Fiverr takes 20% of every order from the seller, so on a $100 gig the seller is credited $80. Buyers pay separately: a 5.5% service fee on the purchase price, plus a $3.50 fee added to orders under $200. Both fees apply to every transaction on an order, including extras and tips. That combination is why a $40 gig can cost a buyer close to $46 while the seller still only sees $32. Here is exactly where each cut lands, and what the 20 percent adds up to over a year.
Last updated July 2026. Fee figures below are Fiverr's own published rates. Platforms change pricing, so check Fiverr's help center before making a decision on the basis of a specific number.
How much does Fiverr take from sellers?
Fiverr takes 20 percent of the order value from the seller. Fiverr's Terms of Service put it plainly: each Gig you sell and successfully complete credits your account with revenue equal to 80% of the purchase amount. There are no volume tiers and no loyalty discount. A brand new seller and a seller with a thousand five-star reviews pay the same one-fifth cut, on their first order and on their five-hundredth.
That is the number that matters for your earnings. The buyer-side fee described below is charged on top of your listed price, so it raises what the buyer pays rather than what you take home.
Fiverr fees at a glance (2026)
| Fee | Who pays | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Seller commission | Seller | 20% of the order (seller keeps 80%) |
| Buyer service fee | Buyer | 5.5% of the purchase price |
| Small order fee | Buyer | $3.50 added to orders under $200 |
| Fees on extras and tips | Both | Charged per transaction, not per order |
| Seller Plus Standard | Seller (optional) | $25 per month |
| Seller Plus Premium | Seller (optional) | $49 per month |
What is the Fiverr service fee and how much do they charge?
The Fiverr service fee is the buyer-side charge added at checkout. Fiverr's help center states that the standard service fee is 5.5% of the purchase price, and that a $3.50 fee is added to orders under $200. It is separate from the 20 percent the seller pays and it is not a tax, it is Fiverr's own charge for processing the transaction.
The $3.50 flat fee is worth understanding, because it is regressive. On a $200 order it is not charged at all. On a $150 order it is 2.3 percent. On a $30 order it is 11.7 percent on top of the 5.5 percent, so the effective buyer fee is over 17 percent. Small test orders are the most expensive kind of order to place on Fiverr, proportionally.
What a buyer actually pays
| Listed gig price | 5.5% service fee | Small order fee | Buyer total | Seller receives |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $25 | $1.38 | $3.50 | $29.88 | $20.00 |
| $50 | $2.75 | $3.50 | $56.25 | $40.00 |
| $100 | $5.50 | $3.50 | $109.00 | $80.00 |
| $250 | $13.75 | none | $263.75 | $200.00 |
Look at the $25 row. The buyer pays $29.88, the seller banks $20.00, and $9.88 goes to the platform. That is roughly a third of the transaction on a small order.
How much royalty does Fiverr keep?
Fiverr does not charge a royalty in the licensing sense, and it takes no ongoing cut of work you have already delivered. What it keeps is a one-time 20 percent commission per completed order, plus the buyer-side service fee on the same transaction. Once an order is complete and paid out, Fiverr has no further claim on that money or on the work product. The commercial rights to the delivered work are governed by the gig terms you agreed, not by an ongoing fee.
Does Fiverr take a fee on tips?
Yes. Fiverr charges its service fee on tips as well as on the order itself. Fiverr's own client FAQ states that all transactions including tips are required to pay the service fee, and explains the reasoning: the fee on tips covers payment processing costs and prevents sellers from listing artificially low gig prices and recovering the difference through tips. Because fees are applied per transaction rather than per order, adding an extra or a tip triggers its own fee rather than being folded into the original charge.
Does Fiverr charge immediately or once the service is rendered?
Fiverr charges the buyer immediately, at the moment the order is placed, not when the work is delivered. The money is then held by Fiverr rather than passed straight to the seller. When the order is marked complete, the seller's 80 percent is credited to their Fiverr account, and it becomes available to withdraw only after a clearing period has passed. So the buyer pays up front, the seller waits twice: once for delivery and acceptance, and again for funds to clear. Check Fiverr's current help center for the exact clearing window, which has changed more than once.
How Fiverr fees work
On the seller side, the headline number is the 20 percent deducted from each order. Buyers also pay their own service fee on top of the listed price, which raises the total they see at checkout. For your earnings, the seller-side cut is what matters: you list a price, the platform keeps a fifth, and the rest is yours.
That percentage sounds small in isolation. The problem is that it applies to every order, including repeat orders from buyers you already won. You pay the same cut on the tenth project for a loyal client as you did on the first.
What 20 percent actually costs over a year
Let us use simple, round numbers. Imagine you sell a $100 gig and complete a steady volume of orders:
| Orders per month | Monthly revenue | 20% fee | You keep | Annual fee paid |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | $1,000 | $200 | $800 | $2,400 |
| 25 | $2,500 | $500 | $2,000 | $6,000 |
| 50 | $5,000 | $1,000 | $4,000 | $12,000 |
At fifty orders a month, a 20 percent fee hands the platform $12,000 a year. That is not a rounding error. It is a salary's worth of margin leaving your business for distribution you increasingly do not need once buyers know your name.
