Explainer · 2026-05-01

Patreon fees in 2026, every cut, receipts only

Patreon's 8% commission is the headline. Underneath the headline are six other line items — payment processing, small-charge processing, currency conversion, the new 30% Apple cut on iOS subscriptions from November 1, 2026, payout fees, and tax. Every one is public. Most never show up in a single page. This is that page.

The seven things that come out of every Patreon dollar

Before any worked example, it helps to enumerate the cuts. Each gets its own section below; this is the index.

1. Platform commission. 5% on the Lite tier, 8% on Pro, 12% on Premium.
2. Standard payment processing. 2.9% + $0.30 per successful charge of $3 or more.
3. Small-charge processing. 5% + $0.10 on charges under $3 — $1 tiers are taxed at a real rate around 15% once the fixed cents land.
4. Currency conversion. 2.5% when a fan pays in their currency and a creator is paid in another.
5. Apple's IAP cut. 30% of every iOS-app subscription from November 1, 2026, on top of everything else.
6. Payout fees. $0 via direct deposit in the US, ~$0.25 via PayPal, $20+ via international wire.
7. Tax. Not a Patreon fee — your own income tax — but Patreon issues a 1099-K to US creators above the federal threshold and reports the gross before fees, which surprises people every January.

1 · Platform commission — 5% / 8% / 12%

Patreon publishes three plans on its pricing page. The Lite tier is 5% and includes only the simplest membership page. The Pro tier is 8% and adds multi-tier pricing, member surveys, special offers, and the bulk of what creators actually use. Premium is 12% and adds team accounts and dedicated support.

Almost every working creator is on Pro. The Lite plan's missing features make it a non-starter for anyone running multiple tiers, and Premium's added features matter only above roughly $100k/yr on Patreon. So when this page says "8%" it is the modal rate; substitute 5% or 12% if you are on the other plans.

2 · Payment processing — 2.9% + $0.30 (the boring one)

Patreon's processing page states 2.9% + $0.30 for any successful charge of $3 or more. This is what every payment processor charges — Stripe, PayPal, Square, Adyen — give or take a tenth of a percent. It is not a Patreon policy choice; it is the cost of running a card transaction.

The piece worth noticing: this fee is per successful charge, not per active member. A fan on a $10/mo tier generates twelve charges a year, so processing on one $120 annual stream is 12 × ($0.30 + 2.9% × $10) = ~$7.08 — 5.9% of the gross. The fixed $0.30 stings hardest at low monthly prices, which is the cue for the next section.

3 · Small-charge processing — 5% + $0.10 (the one that hurts)

Charges under $3 hit the "micropayment" rate of 5% + $0.10. On a $1 tier — common for podcast supporters and serial-fiction fans — that is $0.15 per charge, or 15% of the gross. Add Patreon's 8% commission and you are at 23% in fees on every dollar from a $1-tier supporter, before any platform.

Whether $1 tiers ever made sense was always debatable. The arithmetic says no above some volume threshold; the reach says yes for some audiences. The point here is that "Patreon takes 8%" is not the take on a $1 charge. It is much larger, the smaller the tier.

4 · Currency conversion — 2.5%

If a fan pays in EUR and the creator's payout currency is USD, Patreon converts at a published mid-market rate plus a 2.5% spread. The same applies in reverse — UK creator paid in GBP, US fan paying USD. The conversion fee is invisible on the creator dashboard until the monthly payout statement; it shows up in the "processing" column rather than in its own.

For US creators with a US-dominant audience, this fee is rounding-error. For UK / EU / Canadian / Australian creators with US fans, currency conversion adds another ~1–2% to the effective take rate, on top of platform and processing. International creators routinely see 15–20% in total fees on web-only subscriptions before any Apple iOS surcharge.

5 · Apple's 30% IAP cut — the new one

The headline change of 2026. From November 1, every Patreon subscription paid through the iOS app routes through Apple's In-App Purchase rails and Apple takes 30% of the gross. Patreon's own 8% still applies on the same revenue; the cuts stack. We have full long-form coverage of this in The Patreon Apple tax, explained, and the homepage has a calculator that takes two inputs (monthly revenue + iOS share) and shows the dollar delta.

Web subscriptions are unaffected — Apple's 30% only applies inside the iOS app. Patreon's public guidance is the same as Spotify's, Netflix's, and Substack's: tell your fans to subscribe on the web. Whether that works depends on whether you have a way to reach your iOS-installed fans outside the app, which most podcasters and YouTubers do not. The web-only-Patreon explainer covers what that path recovers and what it does not.

