OpenSea Fees Explained: Gas Costs and How They Compare With Other NFT Marketplaces

Last Updated: November 6, 2026

Quick Answer: OpenSea charges sellers a 1% platform fee on NFT sales, plus any creator earnings the collection sets, and both buyers and sellers pay blockchain gas fees for on-chain actions. Gas is still cheap on most networks: on November 6, 2026, Etherscan estimated an NFT sale on Ethereum at about $0.28, and on Base, Polygon and Solana a transaction costs about a cent or less. Among the other major marketplaces, Magic Eden and Tensor charge 2% on Solana, Rarible charges 2% on its EVM chains and 1.5% on Solana, and Blur charges nothing but is closing its website on November 12, 2026.

Blockchainreporter’s cost check: on a $500 NFT sale, OpenSea’s 1% fee comes to $5, against $10 on Magic Eden, Tensor and Rarible’s EVM chains, while gas adds about $0.28 on Ethereum and a cent or less on Base, Polygon and Solana.

This guide explains every fee you can pay on OpenSea, how gas works for each action, and how OpenSea compares with Magic Eden, Tensor, Rarible, Blur and LooksRare on cost.

How Do Gas Fees on OpenSea Compare to Other NFT Platforms?

Gas fees on OpenSea are roughly the same as on any other marketplace using the same blockchain, because gas goes to the network’s validators, not to the marketplace, and only the efficiency of each marketplace’s smart contracts makes a small difference. What differs is the chain you trade on and the platform fee: an Ethereum NFT sale cost about $0.28 in gas on November 6, 2026, while Base, Polygon and Solana cost about a cent or less, and OpenSea’s 1% fee is lower than the 2% charged by Magic Eden, Tensor and Rarible on most chains.

Sources: help centers and documentation of OpenSea, Tensor, Rarible and LooksRare, Magic Eden’s help center (checked October 21, 2026, and confirmed by Rarible’s FAQ on October 29), Blur’s website and team announcement; gas from the Etherscan and Basescan gas trackers (November 6, 2026, 10:42 UTC), the Polygon gas station and Solana’s fee documentation (November 6, 2026). Per-trade gas for Base, Polygon and Solana is our estimate from those sources. Gas changes by the minute and rises sharply when networks are busy.

Three points matter most when comparing costs:

• Gas depends on the chain, not the marketplace. Buying the same Ethereum NFT costs about the same gas on OpenSea, Rarible or Blur. Etherscan’s estimate for an NFT sale was between $0.075 and $0.080 in our snapshots on October 21 and October 29, 2026, and about $0.28 on November 6, when the gas price had risen to about 0.21 gwei.
• Platform fees and royalties now cost more than gas. On a $500 NFT, a 1% fee is $5, a 2% fee is $10 and a 5% royalty is $25, against well under a dollar of gas on any of these chains.
• Who pays gas depends on the action. On OpenSea and most EVM marketplaces, listings are signed off-chain and free after a one-time approval, while buying, accepting an offer and canceling a listing cost gas. On Solana marketplaces, every action is an on-chain transaction, but each one costs a fraction of a cent.

Blockchainreporter’s Cost Check: Fees on a $500 NFT Sale

To show what these rates mean in practice, Blockchainreporter applied each marketplace’s published fee to a single $500 NFT sale and added the gas estimates from November 6, 2026. Creator royalties are left out because they depend on the collection: a 5% royalty would add $25 on any marketplace that pays it.

Source: Blockchainreporter calculation from each marketplace’s published fees, as listed in the comparison table above, and the Etherscan and Basescan gas trackers, the Polygon gas station and Solana’s fee documentation on November 6, 2026.

Blockchainreporter’s takeaway: gas now costs less than a tenth of a percent of a $500 sale on every chain in the table, so the platform fee and the royalty decide what a trade costs. Among marketplaces that are still actively traded, OpenSea’s 1% is the lowest fee for Ethereum and its layer-2 networks, while on Solana a Tensor maker pays no platform fee.

