PayPal publishes a separate rate line for each way a customer can pay — PayPal Checkout, a card, a QR code, Pay Later, an invoice, or a donation — and each line is a percentage plus PayPal's fixed per-transaction fee. The table below runs those published rates through the arithmetic for you, at four sale sizes, so you can see the dollar cost instead of just the percentage.
This page looks at PayPal on its own, not against Stripe or Square — that three-way comparison lives on a sibling page. One extra row covers what happens when a customer's card was issued abroad, since PayPal's plain percentage table does not show that surcharge on its own.
Each column is one sale size, and each row is one PayPal payment type, computed the same way across every column so the rows are directly comparable. PayPal Checkout, the standard card option and Pay Later each publish one flat percentage; the QR code row uses the rate and fixed fee PayPal states for a QR transaction processed through a third-party integrator, because that is the only QR row where PayPal states its own fixed fee. Invoicing carries its own row even though its published percentage matches PayPal Checkout, because invoicing is a separate product on PayPal's fee page — and, as the invoicing section below explains, it carries an optional add-on cost that a regular PayPal Checkout sale does not. Donations get their own row too, because PayPal charges a lower rate for a donation than for a commercial sale.
Why the fixed fee matters most on small sales
PayPal's rate has two parts, and only one of them cares how big the sale is. The percentage scales by definition — sell more and the percentage cut grows right along with it. The fixed fee stays put: it is the same 0.49 USD (or 0.09 USD on the QR row) no matter how large or small the sale is, so how much it matters depends entirely on the size of the sale. Read down any single row of the table above, from the smallest column to the largest, and you can watch that weight fall away on its own — the flat piece starts out as a real chunk of what PayPal keeps and ends up too small to notice next to the percentage.
Why the rate differs by payment type
PayPal publishes a different percentage for nearly every row in the table above, and PayPal's fee page does not explain why any one payment type costs more than another — so this page does not guess either. What it can say, from the published rates alone, is the order: the QR code rate through a third-party integrator (2.29%) is the cheapest of the payment types compared here, a donation (2.89%) costs the next least, a card payment (2.99%) costs more than a donation but less than a full PayPal Checkout sale (3.49%), and Pay Later (4.99%) is the most expensive of the six rows. Invoicing does not add a rate of its own — it carries the same rate as whichever payment type funds the invoice, PayPal Checkout in the row above.
Paying with an international card
The extra row in the table above answers one question: what changes when the customer's card is not American. PayPal's answer is a flat 1.50%, tacked on top of whatever domestic rate would otherwise apply, no matter which of the six payment types processed the sale. It is the same 1.50 points on every payment type alike, so a business that mostly serves customers abroad pays that surcharge whichever PayPal option it offers at checkout.
Invoicing and the optional subscription
An invoice sent through PayPal Checkout, Pay with Venmo or PayPal Guest Checkout is charged at the rate PayPal publishes separately for invoicing — but that rate turns out to be the identical percentage and the identical fixed fee as a regular PayPal Checkout sale (see the FAQ below for the exact comparison). The one cost that invoicing carries and a regular sale does not is optional: PayPal's Invoice Subscription Service costs 14.99 USD per month, on top of the per-invoice rate, for merchants who choose to subscribe to it. A merchant who never subscribes pays nothing extra for sending an invoice instead of a regular checkout link.
What this page can't tell you
Everything above adds up what PayPal openly publishes. What it cannot add up is what a sale is worth to you once the platform you sold through, any returns, and the cost of getting that customer to your page in the first place have all taken their own bite — none of those numbers live on PayPal's fee page, and none of them live on this one either.
We built a companion tool for that other gap: a free worksheet called The Hidden Margin Teardown Kit. Instead of a fee schedule, it is a checklist of questions to run against any business you can see from the outside — including your own — using nothing but information that is already public. Work through it once and you end up with a rough margin estimate for a company that never told you its numbers.
Figures on this page were collected and cross-checked with the help of AI tools; every one links to the provider's own page and was reviewed by a person before publication.
What these providers do not publish
Limits of this page
These are things we did not verify, listed so you can judge the rest.
Search demand figures on this page come from Bing Webmaster Tools; we did not have a Google search volume tool available when this page was built.
This page checks PayPal's own published rates only. It does not compare PayPal against Stripe, Square or any other processor — that comparison lives on a sibling page.
PayPal's fee page states a fixed fee for QR code transactions only under the row for a third-party integrator; the plain QR code Transactions row does not list its own fixed fee separately, so the QR row on this page uses the third-party-integrator figure.
PayPal's published fixed fees change by the currency the money is received in. Every dollar figure on this page uses the fixed fee PayPal publishes for US dollars, because every sale size on this page is in US dollars.
PayPal's fee page also lists rates for micropayments, chargebacks and disputes. This page does not cover them because we could not pull a clean, verbatim quote naming a single fixed rate for each one.
A short list of questions for working out where a company, product or subscription actually makes its money, using only public information like the pricing pages cited on this page. It opens on the page — no email required.
On a $100 sale paid through PayPal Checkout, PayPal keeps $3.98 — its 3.49% rate plus the 0.49 USD fixed fee it charges on a domestic commercial transaction.
Does PayPal charge less for card payments than for PayPal Checkout?
Yes. PayPal's Standard Credit and Debit Card Payments rate is 2.99%, half a point below PayPal Checkout's 3.49% — both add the same 0.49 USD fixed fee on top.
What does PayPal add on international sales?
PayPal adds an additional 1.50% on top of its domestic rate for international commercial transactions. On a $100 sale paid through PayPal Checkout with a card issued outside the United States, that brings the total to $5.48.
Do PayPal invoices cost more?
No. An invoice paid through PayPal Checkout, Pay with Venmo or PayPal Guest Checkout charges the same 3.49% rate plus the same 0.49 USD fixed fee as a regular PayPal Checkout sale. The only added invoicing cost is optional: PayPal's Invoice Subscription Service costs 14.99 USD per month.
What we could not verify
Search demand figures on this page come from Bing Webmaster Tools; we did not have a Google search volume tool available when this page was built.
This page checks PayPal's own published rates only. It does not compare PayPal against Stripe, Square or any other processor — that comparison lives on a sibling page.
PayPal's fee page states a fixed fee for QR code transactions only under the row for a third-party integrator; the plain QR code Transactions row does not list its own fixed fee separately, so the QR row on this page uses the third-party-integrator figure.
PayPal's published fixed fees change by the currency the money is received in. Every dollar figure on this page uses the fixed fee PayPal publishes for US dollars, because every sale size on this page is in US dollars.
PayPal's fee page also lists rates for micropayments, chargebacks and disputes. This page does not cover them because we could not pull a clean, verbatim quote naming a single fixed rate for each one.
PayPal's Standard Credit and Debit Card Payments option charges 2.99% plus a fixed fee for domestic commercial transactions. — https://www.paypal.com/us/business/paypal-business-fees (verified on: 2026-09-02, confidence: verified)
Invoicing transactions paid through PayPal Checkout, Pay with Venmo or PayPal Guest Checkout charge 3.49% plus a fixed fee — the same rate as a commercial PayPal Checkout transaction. — https://www.paypal.com/us/business/paypal-business-fees (verified on: 2026-09-02, confidence: verified)
PayPal's fixed fee for a domestic (US dollar) invoicing transaction is 0.49 USD, the same fixed fee as a commercial transaction. — https://www.paypal.com/us/business/paypal-business-fees (verified on: 2026-09-02, confidence: verified)
