PayPal Goods & Services fee calculator
Goods & Services is the version of PayPal with buyer protection — and a fee. If you sell anything to strangers, it is the version you should be using, so it pays to know exactly what it costs.
Fees verified 02 August 2026 against PayPal Goods & Services’s official fee page.
G&S versus Friends & Family, said plainly
The fee is the price of the dispute system. Friends & Family is free precisely because it offers the sender no protection and you no legitimacy — which is why a stranger insisting on F&F to "save the fee" is one of the oldest red flags in online selling, and why a seller demanding it forfeits the buyer's trust. For actual commerce between strangers, G&S is the cost of doing business safely.
The personal Goods & Services rate is a flat percentage of the whole payment with no fixed per-transaction charge — which makes it unusually friendly to small payments. That's different from PayPal's business rails: PayPal Checkout and Invoicing run at 3.49% + $0.49, and standard card payments at 2.99% + $0.49. If you graduate to invoicing customers through a business account, the fixed 49 cents reappears and small payments get proportionally expensive again. International payments add 1.5% on any rail.
Working backwards is the everyday use: if you need an exact amount to land, pair this rate with the reverse fee calculator on this site and ask for the grossed-up figure instead of eating the difference.
Questions
Should I ask buyers for Friends & Family to avoid the fee?
No — it strips the buyer's protection, violates PayPal's terms for commercial payments, and can get accounts limited. It also marks the transaction as one a scammer would design. Price the fee in instead.
Who pays the fee, sender or receiver?
The receiver, on Goods & Services payments. The sender pays the sticker amount; the fee comes out of what lands on your side. Gross up what you ask for if you need an exact net.
Is the rate the same for every kind of payment?
No. This calculator uses the US personal Goods & Services receiving rate (2.99%, no fixed fee). Business PayPal Checkout and Invoicing run 3.49% + $0.49, card payments 2.99% + $0.49, and international transactions add 1.5%. The verification date below shows when these were last checked against PayPal's fee table.