Gas applies only to actions recorded on the blockchain. This guide to on-chain vs off-chain transactions explains the difference.

What Is OpenSea and How Does It Work?

OpenSea is a peer-to-peer marketplace for NFTs, tokens and other on-chain assets, founded in 2017 by Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah. It is non-custodial: according to the company, OpenSea “never takes custody of your NFTs or tokens.” You connect your own self-custodial wallet, and your assets stay in it until a trade settles on the blockchain.

In practice, OpenSea works like this:

1. Connect a wallet. Connecting is free, and the wallet holds your NFTs, tokens and the coins used to pay gas.
2. Buy or sell NFTs. Buyers purchase listed items or make offers. Sellers create listings, which are signed off-chain, or accept offers.
3. Trade tokens. OpenSea’s token trading draws on liquidity from major decentralized exchanges and lets you swap across chains without bridging manually.
4. Create and mint. Creators can mint NFTs and run drops through OpenSea Studio.

The current platform, OS2, was introduced on February 13, 2025 and left beta on May 29, 2025, when full token trading went live. OpenSea supports dozens of blockchains, including Ethereum, Base, Polygon and Solana, and it earns money mainly from the fees explained below.

What Fees Does OpenSea Charge?

According to OpenSea’s help center, the platform charges:

• 1% on NFT sales. The fee is included in the price buyers see, so it comes out of the seller’s proceeds.
• 10% on primary drops. When creators sell newly minted NFTs through an OpenSea drop, OpenSea takes 10% of the mint price.
• 0% on private listings, which are listings reserved for a specific buyer. Required creator earnings and gas still apply.
• 0.5% on token swaps. Users who signed up with a referral code get 10% off this fee, and third-party liquidity providers involved in a swap may charge their own fees.
• 0.01% per perpetuals order, on top of the trading fees charged by Hyperliquid, which processes those orders.

OpenSea has changed its fee several times. It charged 2.5% for years, cut the fee to 0.5% with the launch of its rebuilt OS2 platform in 2025, and then raised it to 1% on all chains from September 15, 2025, as part of the final phase of its rewards program. In March 2026, when it postponed the launch of its SEA token, OpenSea waived trading fees for 60 days from March 31 and said a new fee structure for active traders would follow. OpenSea’s help center lists the NFT sale fee at 1% as of October 29, 2026, and says fees are subject to change at any time. Fees are set when a listing or offer is created, and OpenSea says it can waive them on certain sales.

Our OpenSea review covers the platform beyond fees.

Creator Earnings on OpenSea

Creator earnings, or royalties, are separate from OpenSea’s fee and go to the collection’s creator. On collections with required earnings, the set percentage is paid on every sale. On collections with optional earnings, the seller chooses how much to pay when listing or accepting an offer; the default is the creator’s preferred rate, and there is no minimum. Royalty rates vary by collection and are often between 0% and 10%, so they can cost more than the platform fee itself.

How Gas Fees Work on OpenSea

Gas fees go to the validators of the blockchain you trade on, not to OpenSea. OpenSea does not set them and cannot refund them, and you pay them in the chain’s native token, such as ETH on Ethereum. Failed transactions still cost gas.

Source: OpenSea help center, as of October 2026. The table applies to EVM chains; OpenSea’s help center says Solana works differently.

The main takeaway is that listings are signed off-chain and cost nothing after the first approval, while anything that moves an NFT or cancels a listing on-chain costs gas. OpenSea lets you cancel all listings and offers in one transaction per chain, which costs less than canceling them one by one.

How Much Is Gas on OpenSea Right Now?

Gas costs have fallen sharply since the NFT boom of 2021 and 2022. On Ethereum, gas was about 0.208 gwei on the morning of November 6, 2026, up from about 0.056 gwei on October 29, and Etherscan estimated an NFT sale at about $0.28 with ETH near $2,240.

