The fee arithmetic is the easy half and it is covered elsewhere — the fee and profit calculator carries three real orders down to the cent, including the detail that the transaction fee is charged on shipping as well as on the item. This page is about the other half: the journey the remaining money takes, in order, and the several places it can pause or reverse.
The thing to get straight first is that when a buyer pays you, the money does not go to your bank. It goes to your Etsy payment account, which is a ledger inside Etsy that holds sales, deducts fees and taxes as they are incurred, and periodically pushes a balance out to your bank. Almost every confusing payout question dissolves once that distinction is clear, because “my sales”, “my available funds” and “my deposit” are three different numbers that are never equal.
The money enters the payment account, minus fees, immediately
Etsy's fees are not invoiced separately for you to pay later; they are deducted against your payment account balance as they arise. Your available for deposit figure is defined by Etsy as available sales funds minus refunds, fees and taxes, and minus anything held in a reserve. So the reduction has already happened by the time you look.
If you sell in a currency other than your payment account's, this is also where Etsy's 2.5% currency conversion fee is applied — subtracted from the sale amount before the funds appear in the account at all, which is why it is easy to miss when reconciling.
Funds have to become “available” before any schedule can move them
This is the step most sellers do not know exists. Etsy states that for a new seller, funds generally become available for deposit 14 to 20 days after a sale, and that it can take longer depending on the standing of the shop. For an established seller, an Etsy Payments order may become available as soon as the next business day — again, depending on shop standing.
Nothing about this is a punishment and nothing about it is visible on the order itself. It is simply a holding period that shortens as a shop builds history.
A percentage of every physical sale is held separately
A payment account reserve is a distinct mechanism layered on top of the availability window. When one is in place, Etsy sets aside a percentage of the funds from each new sale of a physical item, and those funds are not available for deposit until a holding period has passed — Etsy's help describes 45 days from the date of the sale — or until Etsy can confirm from valid tracking, added by you, that the order is in transit.
That “or” is the actionable part, and it is the reason adding tracking promptly is a cash-flow decision rather than an admin task. Etsy says reserves are applied on the basis of risk factors, one of which is simply having recently made your first sale, and that the specific holding period and percentage that apply to your shop are shown in the Reserve section of your payment account. Read your own numbers there rather than any figure quoted elsewhere, including this one.
Only now does money leave Etsy
Deposits run on a schedule you choose — daily, weekly, biweekly or monthly — and Etsy's default for a new seller is weekly, every Monday. If a scheduled payment date falls on a non-business day, it moves to the next business day, so a bank holiday shifts a deposit without anything being wrong.
Two smaller conditions apply in some markets: a deposit fee for deposits below a threshold, deducted from your available funds at the time of the deposit, and a minimum balance requirement for the daily schedule in certain countries. Both vary by market, so check what applies to yours.
Anything the sales did not cover becomes a bill
At the beginning of each month a statement appears in your payment account covering the previous month's sales and fees, and outstanding fees from that month are charged on the 1st. If you are enrolled in autobilling, Etsy charges the card on file on the 1st; if not, the amount due can be paid from the 1st to the 15th. Where the payment account did not hold enough to cover the fees, Etsy's policy is that you are responsible for paying in full within 15 days of the statement date, after which the account is past due.
Which is how a shop with real sales ends up owing money. If fees for a month exceed what you sold — a heavy advertising month, a quiet trading month, or both — your balance is simply negative, there is no deposit, and the shortfall arrives as a bill.
The two clocks, and the one everybody adjusts
A payout is gated by two independent timers, and confusing them produces the most common piece of wasted effort in this whole area.
Decides whether a given sale's money can be paid out yet. Set by shop standing, the new-seller window and any reserve. You cannot change it from a settings page; it moves as your history and your tracking do.
Decides when already-available money is swept to your bank. Entirely yours to set — daily, weekly, biweekly, monthly.
