Consignment Percentage Calculator
In a consignment deal, a shop sells your item and keeps an agreed percentage. The consignor percentage is your share of the sale price; the rest is the shop commission, and getting that split in writing before the item sells prevents almost every consignment dispute. The formulas and the going rates by category are set out plainly below.
The calculator on this page does both jobs consignors need, on two tabs. The Percentage Split mode prices a single sale: enter the sale price and your consignor share percentage and it returns what you receive and what the shop keeps. The Batch Tracker mode follows a whole batch over time, taking what you invested, what you have already withdrawn in payouts, and what the position is worth now, and returning your total investment, net equity, and net gain. Use the split mode to judge an offer; use the tracker to judge how the batch actually performed.
| Total investment | — |
| Net equity | — |
| Net gain / loss | — |
How it was calculated
Net equity tells you what a whole batch position is worth after the money you put in and took out. It is not the same as the consignor percentage of a single sale; use the Percentage Split tab above to price one sale, and see the sections below for the split benchmarks.
Quick Answer
Key takeaways
- A percentage split prices one sale. Net equity tracks a batch over time. Confusing the two is how consignors misread both their offers and their statements.
- Shops typically take 30 to 50%. Consignors keep about 40% on clothing, around 60% on furniture and antiques, and 70 to 85% on watches, sneakers, and instruments.
- Your payout follows the final sale price, so a markdown schedule in the contract matters as much as the headline split.
- In the tracker, withdrawals count toward your gain. Money already paid out is earned money, not money lost.
- Quick Answer
- The split formulas, stated correctly
- Typical consignor shares by category
- How the percentage split mode works, and its worked example
- How the batch tracker works, and its worked example
- Reading a consignment statement without getting lost
- What competing calculators miss
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Add This Calculator to Your Website
- References
The split formulas, stated correctly
One error deserves calling out because it circulates widely, including in guides that should know better: taking the sale price, subtracting the consignor share, and then subtracting the shop share again, and calling the remainder the payout. On a $200 sale at a 70% consignor share and a 30% shop share, that sequence produces $200 − $140 − $60 = $0, which is nonsense. The two shares are the division of the price, not two deductions from it. Your payout is your share, $140, less only those fees the agreement explicitly charges to you.
Fees need the same care. Best practice in the industry is to deduct payment processing, typically around 3%, from the sale price first and split what remains, so both sides carry the cost proportionally. If your agreement instead splits the gross price and bills processing to the consignor alone, your real percentage is the headline rate minus roughly the full fee, and that difference is worth negotiating before the first item is tagged. When you compare offers from two shops, the 60-40 commission calculator and the 70-30 commission split calculator let you price the same sale under the splits you are actually being offered.
Typical consignor shares by category
Rates cluster by how much work a dollar of sale costs the shop. Cheap, slow, handling-heavy stock pays the consignor least; expensive pieces that photograph well and sell fast pay the most.
| Category | Typical consignor share | Usual range |
|---|---|---|
| Everyday clothing | 40% | 35 to 60% |
| Kids clothing and gear | 40% | 30 to 50% |
| Art | 50% | 40 to 70% |
| Furniture | 60% | 50 to 65% |
| Antiques | 60% | 50 to 70% |
| Jewelry | 70% | 50 to 80% |
| Designer handbags | 70% | 50 to 80% |
| Watches | 80% | 70 to 85% |
| Sneakers | 80% | 75 to 85% |
| Guitars and instruments | 80% | 70 to 85% |
Online consignment usually takes less than brick and mortar, roughly 25 to 40%, because there is no shop floor to fund, though platforms that handle photography, listing, and shipping justify the top of that range. A split well outside the range for your category is not automatically a bad deal: a busy shop at 50% can pay you more, sooner, than a quiet shop at 70% whose floor your item never leaves. What you are buying with the shop share is traffic, presentation, and sell-through, and those are worth pricing alongside the percentage.
How the percentage split mode works, and its worked example
The Percentage Split tab is pre-filled with its worked example: a $200 sale at a 60% consignor share and no flat fee. The amount split is the full $200, you receive $200 x 60% = $120.00, and the store keeps the remaining $80.00. Change any figure and press Calculate: at a 50/50 split the same sale pays $100.00 to each side, and at a 70% share it pays you $140.00 and the store $60.00.
