A Freelancer's Guide to Payment Fees
A few percent on every payment adds up fast. Here's how fees work and how to keep more of your money.
By Clemens AndritschkeUpdated
How the fee is built
Most payment processors charge a percentage of the transaction plus a small fixed fee per payment. The percentage hurts most on large invoices; the fixed fee hurts most on small ones. Knowing the exact split tells you what you actually keep, and where the leakage is.
On international payments, currency conversion can quietly add more on top — sometimes the largest cost of all, hidden in an unfavourable exchange rate rather than a stated fee.
Decide who pays, on purpose
You have three honest options: absorb fees as a cost of doing business, build them into your rate, or add a clearly stated surcharge. Any is fine — what is not fine is losing a few percent on every invoice without ever deciding to. Price the fee in deliberately.
Cut the cost where it is large
For domestic payments the differences between methods are small. For cross-border work they are not — tools built for international freelancers can save meaningfully on conversion and transfer costs. Weigh any saving against the payment methods your clients actually find convenient.
Comparing methods on what actually arrives
Providers advertise their headline percentage, which is the part of the cost easiest to compare and often the smallest part of the total. The figure that matters is what lands in your account, and getting to it means adding the fixed per-transaction fee, any currency conversion spread, and any receiving or withdrawal fee at your end.
The proportions shift with invoice size. On a €200 invoice a fixed fee of €0.30 is noise while the percentage dominates; on a €10,000 international transfer the percentage may be capped while a 3% conversion spread quietly costs €300. A provider that is cheapest for small domestic invoices can be the most expensive for large cross-border ones, so the honest comparison is per invoice type, not overall.
Bank transfer remains the cheapest option for domestic business-to-business work and is what most business clients expect. Cards buy convenience and speed of payment, which for consumer-facing or smaller work is often worth the fee outright — being paid immediately at 2.5% frequently beats being paid in six weeks at zero.
The conversion spread, and who should pay the fee
On cross-border work the exchange rate is usually the largest single cost and the only one that never appears as a line item. A provider quoting "no transfer fee" while applying a rate two to four percent worse than the mid-market rate is more expensive than one charging a visible flat fee. Compare the rate you are offered against the mid-market rate on the day; the difference is the real price.
On who absorbs it: passing card fees to business clients as a surcharge is legal in some places, restricted in others, and almost always resented. The cleaner approach is to build the expected cost into your rate and offer bank transfer as the default, so the fee becomes a margin question rather than a line on the invoice for the client to query.
For clients who pay in another currency, a multi-currency account that lets you hold the funds and convert when you choose removes the worst of the spread and lets you time conversions rather than accepting whatever rate applies on the day the money happens to land.