Stripe Card Processing Fees in 2026: 2.9% + 30¢, Line by Line

Stripe's US rate card charges 2.9% + 30¢ per successful domestic card charge. On a $10 charge that is $0.59 and you keep $9.41; on a $100 charge it is $3.20 and you keep $96.80 (calculated 2026-10-25). Everyone quotes the percentage, but the fixed 30¢ decides whether a small ticket is worth selling at all — it is 50.8% of the fee at $10 and 9.4% at $100. This page works from the rate card as served on 2026-10-25, runs both ticket sizes, then adds the surcharges that move the number in either direction.

What Stripe charges per card charge

What the surcharges actually mean

The headline rate is only the domestic-card case. Four published modifiers sit on top of it, and they stack.

The 1.5% international surcharge applies when the card is issued outside the United States; the 1% conversion surcharge applies when Stripe has to convert currency. A US merchant selling to a Canadian buyer who pays in CAD pays both, so the $100 sale nets $94.30 rather than $96.80 (calculated 2026-10-25). Manually keyed cards — phone orders, virtual terminals — add 0.5%, which exists to price the higher fraud risk of a card number typed by a human.

Disputes are priced separately from processing. Stripe lists $15.00 for a dispute received and $15.00 for a dispute countered; the counter fee comes back if you win and stays gone if you lose. On a $10 product, one lost chargeback costs $15.00 plus the refunded $10, which is 2.5× the sale price.

How we measured it

We loaded Stripe's pricing page on 2026-10-25 with the billing country set to the United States, because the same URL otherwise serves a local-currency rate card to visitors outside it. Every rate in the tables above is printed on that page; the dollar amounts are $0.00 either way, but the units are not, and a page that quotes Hong Kong dollars is not citable as a US price. The arithmetic is ours and is labelled with the capture date. No benchmark was run and no account was opened.

What changes in practice

The fixed fee is a floor on your pricing. At $10 a charge, 5.90% of the sale disappears; at $1,000 it is 2.93%. Any product priced under about $5 loses more than 8% to processing, which is why low-ticket sellers bundle: three $5 charges cost $1.17 in fixed fees, one $15 charge costs $0.30.

Refund behaviour is the gap worth flagging. The rate card states the fee per successful charge but does not publish whether that fee is returned when you refund the customer, so the honest planning assumption is that the 30¢ is spent the moment the charge succeeds. Budget it as a cost of doing business rather than a cost of keeping the money.

Dispute economics beat fee economics at low ticket sizes. On 1,000 sales at $10, processing takes $590; if 5% of those buyers dispute, the $15.00 fees alone add $750 — more than the entire processing bill — before any refunded principal.

Bottom line

Price at $20 or above if the product allows it: at $20 the effective rate is 4.40%, and by $100 it is 3.20%, so the 30¢ stops being the story. If your average ticket has to stay at $10, the fixed fee is half your cost and no negotiation with Stripe changes that — only fewer, larger charges do.