Stripe Fee Calculator
Work out Stripe's processing fees and the exact amount to charge so you net what you need.
You Receive
Fee: 2.90% + $0.30
Based on Stripe's published US standard pricing. Rates differ by country and plan — always confirm with Stripe.
Stripe charges 2.9% plus 30 cents for online card payments — but that headline hides a lot. International cards add 1.5%, currency conversion adds 1%, and ACH bank transfers cost dramatically less while almost nobody offers them. This calculator shows what you actually net.
How Stripe's pricing really works
The 2.9% + $0.30 standard rate is genuinely competitive for online card processing. The fixed 30 cents is the part that bites small transactions: on a $100 charge the effective rate is 3.2%, but on a $5 charge it is 8.9%. Where Stripe gets expensive is the surcharges. An international card adds 1.5%. If the currency also needs converting, that is another 1%. A European customer paying a US business in euros costs 5.4% instead of 2.9% — and that difference lands entirely on you. ACH is the outlier worth knowing about. 0.8% capped at $5, which means a $10,000 invoice costs $5 to collect instead of $290. If you invoice businesses for meaningful amounts and are not offering ACH, you are burning money for no reason.
The formula
Card: Fee = (Amount × 2.9%) + $0.30
+ 1.5% international
+ 1.0% currency conversion
ACH: Fee = min(Amount × 0.8%, $5.00)
Gross-up (to net an exact amount):
Charge = (Desired + Fixed) ÷ (1 − Rate%)
Example: $10,000 invoice
Card = $290.30 ACH = $5.00That ACH cap is not a rounding detail — it is a $285 difference on a single invoice. On fifty invoices a year, it is over $14,000.
Paying Stripe less
- 1Offer ACH for any B2B invoice over about $600. Past that point the $5 cap makes it cheaper than card, and the gap widens with every dollar. It takes an afternoon to enable.
- 2Bill international customers in their own currency using Stripe's local acquiring where available. It reduces both the international surcharge and the failure rate — foreign cards get declined far more often than domestic ones.
- 3Annual billing beats monthly on fixed fees. Twelve $10 charges pay the 30 cents twelve times: $6.08 in fixed fees alone. One $120 charge pays it once: $0.30.
- 4Failed payments cost you twice — the revenue and the retry overhead. Stripe's Smart Retries and card account updater recover a meaningful share of involuntary churn. They are free and off by default in some setups.
- 5Watch out for chargebacks. Stripe charges $15 per dispute regardless of whether you win. Three disputes on small transactions can erase the profit on dozens of sales.
Frequently asked questions
Is Stripe cheaper than PayPal?
For standard card payments, marginally: 2.9% + $0.30 versus PayPal's 3.49% + $0.49. On a $100 sale that is $3.20 against $3.98. The bigger difference is ACH — Stripe caps it at $5, PayPal has no equivalent for most merchants.
Why is the ACH fee capped at $5?
Because bank transfers cost Stripe a flat amount to process, unlike cards where interchange scales with the transaction. They pass that structure through. It means ACH gets cheaper as a percentage the larger your invoice — the opposite of card pricing.
What triggers the international fee?
The card's issuing country, not your customer's location. A US-issued card used by someone travelling in Europe pays no international fee. A German card used by someone sitting in New York does.
Can I pass Stripe's fees to my customers?
Legally it varies by country and card network rules — surcharging is restricted or banned in several places. Practically, use the 'What I should charge' mode to build it into your price rather than adding a visible surcharge line.
Are these rates accurate for my country?
These are Stripe's published US standard rates. European rates are lower for EEA cards (around 1.5%) because of interchange caps. Check Stripe's pricing page for your country — the structure is the same, the numbers are not.