The flat fee field is optional and starts at $0. Use it only when your agreement deducts a flat amount, such as a processing or listing fee, before the split. With a $6 fee on that $200 sale, the amount split falls to $194 and a 60% share pays you $116.40 and the store $77.60. Leave the fee at $0 and the whole sale price is split. The tool has no percentage fee field and no tiered rates, on purpose: enter the dollar fee your agreement actually charges, and use one flat percentage per sale.
Most agreements land between a 50/50 split and a 70/30 split in the consignor favor. According to PuppetVendors' consignment commission rates guide, most shops take 30 to 50% of the sale price, so consignors keep 50 to 70%, and the single most common arrangement is 60/40 in the consignor favor. SimpleConsign's consignment pricing guide puts the typical shop share at about 40 to 50% and notes that shops competing for premium merchandise offer consignors 60% or more. If an offer sits outside that band, the category table below shows whether your kind of item explains it.
How the batch tracker works, and its worked example
The Batch Tracker tab is pre-filled with its worked example. You put $1,000 into a batch, added $200 of further stock, have taken $100 out in payouts, and the remaining position, meaning payouts still owed plus the realistic value of unsold pieces, is worth $1,500. Total investment is $1,200.00. Net equity is $1,500 − $1,200 + $100 = $400.00, and net gain is the same $400.00.
| Line | Worked example | A batch that lost money |
|---|---|---|
| Initial investment | $1,000.00 | $2,000.00 |
| Additional investment | $200.00 | $0.00 |
| Withdrawals (payouts taken) | $100.00 | $300.00 |
| Current value | $1,500.00 | $1,200.00 |
| Total investment | $1,200.00 | $2,000.00 |
| Net equity / net gain | $400.00 | −$500.00 |
The loss case is the one that teaches the withdrawals rule. That batch consumed $2,000, paid back $300 along the way, and is now worth $1,200, so it is $500 down overall even though $1,200 still sits in the position. Sellers who forget the $300 they already withdrew talk themselves into believing the batch lost $800. Run the tracker at every payout, not just at the end, and a batch that is quietly going underwater shows it while you can still reprice or pull the stock. Sellers who also earn a wage plus commission can sanity-check the employment side of the same money with the base plus commission calculator.
Reading a consignment statement without getting lost
A good statement lists each item, its final sale price, the split applied, any fees and who bore them, and the payout. Check three things against your agreement. First, that the split percentage matches the contract for that category, since tiered and category rates are easy to apply wrongly. Second, that markdowns follow the agreed schedule and floor, because payout follows the final price. Third, that fees appear once: a processing fee deducted before the split should not reappear as a line against your payout afterward.
Then reconcile the statement against the tracker. Add the statement payouts to your withdrawals figure, update the current value for what remains unsold, and the net gain should move by exactly the profit on the items that sold. If it does not, the difference is almost always a fee, a markdown, or an item that sold in a previous period, and finding it now is far easier than finding it at tax time.
A fair agreement covers
- The split stated as who gets what, per category
- Whether fees come off before or after the split
- The markdown schedule and your floor price
- The selling window, typically 60 to 90 days
- When payouts are made after a sale
- What happens to unsold items at the end
Red flags worth a question
- A split quoted without saying whose share it is
- Fees that appear both before and after the split
- Unlimited markdown authority with no floor
- No written payout schedule
- Unsold items becoming shop property without notice
What competing calculators miss
Miss 1: split tools with no memory. The per-sale split calculators ranking for this term take a price and a percentage and return two numbers. They are fine for one item and useless for the real consignor question, which is what a season of items earned after everything put in and taken out. This page carries both in one tool: the split mode for the single sale and the tracker for the season.
Miss 2: rate guides with no tracker. The detailed commission guides publish good benchmark tables, then leave you to spreadsheet your own results. Here the benchmarks and the batch accounting sit together, so the rate you negotiate and the outcome you measure live in one place.
