer and include the marketplace, the fee, and the page you are reading. If the correction checks out we fix the figure and update the verification date.

You can start from eBay's US selling fees schedule if you want to check our US figures yourself. Each country page on this site links to the official schedule for that marketplace.

Citing our figures

Several of our findings are original in the sense that eBay publishes the components but not the conclusion. Fee ceilings derived from tiered schedules, cross-market comparisons and effective rate calculations fall into this category. The hard ceiling on the UK Buyer Protection fee is one example: eBay publishes the three percentage bands and the point where they stop, but never the maximum they add up to. We worked it out and published it alongside the Australian equivalent.

You are welcome to cite them. Two requests. Link to the page you took the figure from rather than to the homepage, so a reader can see the working. And name the verification date, because an eBay rate without a date attached will eventually be wrong, and we would rather not be the source of the next stale number.