The earnings number and paid member count listed under your Patreon heading and your Membership insights page are approximations of your monthly or per-creation earnings and membership count. Think of the overview and summary as a snapshot of your current membership health.
The paid member count and earnings estimations are pulled from the active paid members list in your Relationship manager.
While our examples show a US Dollar ($) amount, yours will appear in the supported currency you and your paid members have selected. To learn more about supported currencies, please visit our guide Setting my creator currency.
How to review processed earnings
Use the Earnings dashboard, and Payouts reports for your monthly totals. These reports are reliable records of what we've processed for you in a given month.
The earnings number listed on your Patreon will fluctuate as paid members come and go and as we retry failed payments throughout the month. While you can use this number as a snapshot of your earnings, it will adjust throughout the month.
Your Membership dashboard is your best resource for digging into paid member count by join date and tiers.
- We use the percentage of your payment processing fees from the previous month as an estimator. There may be a fluctuation in this amount depending on what is processed.
- This fee will vary depending on the plan that you are on and is deducted from the total to give you a more accurate estimation of your take-home earnings. To find out more about the platform fee, visit our Creator fees overview.
- Apple requires that all new sales (digital goods and memberships) made in the Patreon iOS app use their in-app purchase system. As a result, Apple charges a 30% fee on the price of these products. Patreon does not charge any additional payment processing fees on in-app iOS transactions. Learn more about How iOS in-app payment works for one-time purchases and your options for pricing.
- The total amount of failed payments for the month. When a member's payment fails, their access is immediately revoked while we retry the payment. Declined members remain in your active member count while retries are ongoing. However, their declined amounts are deducted from your earnings estimation until their payment is resolved. After ~30 days of failed payment retries, the member is converted to free membership and removed from your paid member count.
There are a few reasons you may see fluctuations in the earnings number and paid member count listed under your Patreon heading and on your Membership insights page.
Please keep in mind that the data in the dashboards is updated every 4 hours.
- New members can join at any time throughout the month. This means your earnings, estimates, and member counts might fluctuate more frequently compared to legacy billing models. This is a normal part of the subscription billing model. While it may seem different from what legacy creators are used to, it offers a more dynamic and potentially stable revenue stream as members join at their convenience. This is more in line with what members expect the billing experience to be. Learn more about how Subscription Billing works.
- For Charge Up Front, Per Creation, and Non-charge up front, we process your paid members' payments throughout the day on the 1st. Due to this, the earnings and paid member count listed on your Patreon may fluctuate the most in the first few days of the month.
If you use charge up front, you'll see the biggest shift on the 3rd of the month. Members who cancelled in the previous month retain access until the 1st of the month and are removed from your Active member list at 12 midnight Pacific Time on the 3rd. Their cancellation is reflected in your Membership Insights from the date their access expired, not the date they cancel. If you notice a sudden decrease in your paid member count around the 3rd, this is expected and reflects those cancelled members being removed from your count.
You can check which members canceled in the previous month by heading to your Relationship Manager and filtering by the Cancel Date column. - The declined amounts are deducted from the earnings number listed on your Patreon, and we regularly retry processing failed payments throughout the month. As a result, your earnings number will likely increase as these payments are successfully processed. After ~30 days of failed payment retries, the member is removed from your paid member count and earnings estimation.
In a one-time update, members who have been in a failed payment state since Jan 2024 will become free members. In addition, members in a failed payment state between Dec 2025 and Jan 2026 will also be counted as a paid cancelled member. This means you may see a one-time increase in free and paid cancelled members, which will be reflected in both Membership Insights and Relationship Manager.
Note: Members in a failed payment state prior to Jan 2024 will become cancelled members. However, this will only be updated in Relationship Manager, not Membership Insights.