PayPal's Goods and Services payment type covers an actual purchase — but running a payment through it is not free, and PayPal is clear about who meets that cost: not the buyer. PayPal's domestic rate for a commercial transaction is 3.49% plus a 0.49 USD fixed fee, and an additional 1.50% applies on an international commercial transaction. This page works out what that leaves a seller holding at four payment sizes — a $10 payment, a $100 payment, a $1,000 payment and a $10,000 payment — and closes with how a Friends and Family payment, PayPal's other way of sending money, is priced differently again.
| PayPal's fee | What the seller receives | Fee if the payment is international | |
|---|---|---|---|
| $10 payment | $0.841 2 | $9.161 2 | $0.991 2 3 |
| $100 payment | $3.981 2 | $96.021 2 | $5.481 2 3 |
| $1,000 payment | $35.391 2 | $964.611 2 | $50.391 2 3 |
| $10,000 payment | $349.491 2 | $9,650.511 2 | $499.491 2 3 |
PayPal's own fee pages use a specific term for a Goods and Services payment: a "commercial transaction", covering buying or selling goods or services or making any other transaction of that kind. For that kind of payment, PayPal states plainly that paying — the buyer's side — costs the buyer nothing, unless the payment involves converting currency; the person sending money for a purchase is not charged PayPal's percentage or its fixed fee. PayPal instead points the person on the other side, the one selling, to its Merchant Fees page for its selling rates — the same domestic and international rates cited above. The fee, in other words, is priced on the receiving end of the transaction, not the sending end.
The table above holds the percentage and the fixed fee constant and only changes the size of the payment, which is what makes the shift visible. A fixed fee charged on every commercial transaction, regardless of size, is a rounding error on a large payment and a meaningful bite out of a small one — compare how much of PayPal's fee comes from that fixed portion at the smallest row in the table above against the largest, without doing any of the arithmetic yourself. The 'What the seller receives' column is the mirror image of PayPal's fee column by construction: whatever PayPal's rate does not take, the seller keeps, so the two columns always add back up to the payment size in that row.
PayPal treats a Friends and Family payment as a separate product from a Goods and Services one, and calls it a personal transaction: a payment sent between friends and family that is not for buying goods or services and not any other kind of commercial transaction. That distinction is why a Friends and Family payment cannot substitute for a Goods and Services one when an actual purchase is involved. On pricing, a domestic Friends and Family payment funded straight from a PayPal balance or a linked bank account carries no PayPal fee at all. Fund that same payment with a card instead, and PayPal charges 2.90% plus a fixed fee — a cost a Goods and Services seller absorbs on every payment, but a Friends and Family sender only meets if they choose to pay by card.
Knowing who is charged and how much still leaves out whether accepting Goods and Services payments is worth it for a given seller, once the platform they sell through, any refunds, and the cost of winning that customer in the first place are all counted — none of that shows up on PayPal's fee page, and it does not show up on this one either.
We built a free worksheet for that other question: The Hidden Margin Teardown Kit. It is a short list of questions you can run against any company, product or subscription — including your own — using only information that is already public, the same kind of fee page cited throughout this article. Fill it in once and you have a rough margin estimate for a business 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.
These are things we did not verify, listed so you can judge the rest.
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.
Open the free worksheetOn a $100 payment made through PayPal Goods and Services, PayPal's domestic commercial rate leaves the seller with $96.02 after its fee.
Yes. On a $100 payment, PayPal's international commercial surcharge brings the fee to $5.48 when the payment is an international commercial transaction.
The seller does. PayPal does not charge the person paying for a purchase or other commercial transaction, unless that payment involves a currency conversion; the percentage-plus-fixed-fee rate falls on the person receiving the Goods and Services payment.
Not the way it does for Goods and Services. A Friends and Family payment funded from a PayPal balance or bank account carries no fee, but PayPal charges 2.90% plus a fixed fee when the sender funds it with a card instead.