Miss 3: the double-subtraction payout error. As shown above, subtracting both shares from the sale price is arithmetically wrong and still appears in published worked examples. The formulas on this page are stated so the two shares sum to the price, and the worked examples reconcile to the cent.
One honest limit, stated plainly: the split mode prices one sale at a time at a single flat percentage, with at most one flat fee deducted first. It does not model tiered splits that change with price, different rates per category inside one batch, or tax. Run each sale through the split mode as it happens, and let the Batch Tracker carry the season totals.
Frequently Asked Questions
It is the share of an item sale price paid to the consignor, the person who owns the item. If a piece sells for $200 at a 60% consignor share, you receive $120 and the shop keeps $80 as its commission. Always state whose percentage a quoted split refers to, because a 60/40 split can be written either way around.
Surveys of shop rates put the most common arrangements at 50/50 and 60/40 in the consignor favor, with shops typically taking 30 to 50% overall. Everyday clothing sits at the low end for consignors, around 40%, while furniture, jewelry, designer pieces, watches, and sneakers commonly pay the consignor 60 to 85% because the shop effort per dollar of sale is lower.
Either happens in practice, and the agreement decides. Deducting a payment processing fee of around 3% from the sale price before splitting is the more transparent method, because both sides share the cost in proportion to their shares. If a shop deducts fees from your share alone after the split, your effective percentage is lower than the headline rate, so model it before signing.
The split mode has one optional flat fee field, pre-filled at $0. If your agreement deducts a flat amount, such as a processing or listing fee, before the split, enter it there: the tool subtracts it from the sale price first and splits what remains, so a $200 sale with a $6 fee at a 60% consignor share splits $194 into $116.40 for you and $77.60 for the store. Leave it at $0 and the full sale price is split. There is no percentage fee field; if your fee is a percentage, work out its dollar amount on the sale and enter that.
Your payout is recalculated from the final sale price, not the original tag. A 25% markdown on a $200 item at a 60% consignor share cuts the payout from $120 to $90. That is why markdown schedules, and any floor price below which the shop may not sell, belong in the written agreement.
It computes both, on two tabs. The Percentage Split tab takes a sale price and your consignor share percentage, plus an optional flat fee deducted before the split, and returns what you receive and what the store keeps. The Batch Tracker tab computes batch-level net equity: enter what you invested at the start, anything you added later, payouts you have already withdrawn, and the current value of the position, and it returns total investment, net equity, and net gain. Both modes show the steps behind the result.
Because in this tracker they are the same arithmetic seen from two sides: current value plus withdrawals minus total investment. The results show both labels because statements use both terms, but they will always match. The genuinely separate figure is total investment, which tells you how much of your own money the batch consumed.
No. Both the split math and the tracker are pre-tax. What you owe depends on your jurisdiction and whether you consign as a hobby seller or a business, so treat every payout figure here as the starting point for your own tax records, not the final number.
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References
- PuppetVendors, "Consignment Commission Rates: What Percentage Shops Take (2026)": shop commission benchmarks of 30 to 50%, the common 60/40 consignor-favoring split, and deducting processing fees before the split. PuppetVendors: Consignment Commission Rates Guide. Accessed October 2026.
- LegalClarity, "How Do Consignment Shops Work: Contracts, Pay, and Taxes": what a consignment agreement should cover, including the split, markdown schedules of a typical 60 to 90 day window, and pricing authority. LegalClarity: How Consignment Shops Work. Accessed October 2026.
- LegalClarity, "How Is a Consignment Fee Calculated?": straight percentage, tiered, and fixed-fee structures, with the fee applied to the gross sale price before further deductions. LegalClarity: How a Consignment Fee Is Calculated. Accessed October 2026.
- SimpleConsign, "How to Price Consignment Inventory for Maximum Profit": tiered and category-based splits, and why premium merchandise supports a larger consignor share. SimpleConsign: Pricing Consignment Inventory. Accessed October 2026.
- Medium, Jitto Joseph, "What Is a Fair Consignment Percentage?": consignor shares by category, from clothing near 40% to watches, sneakers, and instruments near 80%. Medium: Fair Consignment Percentage by Category. Accessed October 2026.