Short version: by default, your attendees pay Eventbrite fees, not you. When you create a paid ticket, Eventbrite passes its service fee and payment processing fee straight on to the buyer at checkout, so a $50 ticket rings up at roughly $55. You can flip one setting and absorb those fees instead, in which case the cut comes off your margin and the advertised price stays clean. So the real answer to "who pays Eventbrite fees" is "whoever you decide", and that decision quietly moves money, conversion and trust around in ways most organisers never measure. This article runs the maths on both choices.
Who pays Eventbrite fees by default
When you build a paid ticket type, Eventbrite gives you a tickbox labelled "Absorb fees". Leave it unchecked (the default) and you are passing fees on: the buyer pays the ticket price plus the fees on top. Tick it and you are absorbing them: the buyer pays exactly the price on the listing, and Eventbrite deducts the fees from your payout. You can change the setting whenever you like, but it only applies to future orders, so a mid-campaign switch leaves you with a messy split.
In the US in 2026 the fees being shuffled around are a 3.7% + $1.79 service fee per paid ticket, plus a 2.9% payment processing fee per order. (UK organisers get a chunkier 6.95% + £0.59 with no separate processing line, so the same decision bites harder over here.) Free tickets cost nobody anything. Everything below assumes paid tickets, because that is where the question actually matters.
The two choices, side by side
Here is what each option does to a single $50 ticket, using Eventbrite's US rates. "You net" is what lands in your account; "buyer pays" is what shows at checkout.
| Ticket price | Pass fees on (default): buyer pays | Pass fees on: you net | Absorb fees: buyer pays | Absorb fees: you net |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $25 | $28.52 | $25.00 | $25.00 | $21.55 |
| $50 | $55.20 | $50.00 | $50.00 | $44.91 |
| $200 | $215.26 | $200.00 | $200.00 | $185.01 |
The fee total is almost identical either way (around $5.09 on a $50 ticket). What changes is whose wallet it leaves. Pass on, and you keep your full face value while the buyer pays the surcharge. Absorb, and your buyer pays a clean round number while you eat roughly a tenth of the ticket. For the full per-price breakdown of how that percentage moves, our guide to what percentage Eventbrite takes has the whole table.
Why "just pass it on" is not the free lunch it looks like
Passing fees to attendees feels like the obvious move: you keep 100% of your price and someone else covers the platform. On a spreadsheet, you win. The catch is that the spreadsheet does not buy tickets. People do, and people react to the number at the top of the checkout page, not the one on your poster.
There is a well-documented gap between the price a shopper expects and the price they are asked to pay at the final step. When a $50 ticket becomes $55.20 with fees stapled on at the end, you have recreated the exact "surprise fees at checkout" experience that regulators have spent years trying to stamp out and that shoppers consistently say makes them abandon a purchase. The US even passed rules targeting hidden "junk fees" in live-event ticketing precisely because tacked-on charges erode trust. Your conversion rate quietly pays a fee of its own.
Passing the fee on does not make it disappear. It just moves it from your accounts to your abandonment rate, where you cannot see it.
Absorbing fees has the opposite problem. Your checkout is honest and your advertised price is real, which is lovely, but now the percentage in that table comes straight off your margin. On low-priced tickets that hurts the most, because Eventbrite's flat $1.79 is a far bigger slice of a $25 ticket than a $200 one. Absorb fees on cheap tickets at volume and you can hand back a double-digit percentage of revenue without a single buyer noticing you were generous.
So which should you choose?
There is no universally right answer, only trade-offs you should pick on purpose rather than by leaving a default untouched. As a rough guide:
- Pass fees on when your audience is fee-tolerant and price-insensitive: industry conferences, B2B summits, anything expensed to an employer. A finance manager approving a $215 ticket is not abandoning the cart over $15 of fees.
- Absorb fees when price perception is the whole game: consumer events, community nights, fundraisers, anything where a clean "$25" converts noticeably better than "$28.52" and where word-of-mouth depends on people feeling they got a fair deal.
- Split the difference by raising your face price a little and absorbing, so the buyer sees one honest number and you recover most of the fee. It is the most transparent option and the most admin to model.
Whichever you pick, notice the thing the setting cannot change: the fee exists on every paid ticket, and it scales with your sales. Sell more, and the bill grows in lockstep, regardless of who is nominally paying. That is the part worth questioning.
The third option nobody puts in the tickbox
The whole "you or your attendees" debate only exists because the fee is a percentage of your sales in the first place. Change the pricing model and the question dissolves. Flat-fee platforms charge for the software, not a cut of each ticket, so there is no per-ticket fee to absorb or pass on at all. eventcloud is $125 per user per month with unlimited events and tickets, and ticket revenue is paid straight into your own Stripe account on Stripe's normal schedule. Your buyers pay the price on the listing, you keep it (minus the card processing that exists everywhere), and nobody has to choose who eats a surcharge.
That is not automatically the cheaper choice, and we are not going to pretend it is. If you sell a few hundred low-price tickets a year, a per-ticket platform will cost you less and you should use one. Flat pricing only pulls ahead once you are selling at volume, roughly a few thousand paid tickets a year. The honest dividing line, and a fuller cost comparison, is laid out in our eventcloud versus Eventbrite breakdown.
If you do stay on Eventbrite, at least make the choice deliberately: decide whether your event is a "pass it on" crowd or an "absorb it" crowd, model both against your real ticket prices, and stop letting an unticked box make a revenue decision for you. And if you would rather not have the decision at all, see what flat, all-included pricing looks like and run it against your numbers. The setting is yours either way. So is the maths.
