Whatnot fees explained, with a worked example

Whatnot takes two fees from every completed sale: commission of 8% of the item's final sale price in most categories (4% on coins and money), and payment processing of 2.9% of everything the buyer paid plus a flat $0.30 per order. There are no listing fees and no monthly platform charge; creating, storing and managing listings costs nothing.

How that stacks up against the other marketplace card sellers know best is its own article: Whatnot fees vs eBay fees.

What makes the fees confusing is not their size, it is that each one is charged on a different number.

Everything below matches Whatnot's published schedule as updated 12 August 2026, using the rates for the US, Canada and Australia. The UK and EU run 6.67% commission and 2.42% processing with VAT added to the fees, and Japan has its own rates with JCT, but the structure, two fees charged on two different numbers, is the same everywhere. Promotions change, so check Seller Hub before pricing anything around one.

Commission is a percentage of your item's final sale price, and only that. Buyer-paid shipping and buyer-paid tax are not in its base. The standard rate is 8%, which covers sports cards, trading card games, comics and toys; coins and money and wholesale pallets are 4%.

The final sale price means the price after your own coupons. If you list at $20 and offer a $5 coupon, commission is charged on $15. A coupon Whatnot issues, like a first-time buyer discount, does not touch your price at all: you are paid, and charged fees, as if the buyer paid full price.

Payment processing is 2.9% of the total order value plus a flat $0.30. The total order value is everything the buyer handed over at checkout: the item price, any shipping they paid, and any tax they paid. That shipping and tax were never yours to keep, but they still raise the processing fee.

This is why two sales at the same price can pay you different amounts. A buyer far away pays more shipping, the order total rises, and the processing fee rises with it. It is also why very small sales keep a thin share: the flat $0.30 is the same on a $2 sale as on a $200 one.

Say a card sells for $100, the buyer pays $6 shipping and $8.25 tax, and the category is standard rate.

Commission is 8% of $100, which is $8.00. The total order value is $114.25, so payment processing is 2.9% of that plus $0.30, about $3.61. Your payout is $100.00 minus $8.00 minus $3.61, which is $88.39. The buyer's shipping and tax pass through to the carrier and the tax office; they were only ever in the maths as the processing fee's base.

In many countries there is one more line: tax charged on the fees themselves, not on the sale. That is GST for Australian sellers, VAT in the UK and EU, and JCT in Japan, and Whatnot reports it as two separate columns, tax on commission and tax on the payment processing fee. For an Australian seller on this sale it is 10% of each fee, $0.80 plus $0.36, taking the payout to $87.23. Whether the fees themselves are tax deductible is its own question, answered separately.

To run your own numbers, the free fee calculator does this arithmetic live, and the break-even calculator runs it backwards to find the lowest price that still covers you.

The big one is the high-value rate: since 14 January 2026, commission in select categories applies only to the first $1,500 of an item's price, and the portion above that is commission free. Sell a $3,000 card and commission is charged on $1,500. Whatnot's terms still call it a limited-time promotion it can end at any time, but it has run all year and was extended to more categories in June 2026. Two details matter: it covers the singles subcategories in sports cards plus categories like comics, TCG, coins and toys, and it explicitly excludes sports breaks and surprise products. If you sell breaks, your break sales pay full commission however large they are; your singles get the cap.

Australian sellers have two more: coins and money orders carry 0% commission through 30 September 2026, and orders placed during the daily window of 2:00am to 4:00pm AEST carry a reduced 4% commission across all categories through 31 December 2026. Promotional rates apply automatically when a sale qualifies. Card sellers and breakers: we follow one full break from case cost to net profit in Whatnot fees for sports cards.

Giveaways carry no seller fees, because the buyer pays nothing. You do pay the shipping, which is why a giveaway shows up in your reports as a small negative amount: it is a marketing cost doing its job, not an error. We do the fuller seller-side math in what giveaways really cost on Whatnot.

A refund you accept, or Whatnot issues on your behalf, comes back out of your earnings as its own transaction. In the Weekly Order Report it appears as a second row sharing the original order id, which is one of the things that makes that file worth reading carefully. We wrote a full guide to it: how to download and read the Whatnot Weekly Order Report.

Every number above is about one sale. A week of selling is fees plus shipping labels, giveaways, refunds, and above all what the inventory cost you, which no Whatnot report can know.

BreakCount reads your Weekly Order Report, asks for one cost per purchase lot, and spreads it across the lot's sales, so every show ends with a real net profit instead of a guess.

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