How to calculate Paystack charges

The Vendor’s Guide to Paystack Charges: Stop Losing Money on Every Sale

Let’s be honest: nothing hurts a Nigerian business owner quite like seeing an alert for ₦50,000, only for your settlement account to hit you with ₦49,250. Where did that ₦750 go? It evaporated into online payment fees.

If you are selling on Instagram, WhatsApp, or your website, you cannot escape transaction processing fees. However, you can escape losing your profit margins to them. Let’s look at exactly how these fees work and how to calculate them without giving yourself a headache.

The Math: How Paystack Charges Actually Work

For local transactions in Nigeria, the baseline fee is 1.5% + ₦100.

But there is a catch: Meta’s payment guidelines and standard gateway structures waive that flat ₦100 fee for transactions under ₦2,500. For anything ₦2,500 and above, the ₦100 kicks in. The maximum fee Paystack will ever charge you on a single local transaction is capped at ₦2,000.

Here is the quick breakdown:

A sale of ₦2,000: 1.5% fee = ₦30 (No ₦100 fee applies). You get ₦1,970.

A sale of ₦10,000: 1.5% fee (₦150) + ₦100 = ₦250. You get ₦9,750.

The Trap: Absorbing vs. Passing the Fee

As a business owner, you have two choices when sending a payment link:

Absorbe the fee: You pay the transaction fee out of your own profit.

Pass the fee: The customer pays the fee during checkout.

If you want to pass the fee to the customer, you cannot just add 1.5% + ₦100 to your price. If you do, the final settlement math will still leave you short by a few Naira because Paystack charges their 1.5% on the total final amount paid, not your original price.

Save Your Brain: Use a Calculator

Instead of writing complex algebra formulas on a piece of paper before sending an account number, use our free Paystack Fee Calculator. You just type in the amount you want to clear, toggle whether you or the buyer pays, and it gives you the exact figure instantly.

Pro-Tip: Manual calculations cause errors. If you are handling 50 orders a day during a flash sale, typing payment links manually is an easy way to lose money.

Bring on the Automation

If you are tired of manually creating payment links and calculating fees for every single WhatsApp customer, it’s time to scale up.

With WhatBiz, you don't need to manually calculate anything. When a customer drops an order in your chat, our smart WhatsApp assistant automatically generates the exact invoice, calculates the payment gateway split, and sends a secure link straight to the customer.

No calculations, no "send me your account number," and no missed payments. Automate your WhatsApp orders for free with WhatBiz today.