How Much Does It Cost to Sell a Domain Name in Commission, Escrow and Tax

Short answer: selling a domain name costs 7% to 30% 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 $7,200 and $9,200 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. A cheaper marketplace option is covered in our Sav.com marketplace review, including its 4% commission, payout requests and the different fees that can apply to network sales.

1. Marketplace commission of 7% to 30%

This is the cost that matters. Published rates, read from each venue's own terms where they are reachable:

• 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.
• Porkbun: 7% on its marketplace with no listing fee, with cash payouts through PayPal only and an outbound transfer lock while a name is listed.
• Namecheap Market and Dynadot: a flat 10% each, no listing fee. Cheap and simple if your names already sit at that registrar. Spaceship SellerHub joined them at 10% in February 2026; see the Spaceship SellerHub alternative comparison for what you keep at each sales volume.
• Sedo: reported at 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): 7.5% on a Standard listing, 15% on Plus, and 15% to 30% on curated Premium brandable listings, tiered by sale price: 30% below $5,000, 25% to $49,999, 20% to $74,999 and 15% above that. High at the bottom, 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, and whether the platform itself can be trusted is answered in is Atom.com legit.
• DomainsDealer: 12% on the Investor plan, 8% on Pro Broker and 5% on Brokerage. The plans are on the pricing page.

Run it on a $10,000 sale and the spread is brutal: 7% leaves you $9,300, while 25% (Afternic off its own nameservers, or Atom at that price) leaves you $7,500. The venue decision is worth $1,800 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.

What you keep at $2,500, $20,000 and $100,000

Percentages are abstract until you put a sale price against them. These are the commission amounts only, before escrow or transfer, at three prices that cover most of the aftermarket.

Read it as a spread rather than a ranking. The gap between the best and worst row on a $20,000 sale is $4,500, and none of it depends on negotiating harder with the buyer. It depends on where the name was listed and how it was configured before the offer arrived. Our own two rows carry a monthly plan on top, so on a single sale in a year they are not the cheapest option here; they get cheaper the more names you move.

2. Escrow of about 1% to 3% that is 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 of $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 $240 (Escrow.com's 2.4% tier): minus $120
• Transfer: minus $0 (account push)
• Net before tax: about $8,680
• Less the original acquisition cost and three years of renewals, say $2,000 and $36
• Pre-tax gain: roughly $6,644

Now run the identical sale at 25% commission: your net drops to about $7,380 and your gain to roughly $5,344. 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 7% to 30% 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. If a broker is involved too, what a domain broker costs sets the upfront and commission models side by side.