Sources: Etherscan and Basescan gas trackers (November 6, 2026, 10:42 UTC), the Polygon gas station and Solana’s fee documentation (November 6, 2026), and CoinGecko prices. Our Polygon estimate applies the gas units implied by Etherscan’s NFT sale estimate. Gas prices change by the minute and spike during busy periods.

In practice, the platform fee and creator earnings now cost far more than gas on any of these chains. On a $500 NFT, OpenSea’s 1% fee is $5 and a 5% royalty is another $25, while gas on Ethereum is under a dollar at current prices.

OpenSea vs Magic Eden, Tensor, Rarible and Blur

Magic Eden charges 2% on all transactions and nothing to list, and it has supported only Solana since March 9, 2026, when it ended its Ethereum, EVM and Bitcoin marketplaces. Cointelegraph reported in March that the company would focus its NFT business on NFT packs and shift resources to its on-chain casino, Dicey. According to its help center, checked on October 21, 2026, royalties on Solana are optional for most collections, and the buyer chooses whether to pay all, half or none of them. See our Magic Eden review.

Tensor, the main Solana trading platform, charges a 2% fee to the taker and nothing to the maker, so placing a listing or bid that someone else accepts costs no platform fee. The taker also pays royalties: in full on collections that enforce them, and none, half or all of the rate on collections where they are optional. The Tensor Foundation, which announced in November 2025 that it had acquired the marketplace, says all marketplace fees now go to the TNSR treasury.

Rarible charges 2% on Ethereum, Base and Polygon and 1.5% on Solana, paid by the seller, and adds a 2% fee when buyers purchase listings it aggregates from other marketplaces on EVM chains. According to its FAQ, IMPOSSIBLE acquired the Rarible brand and certain key platform assets.

Blur charged no marketplace fee and became the largest Ethereum NFT marketplace by volume in 2023, but its monthly volume has since collapsed by more than 99%, according to Token Terminal data. Its website will shut down on November 12, 2026, according to the team’s announcement, while its smart contracts stay live on-chain. Read our Blur marketplace review and our report on Blur shutting down its marketplace.

LooksRare cut its fee to 0.5% in April 2023, but DefiLlama records no fee revenue for it over the past year.

For Solana collections, Magic Eden and Tensor are the main options at 2%. For Ethereum and its layer-2 networks, OpenSea’s 1% is now one of the lowest fees among marketplaces that are still actively traded.

How to Pay Less When Trading NFTs

• Trade on low-cost chains. Base, Polygon, Arbitrum and Solana keep gas to about a cent or less.
• Approve once, then list for free. After the first listing in a collection, new listings and price cuts cost no gas on OpenSea.
• Lower prices instead of canceling. Reducing a price is free on ERC-721 NFTs, while canceling or raising a price costs gas.
• Cancel in bulk. OpenSea’s cancel-all option clears listings and offers in one transaction per chain.
• Use private listings for agreed sales to a specific buyer, which currently carry a 0% OpenSea fee.
• Be the maker on Tensor. Listings and bids that others accept carry no Tensor fee.
• Check royalties before buying or selling. On many collections they cost more than the platform fee.

If you sell NFTs at a profit, read our guide to NFT taxes as well.

The NFT Market in 2026

Lower fees have not brought back volume. NFT sales totaled about $167.2 million in September 2026, according to CryptoSlam data, down from about $554.8 million a year earlier and about $1.78 billion in December 2023. Marketplaces have responded by consolidating: Magic Eden narrowed to Solana and shifted toward NFT packs and gambling, Rarible changed hands, Blur is closing its website, and OpenSea has expanded into token trading and perpetuals, opening its mobile app, with trading across more than 25 blockchains, to all users in late October 2026. Follow the market in our NFT news section.

