Mercari Fees Since 2025: the 10% Fee, Buyer Fee and Instant Pay

What the 10% is charged on

Mercari’s fees page says that effective January 6, 2025, a 10% selling fee applies to the item price and buyer-paid shipping for new and updated listings. There is no separate payment processing fee for sellers, and listing is free.

The buyer pays two things you never see: a 3.6% Buyer Protection fee on the item price plus buyer-paid shipping (Buyer Protection), and the sales tax, which Mercari collects at the rate for the buyer’s address. Neither is in your fee base.

Here is the house example: a $50.00 item with $8.00 of buyer-paid shipping (a round example; Mercari’s actual label prices are further down).

Net payout here means what lands in your Mercari balance after the fee and any label you pay, before a cash-out fee. The $8 of shipping adds $0.80 to your fee, so the fee is 11.6% of the item price rather than 10%. On the same sale Depop leaves $47.48 and Mercari’s $44.20 is second of eight platforms in our comparison.

Buyer pays or you pay: the same $58 either way

When you list, you choose who pays shipping. If you pay, Mercari deducts the label from your earnings and charges the 10% on the item price only, because there is no buyer-paid shipping to include.

Offering free shipping at the same $50.00 price saves you $0.80 in fees but costs you the $8.00 label, so you keep $7.20 less. Raise the price to $58.00 to cover the label and you land exactly where buyer-paid shipping put you: the 10% falls on $58.00 either way. The real choice is how the price looks to a buyer, not the fee.

Each fee is rounded to the cent here; Mercari doesn’t publish a rounding rule, so a sale can differ by a cent.

Label prices before and after October 19, 2026

Mercari publishes its prepaid label prices on the same fees page. For USPS Ground Advantage, the low “Best” rates apply when the package is within 1 cubic foot and 22 inches on the longest side; larger packages are priced by dimensional weight. The current rates were updated May 7, 2026, and new rates take effect October 19, 2026:

Ground Advantage goes up and Media Mail (books and other eligible media only, see the Media Mail rules) goes down. On a $30.00 item in a 1 lb Ground Advantage package:

• You pay shipping: you keep $30.00 − $3.00 − $7.48 = $19.52 today, and $19.01 from October 19.
• The buyer pays: the fee is 10% of $37.48 = $3.75 today, leaving $26.25; from October 19 it is 10% of $37.99 = $3.80, leaving $26.20. A higher buyer-paid label raises your fee too.

A $20.00 book shipped Media Mail at 1 lb with you paying keeps $13.01 today and $13.53 from October 19. First-Class Envelope labels for trading cards are on a promotion from September 17, 2026 to January 4, 2027: $0.00 for 1 oz and $0.49 for 2 or 3 oz. For what USPS charges outside a platform label, see the shipping costs guide.

Instant Pay: when $3 is a small share

Mercari’s Getting Paid page lists two ways to cash out:

• Direct deposit: free since January 6, 2025 (it was $2), one request a day, typically within 5 business days. A failed deposit costs $2.
• Instant Pay: a flat $3 per cash-out to an eligible Visa or Mastercard debit card, once a day, up to $600 a month, usually within 30 minutes.

Because the $3 is flat, its share depends on how much you move at once:

Cashing out the single $44.20 sale instantly leaves $41.20. Payout timing by platform compares this with the instant options on eBay and Etsy. Whether the speed is worth it is your call; the numbers just show that the same $3 costs more on a small balance than on a large one.

Legacy listings and how the fee got here

For most of 2024, Mercari ran a different model. Its own letter announcing the 2025 change says that when it introduced that structure in March (the letter gives no year; an archived April 2024 copy of Mercari’s fees page dates the switch to March 27, 2024), sellers kept 100% of their sales proceeds while buyers paid the fees, and that sellers saw fewer sales because items were less affordable. From January 6, 2025, Mercari reintroduced the 10% seller fee, set the buyer’s fee at 3.6% Buyer Protection, dropped the separate processing fee and removed the $2 direct deposit fee.

The fees page still describes the transition case: a listing created before January 6, 2025 and never updated pays no selling fee until it is updated, and its buyer pays a 10% buyer fee plus 2.9% + $0.50 processing instead. Mercari also said existing listings would be switched automatically within about a week, and that you can see a listing’s selling fee on its editing screen. If a listing really is on the old terms, the $50.00 sale leaves you the full $50.00. The fee change log keeps the dates.

Next step

Run your own price, label and payout choice through the Mercari fee calculator; it picks the label price by sale date, so a sale on or after October 19, 2026 uses the new rates. To see how the same item does elsewhere, try the comparison tool.