Etsy Candle Profit Calculator

How to read your result

Profit is what remains after Etsy fees and all of your costs, including labour. If profit is negative, the price does not cover the batch even before your time is counted; if margin is under roughly a third, one returned or remade candle can erase several sales, so treat a thin margin as a warning, not a pass.

Method and formula

Revenue is the discounted item total plus the shipping amount charged to the buyer. Etsy fees are then deducted: a $0.20 listing fee per unit, a 6.5% transaction fee on revenue, and a 3% + $0.25 payment processing fee (US Etsy Payments). If Offsite Ads is enabled, add 15% of revenue, or 12% for shops at or above the $10,000 trailing-365-day threshold, capped at $100 per order. Profit = revenue - total fees - total costs (product + actual shipping cost + packaging + labour + other). Margin = profit / revenue. Rates verified against Etsy’s official fee pages on 28 Oct 2026. Unit material cost is the batch total divided by sellable candles per batch, which is why the batch size and the number of sellable candles matter as much as the wax price.

Worked examples

Example 1 prices a soy jar candle at $28 with a $55 batch yielding 12 sellable candles. Example 2 repeats the same sale through Offsite Ads at the standard 15% rate, showing how much of the profit an ad-attributed sale removes. Full inputs and expected outputs are in the worked_examples field and were computed by the independent script in this record's build.

Assumptions and limits

US Etsy Payments rates only; non-US processing rates differ. Sales tax is excluded from the transaction base for US sellers per the base fee profile. The listing fee is charged per unit sold here (one listing renewal per sale); multi-quantity listings renew per unit. Currency conversion (2.5%), regulatory operating fees for non-US markets, returns, and Etsy's one-time new-shop set-up fee are not modelled. Labour is valued at the rate you enter; unpaid time is not free, it is profit you keep only if you choose to value it at $0. Cure time is not a cost line: if candles sit unsold for weeks, the cost is tied-up cash, not a fee, and this calculator does not price it.

Category guidance: materials and process

Cost candles by batch, never by guessing a per-candle figure. Weigh wax and fragrance rather than measuring by volume, because fragrance load is specified as a percentage of wax weight and eyeballing it changes both scent throw and cost. Record the container and lid together: sellers most often under-cost the vessel, and it is usually the largest single material line after wax.

Category guidance: pricing pitfalls

Three pitfalls recur: pricing from wax cost alone while forgetting the container; counting every poured candle as sellable when some fail quality checks; and charging shipping below the actual carrier cost, which quietly moves a shipping loss into every order. Test the price at a smaller batch too, since a 6-candle batch carries far more cost per candle than a 24-candle batch.

Related tools

Start from the generic Etsy profit calculator to cross-check a result, use the fee calculator to isolate the fee lines, and read the guide on how Etsy fees work before changing prices. The handmade pricing calculator is the fallback for candles you cannot batch-cost cleanly.

Fee assumptions

Worked example calculations

Every example below uses the US Etsy Payments fee profile and is rounded to the cent. You can enter the same numbers into the calculator above to reproduce each result.

Soy jar candle, single sale

Same candle sold through Offsite Ads (standard 15%)

Sources

• Etsy Fees & Payments Policy (official) — verified 2026-10-28
• Etsy Help: Offsite Ads rates and $10,000 threshold (official) — verified 2026-10-28
• Sellarithm base fee-config.js (read this session; cites the official pages above) — verified 2026-10-28