n-What PayPal Actually Charges, and Why the Deposit Never Matches the Invoice
PayPal charges a percentage of the payment plus a small fixed amount on most Goods & Services transactions, deducted automatically before the money lands in your account, not billed separately afterward. Friends & Family payments funded by a bank account or PayPal balance usually skip that fee entirely, while card-funded or cross-border transfers often don't. We don't set your rate or negotiate it down. We build the reconciliation that accounts for the gap the fee leaves behind.
Where PayPal's fees actually show up
The standard Goods & Services fee applies to a normal commercial payment, a percentage of the transaction plus a flat amount, taken out before the funds settle into your balance. It's the same structure whether the payment came through a checkout button, an API call, or an invoice, since PayPal treats all three the same way once money has actually changed hands for something.
Friends & Family skips that fee when the sender funds it from their own PayPal balance or a linked bank account, which is the whole reason it exists as an option. Funding it with a card, or sending it across borders, usually brings a fee back into the picture even on a Friends & Family payment, along with a currency conversion markup on anything that crosses currencies.
A dispute that escalates into a chargeback through the card network, rather than staying inside PayPal's own Resolution Center, can carry its own separate chargeback fee on top of whatever the original transaction already cost, which is part of why keeping a dispute from escalating that far is worth more than just the refunded amount.
Rates and exact numbers change more than once a year and vary by country and account type, so check your account's current fee schedule directly rather than relying on a percentage that might already be out of date.
Why the deposit never quite matches the invoice
Because the fee comes out before the money lands, the amount that hits your bank account is always smaller than what you actually invoiced or sold, and by an amount that shifts slightly depending on the payment type, currency, and whether a chargeback fee got tacked on anywhere that period. A business reconciling by eye ends up chasing a gap that isn't a mistake, it's just the fee doing exactly what it's supposed to do.
That gap is also an early warning sign worth watching on its own. A rising share of cross-border or card-funded payments, or an uptick in chargebacks, shows up first as a shift in that fee percentage, usually well before anyone notices it in a margin review months later.
What we build around PayPal's fees
Reconciliation that expects the gap instead of flagging it as an error
A net PayPal deposit matched automatically against the gross invoice or order it came from, with the fee amount booked straight to the right expense account, instead of someone treating the difference as a discrepancy to chase down.
Fee creep caught before it shows up in a margin review
A shift in the effective rate you're paying, more card-funded transfers, more cross-border payments, more chargebacks, surfaced as it happens instead of discovered months later when someone finally compares two quarters.
Still manually explaining the gap between what you invoiced and what actually landed?
Tell us how you're currently reconciling PayPal deposits against what you actually billed, and we'll look at whether it needs to stay a manual step.
Taking PayPal payments and still eyeballing the difference between what you billed and what you got?
The fee isn't a mistake in your books, it's just math that nobody's automated yet. Once something's matching the deposit to the invoice and booking the difference on its own, that gap stops being something a person has to explain every month. PayPal's fees are just this page's example. The same reconciliation question applies to any payment method the business runs that quietly deducts something before the money shows up.
Let's talk