The standard rate: 3.49% plus 49 cents
PayPal’s workhorse fee for online goods-and-services payments in the US is 3.49% of the transaction plus a fixed $0.49. The percentage does the damage at scale; the flat fee does it at small amounts — on a $10 sale the 49¢ is 4.9% of revenue, making the true rate 8.4%, while on a $1,000 sale it rounds the 3.49% to barely 3.54%. This asymmetry shapes behavior exactly as eBay’s per-order fee does: small invoices get bundled, and “friends and family” gets tempted — which is both against PayPal’s terms for commercial payments and the fastest way to lose both the money and the account when a dispute arrives. Run everything commercial through G&S; the fee is the cost of actually keeping your money.
The rate menu — and when the cheaper rows apply
PayPal prices by context and the spread is wide. Vendor/in-store tap payments run 2.99% + 49¢; QR-code in-person transactions are the bargain at 2.29% + 9¢ — on a $100 sale that is $2.29 versus $3.98 online, a 42% discount for the crime of standing next to the buyer. The catch is eligibility: these rates require the PayPal/Zettle hardware or QR flow, not a “please pay my PayPal.me” email. International consumer transactions add 1.5% plus a currency-fixed amount, and if the buyer pays in another currency, conversion spread adds roughly 3-4% on top — the calculator’s international toggle models the first, and the honest advice on the second is to price in your currency and let the buyer’s side handle conversion.
Reverse math: invoice for what you need to net
The most useful line on the page is the last one. “I need to net $500” is the real constraint in freelance and off-platform selling, and the arithmetic to satisfy it is division, not subtraction: invoice = (net + fixed) ÷ (1 − rate). For a $500 net on standard G&S: ($500 + $0.49) ÷ (1 − 0.0349) = $517.99. The instinctive $500 + 3.49% = $517.45 under-bills by 54 cents — small, but it repeats on every invoice, and it compounds into the “where does my money go” fog every service seller knows. The calculator runs this for all three rate rows plus the international add-on, so the number you invoice is the number that lands.
A worked example: the $60 Facebook marketplace sale
Sold a rug locally, buyer insists on delivery and pays via PayPal G&S: $60. Fee: $60 × 3.49% + $0.49 = $2.58 — you net $57.42. Had you met at a parking lot and scanned each other’s QR codes: $60 × 2.29% + $0.09 = $1.46, netting $58.54 — the QR flow is worth $1.12 for ninety seconds of inconvenience. Now the failure mode: buyer pays friends-and-family to “save the fee,” item arrives damaged, buyer files a claim — and there is no purchase protection because F&F has none, by design. The $2.58 is not PayPal’s greed; it is the premium on the guarantee that a dispute gets adjudicated. Price it in and move on.
Where PayPal fees fit in a reseller’s stack
Off-platform sales — Discourse DMs, local swaps shipped, depop of goods via direct arrangement — are where PayPal still owns the checkout, and the fee calculator here is deliberately the same engine as the reverse-pricing fields on the platform pages: a 3.49% + 49¢ sale on $80 nets $76.71, versus $69.63 netting the same item through eBay’s 13.25% structure. That 7-dollar spread is the whole argument for off-platform selling at scale — and the whole argument for platform fees, which buy you search traffic, dispute machinery and buyer trust that a PayPal invoice does not. Run both numbers per item type; the right channel is per-item arithmetic, not loyalty.
Last verified October 11, 2026. Platform fees change — always confirm against the platform’s official fee page before pricing decisions. Estimates for planning only; every calculation runs in your browser and nothing is stored.