Switching the schedule to daily when the constraint is availability changes nothing except how often you check an empty transfer. If your funds are sitting in a reserve, the lever that moves them is tracking on the order, not the dropdown. If you are inside the new-seller window, the lever is time.
When the money goes backwards
Refunds are the one direction of travel that behaves unintuitively, and Etsy's treatment of the fees depends on who issued the refund.
When you refund an order yourself, in full or in part, Etsy recalculates the payment processing fee against the adjusted sale amount and credits the difference proportionally to the refund amount, with other applicable fees returned to your payment account. That is roughly what you would expect: a smaller sale, a smaller fee.
The exception worth knowing before it happens. Etsy's policy states that where a full refund is covered by Etsy — for example under its protection programme — the payment processing fee and other applicable fees, including the transaction fee and any Offsite Ads fee, are not credited back to the seller. The order value returns to the buyer; the fees on it do not return to you.
On an ordinary order the fee total is a few per cent. On an order that arrived through Offsite Ads it is not: that fee alone is 15% of the order total for most shops, or 12% for shops past $10,000 of sales in the previous 365 days. A refunded advertised order can therefore cost you close to a fifth of its value in fees on a sale you no longer have.
The practical consequence is that a returns problem is more expensive than a returns rate suggests, and the effect is worst on exactly the orders that already carried the highest fee load. It is also the reason a month's fee total can look wrong against a month's sales total: refunds and their fee adjustments do not necessarily land in the same statement period as the original order.
Three questions before you conclude the money is missing
In order, because each one rules out the next.
- Is the balance negative rather than zero? If fees for the period exceeded sales, there is nothing to deposit and there is an amount due. This is an accounting outcome, not a hold.
- Is any of it in a reserve? The Reserve section of the payment account shows the percentage and the holding period applied to your shop. If an order in there has no tracking on it, adding tracking is the fastest available action.
- Has it become available at all? New shops are working inside a window of roughly two to three weeks, and the deposit schedule cannot reach funds that have not cleared it.
Only after all three does a support question make sense — and it is a much better question when it names which of the three you have eliminated.
What Etsy does not put a number on
Two things on this page are deliberately vague in Etsy's own documentation, and it is worth knowing that the vagueness is theirs rather than ours. The availability window is described as a range that depends on the standing of your shop, with no published criteria for what improves standing or how quickly. And the reserve percentage and holding period are stated to vary by account, with the defaults shown in your own payment account rather than published centrally. Anyone quoting you a fixed percentage for a reserve, or a fixed number of days to graduate from the new-seller window, is describing their own account and not yours.
Everything above is the mechanics of getting paid. What you are getting paid depends on the fee lines themselves, which the fee calculator works through order by order — and if the underlying product is print-on-demand, the supply side sits in the POD profit calculator instead, because a supplier invoice and a marketplace fee behave nothing alike.
Policy details verified against Etsy's own help centre and policies on 2026-07-28. Etsy's terms change; confirm anything load-bearing against your own payment account.
Primary sources, all Etsy's own: How to Manage Your Payment Account and How to Calculate Your Etsy Payments Deposit Amount — the definition of available for deposit, and the deposit schedule options; Why Hasn't My Money Been Deposited Yet? — the 14 to 20 day new-seller window, next-business-day availability for established shops, and negative balances; What is a Payment Account Reserve? and Etsy's Handbook article on reserves — the percentage hold, the 45-day period, release on confirmed tracking, and the statement that terms vary by account; Fees & Payments Policy — monthly statements, the 1st-to-15th payment window, the 15-day deadline, deposit fees below market thresholds, and the non-business-day rule; Refunds, Returns and Exchanges for Sellers and the Etsy Payments Policy — proportional fee credits on seller-issued refunds, and the exception for full refunds covered by Etsy; Currency Conversion Fees — the 2.5% conversion fee deducted before funds reach the payment account. Etsy's wording is paraphrased throughout rather than quoted.