What this calculator does
- Estimates Stripe's card processing fee for a single transaction, starting from the US base rate of 2.9% + $0.30.
- Adds the three published surcharges — international cards, currency conversion, manually-entered cards — since they stack on top of the base rate rather than replacing it.
- Uses Stripe's published US rate card; other countries publish their own base rates and fixed-fee amounts.
The base rate, and why it's rarely the whole story
Stripe's headline US rate is 2.9% + $0.30 per successful card charge, and for a purely domestic, online-checkout, single-currency payment, that's the entire fee. The moment any of those conditions change — the card was issued abroad, a currency conversion happens, or the card number was typed in rather than tapped or entered through checkout — an extra surcharge applies on top, and more than one can apply to the same transaction at once.
International cards: +1.5%
This surcharge is about where the card itself was issued, not where the cardholder happens to be sitting when they pay. A card issued by a bank outside the country your Stripe account is registered in counts as international, even if the person paying is physically in your country at the time.
Currency conversion: +1%
This is separate from the international-card surcharge and triggers whenever Stripe converts the payment into the currency your account settles in. It can apply even on a domestic card if the customer pays in a different currency than your account uses — and it can stack with the international surcharge if both conditions are true at once.
Manually-entered cards: +0.5%
Typing a card number in directly — over the phone, or into a manual-entry field — carries more fraud risk than a chip, tap, or standard checkout-form payment, since there's no chip or contactless authentication backing it up. Stripe prices that extra risk in as a small additional surcharge.
These stack, and the worst case adds up
A card that's international, needs currency conversion, and is manually entered picks up all three surcharges at once: 2.9% + 1.5% + 1% + 0.5% = 5.9%, plus the fixed $0.30. That's roughly double the advertised headline rate, which is exactly why it's worth checking which of these actually apply before assuming Stripe's cost is simply "2.9% + 30 cents."
Why the fixed fee still matters on small charges
The percentage gets most of the attention, but the flat $0.30 is a fixed cost no matter the transaction size — on a $500 invoice it barely registers, but on a $5 microtransaction it can be a bigger share of the total fee than the percentage itself. If a business collects a lot of small payments, that fixed fee is worth modeling separately rather than folding into a single blended "percentage fee" assumption.
Rates differ by country, not just by card
Everything above reflects Stripe's published US rate card. A Stripe account registered in the UK, the EU, or elsewhere has its own base percentage and its own fixed-fee amount in the local currency — a UK account, for example, isn't simply the US numbers converted at the exchange rate, it's a separately published rate. Always check Stripe's own pricing page for the specific country an account is registered in before treating any single number as universal.