How Much Does It Cost to Sell a Domain Name?

Short answer: selling a domain name costs 8% to 25% in marketplace commission, roughly 1% to 3% in escrow fees (often split with the buyer), plus a transfer fee of about $10 to $20 and income tax on the gain. On a $10,000 sale that means you keep somewhere between roughly $6,400 and $9,100 before tax, depending entirely on where you list it. Commission is the whole ballgame; everything else is rounding.

Most first-time sellers discover this at closing, which is a bad time to discover it. Here is every line item, with real numbers.

1. Marketplace commission: 8% to 40%

This is the cost that matters. Published rates as of July 2026:

• Afternic and GoDaddy: 15% if the domain uses their aftermarket nameservers at the time of sale, 25% if it does not. That nameserver detail has cost inattentive sellers thousands of dollars.
• Sedo: 10% on a direct fixed-price sale through its own landing page, 15% on marketplace offers and auctions, and 20% when the sale comes through the SedoMLS network.
• Atom (formerly Squadhelp): 30% to 40% on curated brandable listings. High, and sometimes still correct, because Atom puts invented names in front of funded founders who no other venue reaches. Where that premium is earned and where it is not is compared on our Atom alternative page.
• Domainsdealer: 12% on the Investor plan, 8% on Pro Broker, with negotiated rates as low as 5% at enterprise volume. The plans are on the pricing page.

Run it on a $10,000 sale and the spread is brutal: 8% leaves you $9,200, 25% leaves you $7,500, and 35% leaves you $6,500. The venue decision is worth $2,700 on one transaction. Across a portfolio doing four sales a year, it dwarfs almost every other optimization you could make. The full venue-by-venue breakdown lives on where to sell domain names.

2. Escrow: about 1% to 3%, frequently split

A licensed third-party escrow service holds the buyer's funds, waits for you to push the transfer, confirms the buyer has control, and only then releases the money. On a $10,000 domain, escrow typically runs somewhere in the low hundreds of dollars, and it is common for buyer and seller to split it or for the buyer to absorb it entirely as a term of the deal.

Do not treat this as a fee to avoid. Every horror story in this business starts with a seller who skipped escrow to save $150: the chargeback that lands six weeks after the transfer, the wire that was never sent, the buyer who vanishes with the name. If a buyer pushes hard to settle outside escrow, they have just told you what they are. The sequence, step by step, is in the domain escrow guide.

3. Transfer fees: $10 to $20, and sometimes zero

Moving a .com to another registrar costs roughly the price of a one-year renewal, since the transfer adds a year to the registration. Many marketplaces handle a push between accounts at the same registrar for nothing at all. This line item is real but trivial, and it should never influence a decision.

4. Listing and plan fees

Some venues charge to list, some charge a monthly subscription, some charge nothing up front and take a bigger cut at the end. There is no free lunch, only different places to pay for it. What matters is your all-in cost per completed sale, not the sticker on any single line. A $49 monthly plan that drops commission from 25% to 12% pays for itself the moment a single $5,000 name sells.

5. Tax on the gain

In the United States, the proceeds from selling a domain are taxable. For most active domain investors the IRS treats names held for resale as inventory, so gains are ordinary income rather than capital gains, and if you are doing this as a business, self-employment tax applies too. Investors who hold a name for years as an investment rather than as trading stock may have a capital-gains argument, but that determination turns on facts and intent, and it is worth twenty minutes with a CPA rather than twenty minutes on a forum.

What you can control is your records. Keep the acquisition cost, every renewal you have paid on the name, the marketplace commission, and the escrow fee, because all of it bears on the taxable gain. Investors who track their income and costs as they go save themselves a genuinely miserable April, and more importantly they stop guessing at whether the portfolio is actually profitable.

A $10,000 sale, worked through

Take a clean two-word .com that sells for $10,000 on a 12% marketplace, with escrow split down the middle:

• Sale price: $10,000
• Commission at 12%: minus $1,200
• Escrow, half of roughly $190: minus $95
• Transfer: minus $0 (account push)
• Net before tax: about $8,705
• Less the original acquisition cost and three years of renewals, say $2,000 and $36
• Pre-tax gain: roughly $6,669

Now run the identical sale at 25% commission: your net drops to about $7,405 and your gain to roughly $5,369. Same name, same buyer, same day, $1,300 less in your pocket. That is the entire argument for reading the fee page before you list rather than after.

What sellers forget to budget for

• The nameserver clause. The single most expensive detail in the industry: the same marketplace can charge you 15% or 25% on the same sale depending on where the domain's nameservers point. Check it before the sale, not after.
• Currency and payout friction. International payouts can carry conversion spreads that quietly cost more than the transfer fee.
• Renewals during the wait. A name that sits listed for two years costs two renewals. On a portfolio that is a real number, which is why renewal triage matters. A bulk domain appraisal makes those renew-or-drop calls with comps attached instead of by feel.
• Broker commission on top. If a broker sources the buyer, that fee is separate from a marketplace cut. It is often worth it on five-figure names, and rarely worth it below that.

Can I sell a domain with no fees at all?

Technically yes, by finding the buyer yourself and closing directly. In practice it is a false economy for all but the most experienced sellers. You still want escrow (that is not a fee you should skip), you lose the distribution that produces buyers in the first place, and you take on the entire counterparty risk yourself. Saving 12% on a sale that never happens is not a saving. The realistic goal is not zero fees, it is the lowest commission at a venue that will actually put your name in front of the person who wants it.

The bottom line

Budget 8% to 25% for commission, 1% to 3% for escrow, a token amount for transfer, and tax on the gain at your ordinary rate. Then go optimize the only line that is worth optimizing: pick the venue with the lowest commission that still reaches your buyer. Price the name against comps first with the domain appraisal tool so you know what you are protecting, then read how to sell a domain name for the full listing and negotiation sequence.