Why the fee hurts most on repeat buyers
The first time a marketplace sends you a buyer, the fee is arguably fair: it paid for the introduction. But repeat orders are different. You already did the work of winning that client. When the platform owns the relationship, you keep paying the full fee on every future order, with no new value delivered. Over a year, repeat buyers are where the 20 percent quietly costs you the most.
How a fairer take rate changes your take-home
Compare the same $5,000 month at a take rate that starts at 8 percent and falls to 3 percent on higher plans:
| Take rate | Fee on $5,000/mo | You keep | Annual fee | Saved vs 20% |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20% | $1,000 | $4,000 | $12,000 | baseline |
| 8% | $400 | $4,600 | $4,800 | $7,200 |
| 3% | $150 | $4,850 | $1,800 | $10,200 |
Dropping from 20 percent to 8 percent puts roughly $7,200 a year back in your pocket at this volume. At 3 percent it is over $10,000. Even after a modest monthly subscription, the math favors a fairer take by a wide margin once you are doing consistent volume.
How do I avoid Fiverr fees?
You cannot reduce the 20 percent while selling on Fiverr, and taking a client off-platform to dodge it violates the terms and risks your account, so that is not a plan. What you can do is change the shape of the orders and, eventually, where the relationship lives.
- Sell larger packages, not micro gigs. The 20 percent is the same either way, but bigger orders spare the buyer the $3.50 small order fee and cut your per-order admin time.
- Bundle revisions and extras into the tier price. Every separate extra is its own transaction with its own fee for the buyer.
- Build a channel you own. A gig page that ranks in search and that you can share directly brings buyers who did not arrive through a marketplace search, which is the only durable way to stop paying a finder's fee on people who already know you.
- Do the math on Seller Plus. At $25 or $49 a month it only pays for itself if the promotion tools reliably add orders, so track whether they do.
Is the lower fee worth it if you lose marketplace traffic?
This is the real question, and it is fair. A lower fee is only a win if you can still reach buyers. That is why take rate alone is the wrong lens. FreelanceNation pairs a fairer take with a real marketplace and a shareable gig page that ranks in search, so you keep distribution and keep more of each sale. You are not trading traffic for a lower fee. You get both.
Fiverr vs Upwork vs Contra: what each platform really keeps
Comparing marketplaces on the seller commission alone is misleading, because most of them charge the buyer too. The number that actually matters is the spread: on the same contract, the gap between what the client pays and what the freelancer banks, as a share of what the client paid. Fiverr's 20 percent seller cut plus its 5.5 percent buyer fee makes it the widest spread of the major platforms.
The spread on a $1,000 contract
| Platform | Client pays | Freelancer banks | Spread as % of client outlay |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fiverr | $1,055 | $800 | 24.2% |
| Upwork Business Plus, 10% client fee | $1,100 | $900 | 18.2% |
| Upwork Basic, 5% client fee | $1,050 | $900 | 14.3% |
| Upwork Basic, 3% checking-account rate | $1,030 | $900 | 12.6% |
| FreelanceNation Starter | $1,000 | $920 | 8.0% |
| FreelanceNation Studio | $1,000 | $970 | 3.0% |
| Contra | $1,000 | $971 | 2.9% |
Upwork rows use the 10 percent talent fee Upwork uses in its own published example, since that fee is variable from 0 to 15 percent per contract, and they exclude Upwork's contract initiation fee of $0.99 to $14.99. Contra charges a flat $29 on payments of $1,000 or more rather than a percentage, so it gets cheaper as contracts grow and more expensive as they shrink. Being straight about it: above roughly $360 a contract, Contra's flat fee beats our 8 percent Starter rate. Below that, and on the small orders where Fiverr's $3.50 fee bites hardest, the ranking changes again.
One structural difference does not show up in any of these percentages. Upwork charges freelancers to submit proposals through Connects at $0.15 each, so you pay whether or not you win the work; Fiverr and gig-page marketplaces charge you only when you get paid. The full accounting is in our Upwork fee breakdown.
Whatever platform you land on, the take rate belongs in your pricing rather than in your disappointment. Our freelance rate calculator takes the fee as an input: clearing a $90,000 take-home needs about $116 an hour at an 8 percent take rate and about $134 at 20 percent, which is the Fiverr cut expressed as the hourly rate it forces.
If you are weighing the 20% against what other venues charge sellers, we compared the seller side of every major option, including bidding marketplaces, commission-free platforms, and white label work, in our guide to the best platforms to sell SEO services. The arithmetic there is written around SEO retainers, but the take-rate math applies to any recurring freelance work.
The bottom line
Fiverr's 20 percent is reasonable as a finder's fee and expensive as a permanent tax on your own clients. Once you have proof and repeat buyers, paying a fifth of every order forever stops making sense. The buyer-side fees matter too: a 5.5 percent service fee plus $3.50 under $200 makes small orders costly for the people you most want to convert into regulars. Run your own numbers with the tables above, then decide.
See the side-by-side in our Fiverr alternative comparison, compare the best Fiverr alternatives of 2026, or read the full Fiverr vs Upwork breakdown including Upwork's variable 0% to 15% freelancer fee. When you are ready, view pricing and keep more of every sale.