This article will cover possible reasons why the amount you earned is less than you anticipated or why the amount you withdrew is more or less than what you earned.
Fees may be missing from your estimation
One of the most common reasons your payout is lower than expected is that fees are deducted before earnings are added to your creator balance. In other words, the total in your balance already reflects fee deductions from successful payments.
For a detailed explanation of how each fee works, check out our Creator fees overview guide.
Here’s a quick summary of the fees you may see:
- Platform fee – A percentage of successfully processed payments. This depends on your plan: creators on the standard plan pay 10%, while legacy plan creators may pay 5%, 8% or 11%. You can check which plan you're on in your Account Settings
- Payment processing fees – These cover the cost of processing payments from your members. They vary based on your members’ location, currency, and payment method
- App Store fee (iOS purchases) – If a member makes a purchase through Apple’s in-app purchase system within the Patreon iOS app, Apple takes a 30% service fee. This fee replaces Patreon’s standard payment processing fee for that transaction
- Currency conversion fee – A 2.5% fee is applied when a member pays in a different currency than your payout currency.
- Taxes on fees – In some regions, tax must be collected from your members by law. Your payment processing fee is calculated based on the total payment amount, including any applicable tax. Learn more about sales tax and VAT
- Payout fee – A small fee for transferring your balance to your selected payout method (e.g., PayPal, bank transfer, or Payoneer). The fee depends on both the payout method and your payout currency
You can see your fees in Earnings Insights, which updates every 4 hours. For a full per-transaction breakdown, download the monthly CSV from the Documents section of your Payouts page.
Pending balance
Funds from one-time purchases on Web and Android will appear as pending for up to 7 days before they can be withdrawn from your balance. Funds from in-app purchases will appear as pending for up to 75 days before they will be available for payout, accounting for the time Apple requires to process and confirm the funds.
Declined membership payments
Another cause is if some of your members’ payments declined. These are payments that Patreon attempted to process, but failed. In your Relationship manager, you can check if any member’s payments were declined. Visit our declined payments resource to learn more about failed payments
Your Merch cost has been deducted from your balance
If you use Patreon for Merch fulfillment, the cost of the merchandise itself (based on the quantity and SKUs of the associated items) and shipping will usually be deducted from your balance on the 4th of each month. This may impact your balance if you are enrolled in automatic 5th-of-the-month payouts, so you may see a decrease in the amount you receive from the amount that was available to withdraw
You may have memberships with other creators
If you have a paid membership to other creators, we'll subtract your pledge from your creator payout. This prevents unnecessary additional fees, and your card or PayPal account will be billed less or not at all.
Also, the number listed on your public page is an estimate and is not an accurate representation of what you may actually earn. You can learn more about this here: Understand the numbers listed on my creator page