A quick, no-fluff breakdown of Stripe's processing fees and how to keep more of every sale.
Stripe powers payments for thousands of online businesses, from small SaaS products to full e-commerce stores. Its pricing is simple on the surface but has a few layers worth understanding before you set your prices.
For most domestic card transactions, Stripe charges roughly 2.9% of the transaction amount plus a small fixed fee per successful charge. This is the baseline rate most new Stripe accounts start with.
Cards issued outside your home country carry a higher fee, and if the transaction requires converting currencies, an additional conversion fee applies on top. If a large share of your customers are international, this can meaningfully affect your margins.
When a customer disputes a charge, Stripe charges a flat dispute fee regardless of the outcome — though it's refunded if you win. The original transaction fee, however, is not refunded even if you win, so minimizing chargebacks matters for your bottom line.
Once your monthly processing volume grows significantly, Stripe offers custom pricing through direct negotiation with their sales team — worth pursuing once you're processing a consistent high volume each month.
Here's what a merchant actually receives on domestic card transactions at different price points, using Stripe's standard 2.9% + $0.30 rate:
| Sale Amount | Stripe Fee | You Receive | Effective Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| $20 | $0.88 | $19.12 | 4.40% |
| $50 | $1.75 | $48.25 | 3.50% |
| $100 | $3.20 | $96.80 | 3.20% |
| $500 | $14.80 | $485.20 | 2.96% |
| $1,000 | $29.30 | $970.70 | 2.93% |
Same pattern as any percentage-plus-fixed-fee model: the effective rate drops as transaction size grows. At $1,000, Stripe's effective rate (2.93%) sits noticeably below PayPal's comparable rate (3.04%) on an identical sale — a gap that compounds meaningfully across hundreds of transactions per month.
For SaaS businesses running subscriptions through Stripe Billing, the same base processing rate applies to each recurring charge, but Stripe Billing itself carries an additional platform fee on top — typically around 0.5% of recurring revenue on standard plans, on top of the card processing fee. This is easy to miss when estimating margins for a subscription business, since the "advertised" processing rate doesn't include the billing platform fee.
Platforms and marketplaces that route payments to multiple sellers (using Stripe Connect) face a different fee structure entirely — typically the standard processing fee plus a per-payout fee and often a small percentage platform fee that Stripe charges the platform operator, not the end seller. If you're building a marketplace rather than a single-seller store, budget separately for Connect's fee structure rather than assuming standard Stripe pricing applies.
When you refund a Stripe charge, the original processing fee is not returned to you — this is a meaningful difference from how some other processors handle refunds. A $100 sale that gets fully refunded still cost you the original $3.20 processing fee, even though you received $0 net. High refund rates therefore directly erode margins beyond just the lost sale. Failed or declined payments, by contrast, are not charged a fee at all since no successful transaction occurred.
Stripe's advertised 2.9% + $0.30 rate applies to US domestic cards specifically. Merchants operating in the UK, EU, Australia, and other supported regions see different base rates and different currency-specific fixed fees (for example, a fixed fee in GBP or EUR rather than USD). If your business serves customers in multiple regions, check Stripe's region-specific pricing page rather than assuming the commonly-cited US rate applies everywhere.
Use our free Stripe Fee Calculator to see exactly what you'll receive after fees for any sale.