6 · Payout fees — usually small, sometimes not

Direct deposit in the US is $0, the usual creator's default. PayPal payouts cost about $0.25 per payout (one a month), negligible at any working volume. International wire is $20 or more per payout, which matters if you live in a country PayPal does not serve well — Argentina, Pakistan, Nigeria, parts of South-East Asia. For the audience this blog speaks to (US/UK/EU creators), payout fees are sub-1% of monthly revenue and rarely worth optimising.

One footnote: Patreon does not pay out below a $25 minimum. New creators with low monthly revenue can have payouts skipped and rolled over, which doesn't cost anything but is a confusing first surprise on the dashboard.

7 · Tax — not Patreon's fee, but it is a number

US creators earning over the federal 1099-K threshold receive a 1099-K from Patreon each January. The form reports the gross amount of payments processed, not the net after Patreon's commission and processing. Many creators see the gross number and assume that is what they have to pay tax on; in practice the platform's and processor's cuts are deductible business expenses on Schedule C (or your country's equivalent) and so is your time, equipment, and software. The point: keep your own books. Patreon does not.

The full receipt — $4,200/mo · 60% iOS · Pro plan · US-based

This is the canonical example used across the calculator and every other piece on this site. 60% of revenue from iOS, 40% from web; standard processing rate (no $1 tiers); Pro plan; US-domestic so no currency conversion. November-1 onwards.

A third of every dollar your fans send you, gone before you see it. The $4,200/mo creator is keeping $2,777/mo. Apple is the largest single line item — bigger than Patreon's own commission, bigger than processing — once iOS share crosses about 35%.

The same creator, web-only Patreon (no Apple)

The same creator, same audience, same revenue, but with iOS billing disabled and fans subscribing in a browser: $3,533/mo kept. Annual fee load drops from $17,076 to $8,004 — a $9,072/yr swing for one toggle. The caveat is that not every iOS-app fan migrates; the six-phase toggle checklist covers what migration realistically recovers.

The same creator, off-Patreon entirely (KeepTier)

No platform commission, no Apple, just Stripe processing plus a flat $9/mo for the membership page itself — so the take rate is the processor's ~7.9% floor plus the ~0.2% KeepTier flat fee at this revenue band. The eight-platform alternatives ledger walks the same $4,200/mo · 60% iOS creator through every option (Substack, Memberful, Buy Me a Coffee, Ko-fi, Gumroad, self-hosted) so you can see where each one lands. The short version: every alternative beats post-November Patreon, most beat web-only Patreon, and the spread between cheapest and most-expensive is around $13,000/yr on this revenue band.

What the table does not show

Three things matter that none of the receipts above capture, and they cut both ways.

Discoverability. Patreon's own discovery is modest, but a Patreon URL is a known quantity to fans on Reddit, Discord, and YouTube comments. Migrating to a custom domain means giving up that recognition. The fee savings are real; the re-introduction tax is real too.

Fan inertia. The biggest single risk on any migration is fans who do not re-subscribe. A 10% attrition rate during migration eats two years of fee savings on the receipts above. The migration playbook spends most of its words on how to keep that number low.

Time cost. The fee savings on a $4,200/mo creator are roughly $13,000/yr from worst to best. A half-day migration with a one-month follow-up easily clears that hourly rate; a ten-week migration probably does not. Match the size of the migration to the size of the prize.

The 30-second summary

On Patreon Pro you pay 8% commission, ~5–8% processing depending on tier price mix, 2.5% on conversions if you are international, and from November 1 2026, 30% of every iOS-app subscription. On the canonical $4,200/mo US creator with 60% iOS, that is ~34% of every dollar — a third — before tax. Web-only roughly halves it. Off-Patreon roughly halves it again. Whether the migration is worth doing is one honest hour of math against an inertia estimate.

Sources: Patreon's published pricing for commission tiers; Patreon's processing-fee support article for the standard and small-charge rates; Apple's App Store Review Guidelines §3.1.1 for the 30% IAP rule effective November 1, 2026; Stripe's published pricing for the 2.9% + $0.30 baseline. Worked examples assume Pro-tier commission, US-domestic billing, and a tier mix with no $1 supporters. Round to the nearest dollar. Your exact take depends on tier mix, annual vs monthly billing, payment method distribution, and country of residence.