Stripe fees, line by line

Stripe is one of the cleanest payment processors to explain and one of the easiest to underestimate. The published rate is simple; the surcharges stack quietly on top of it, one per condition, and most freelancers only discover them when they reconcile their first cross-border invoice and find the net is smaller than expected. This guide walks through each fee in the order it hits your money: processing, international cards, conversion, product-specific add-ons, and edge-case charges.

The base rate

For standard online card payments in the United States, Stripe charges 2.9% of the transaction plus a fixed $0.30. In-person payments made through Stripe Terminal or a card reader are cheaper — historically around 2.7% plus $0.05 — because presentment carries lower fraud risk. Rates differ by country: UK businesses pay around 1.5% + 20p for European cards, for example, so the "base rate" is really a family of rates indexed to your account's country. The percentages below are the common US figures; treat yours as structurally identical even if the digits differ.

The international card surcharge: +1.5%

If the card paying you was issued outside your country, Stripe adds an extra 1.5% to the transaction. This is the single most common surprise for freelancers. A designer in Austin invoicing a startup in Toronto pays it; so does a developer in Berlin billing a client in New York. There is no threshold and no negotiation — the surcharge keys off the card's country of issuance automatically. On a $2,000 invoice that is $30 before anything else happens.

Currency conversion: another 1%, plus the spread

Bill in a currency your client doesn't hold — or receive in one you don't — and Stripe converts the money. Two costs ride along:

• An explicit 1% conversion fee added to the transaction.
• An implicit spread of roughly 1% baked into the exchange rate itself, because Stripe applies its own rate rather than the mid-market rate you see on XE or Google. Our FX spread inspector exists precisely to expose this gap.

Together, moving money across a currency border inside Stripe routinely costs around 2% beyond the mid-market rate — invisible unless you go looking for it, which is exactly why most people don't.

Product-specific add-ons

Beyond the core processor, several Stripe products carry their own pricing:

• Invoicing: payments collected through Stripe Invoicing add a small percentage (historically 0.4%, capped) on top of the processing fee.
• Micro-payments pricing: transactions under roughly $10 can opt into a plan of about 5% plus $0.05 — better for tiny amounts, worse for everything else.
• Instant payouts: getting money to your bank same-day instead of on the rolling schedule costs around 1%–1.5%.
• Disputes: every chargeback costs a flat fee (historically $15), returned only if you win the dispute.

A worked example: the $2,000 international invoice

Say you invoice a foreign client $2,000, paid by card, converted to your home currency. Here is approximately what happens:

• Base processing: 2.9% × $2,000 + $0.30 = $58.30
• International card surcharge: 1.5% × $2,000 = $30.00
• Explicit conversion fee: 1% × $2,000 = $20.00
• Hidden conversion spread (~1%) ≈ $20.00

Total: about $128, or 6.4% of the invoice — more than double the sticker rate. You would net roughly $1,872. Run your own numbers in the forward fee calculator; it models exactly this stacking.

When Stripe still makes sense

None of this makes Stripe a bad product. It is unmatched for checkout flows, subscriptions, and clients who want to pay by card. But knowing the true cost changes strategy: for card-paying clients you price the fees in (see our processing-fee invoice template); for bank-transfer clients you route around Stripe entirely — see Stripe vs Wise for the side-by-side, or the complete gateway fee guide for the whole landscape. Fees change and vary by country, so always confirm current pricing on Stripe's official pricing page before making decisions.