Every payment processor takes a cut before the money hits your account, and the cut is bigger than most freelancers assume once the fixed per-transaction fee stacks on top of the percentage. This calculator runs one payment through Stripe, PayPal, or Square's standard US online rate, shows exactly what you'll net, and — just as useful — tells you what to charge instead if you need a specific amount to land in your account after fees.
How it works
Every card payment costs two things: a percentage of the amount and a flat fee per transaction. The calculator multiplies your payment amount by the processor's percentage, adds the fixed fee, and rounds that to get the total fee. Subtract the fee from the amount and you get what you actually receive — not what the invoice says, what shows up in your bank account.
The effective fee rate expresses that same fee as a single percentage of the payment, which matters because the fixed fee makes processors relatively more expensive on small payments and relatively cheaper on large ones — a $0.30 fixed fee is 3% of a $10 payment but 0.03% of a $1,000 one.
The fourth number, "charge to net this amount," solves the calculation in reverse. Instead of asking what you keep from a given charge, it asks what you'd need to charge so that after the processor's cut, you keep exactly the amount you entered. That's the number to actually put on an invoice when a contract specifies your take-home pay and the client is expected to cover the processing cost — gross the fee up onto the client instead of eating it yourself.
Worked example
Invoice a client $1,000 through Stripe, which charges 2.9% + $0.30 on US card payments:
- Fee: $1,000 × 2.9% + $0.30 = $29 + $0.30 = $29.30
- You receive: $1,000 − $29.30 = $970.70
- Effective fee rate: $29.30 ÷ $1,000 = 2.93%
- To actually net $1,000 after fees, charge $1,030.18 instead — the fee on that higher amount comes out to $30.18, leaving exactly $1,000.00 net.
Run the same $1,000 through PayPal (3.49% + $0.49) and the fee jumps to $35.39, dropping what you receive to $964.61 — about $6 more lost to fees than Stripe on an identical invoice. That gap is why it's worth checking before picking a default processor for recurring client payments.
How to interpret your result
"You actually receive" is the number that matters for your own cash flow and bookkeeping — not the invoice total, which is what accounting software and most freelancers mistakenly log as revenue before fees. Track the fee separately as a real cost of doing business; it adds up over a year of invoices and is often deductible.
The effective fee rate is most useful for comparing processors at your typical invoice size, since the fixed-fee component means no processor is uniformly cheaper across all payment sizes — a processor with a low percentage but a high fixed fee can lose to one with the opposite tradeoff on a small invoice and win on a large one. Re-run this calculator at your actual typical invoice amount rather than trusting a single "cheapest processor" answer.
"Charge to net this amount" only makes sense when you're the one deciding what to bill — if a client dictates the invoice total, you don't get to gross it up, and the fee comes out of your side regardless. Where you can set the terms, building the processing fee into the price you quote is standard practice and rarely raises an eyebrow.
Methodology & sources
fee = round2(amount × pct/100 + fixed), netReceived = round2(amount − fee), effectiveFeePercent = round2(fee/amount × 100) (0 when amount is 0), and chargeToNetThis = round2((amount + fixed) / (1 − pct/100)), solved algebraically from amount = charge × (1 − pct/100) − fixed.
Rates used, verified against each processor's published US pricing in July 2026:
- Stripe: 2.9% + $0.30 per successful card charge — Stripe Pricing.
- PayPal: 3.49% + $0.49 for PayPal Checkout (standard, unqualified US rate) — PayPal Merchant Fees.
- Square: 3.3% + $0.30 for online payments and invoices on the Free plan (raised from 2.9% + $0.30 in January 2026; Square's separate in-person tap/dip/swipe rate is 2.6% + $0.15, and manually-keyed or card-on-file is 3.5% + $0.15) — Square: Understanding Our Fees.
These are standard published rates, not negotiated or volume-discounted pricing, and they exclude chargeback fees, currency conversion, instant-payout fees, and monthly platform costs. Processors change pricing without much notice — if a number here looks off, check the linked page directly before relying on it for a real invoice.