Data sources: OpenSea help center, OpenSea Learn and developer changelog, the IANA root zone list (October 31, 2026), Magic Eden help center (checked October 21, 2026), Tensor documentation, Rarible FAQ, LooksRare documentation, Blur website, Etherscan and Basescan gas trackers, Polygon gas station, Solana documentation, CoinMarketCap, CryptoSlam via Decrypt, Token Terminal, DefiLlama, Cointelegraph and Bankless reporting, and project announcements, with fee schedules as of October 29, 2026 and gas data, with CoinGecko prices, as of November 6, 2026. Fees can change at any time; check each marketplace before trading.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice.

Frequently Asked Questions

What fees does OpenSea charge?
OpenSea charges a 1% platform fee on NFT sales, included in the price buyers see, and 10% on primary drop mints. Private listings carry no OpenSea fee, token swaps cost 0.5% and perpetuals orders 0.01%. Creator earnings set by each collection and blockchain gas fees come on top. The 1% NFT fee has applied on all chains since September 15, 2025.

Do buyers pay fees on OpenSea?
Buyers do not pay OpenSea’s 1% platform fee, which comes out of the seller’s proceeds. Buyers do pay blockchain gas when they purchase an NFT, and on collections with required creator earnings, the royalty is part of the sale. On Ethereum, gas for an NFT sale was estimated at about $0.28 on November 6, 2026, and it is lower on Base, Polygon and Solana.

How much are gas fees on OpenSea?
It depends on the blockchain and network activity. On November 6, 2026, Etherscan estimated an Ethereum NFT sale at about $0.28 with gas near 0.21 gwei, while Base, Polygon and Solana cost about a cent or less. Listing is free after a one-time approval per collection, but buying, accepting offers, transferring and canceling listings all cost gas.

How do gas fees on OpenSea compare to other NFT platforms?
Gas is set by the blockchain, not the marketplace, so the same Ethereum trade costs about the same gas on OpenSea, Rarible or Blur, roughly $0.28 for an NFT sale on November 6, 2026. Solana platforms such as Magic Eden and Tensor cost a fraction of a cent per transaction. The bigger difference is the platform fee: 1% on OpenSea against 2% on Magic Eden and Tensor.

Which NFT marketplace has the lowest fees?
Blur charges no marketplace fee but is closing its website on November 12, 2026, and LooksRare’s 0.5% fee comes with almost no trading activity. Among active marketplaces, OpenSea’s 1% fee is the lowest for Ethereum and its layer-2 networks, while Magic Eden and Tensor charge 2% on Solana, with Tensor charging nothing to the maker side of a trade.

Is OpenSea cheaper than Magic Eden?
On platform fees, yes: OpenSea charges 1% on NFT sales, while Magic Eden charges 2% on all transactions. The two now serve different markets, though. Magic Eden has supported only Solana since March 2026, where gas costs fractions of a cent, while OpenSea covers Ethereum, Base, Polygon, Solana and many other chains. Creator royalties often matter more than either fee.

Are creator royalties mandatory on OpenSea?
Only on collections that require them. On those, the set percentage is paid on every sale. On collections with optional creator earnings, the seller decides how much to pay, starting from the creator’s preferred rate, with no minimum. OpenSea’s Deals feature, which lets users swap NFTs directly, does not include creator earnings.

Is Blur still open?
Blur’s website, blur.io, will shut down on November 12, 2026, according to the team’s October 12 announcement, after its monthly trading volume fell more than 99% from its 2023 peak. Its smart contracts will stay live on-chain, and its Blend lending product will stop matching new loans on the same date. Users with funds in Blur’s lending products should review their positions before the closure.

What are the best practices for securing my OpenSea wallet?
OpenSea’s help center advises never sharing your secret recovery phrase, downloading wallet software only from the provider’s own website and considering a hardware wallet. Avoid links, files and QR codes from strangers, review your smart contract approvals regularly and never sign a wallet transaction prompted by an email. OpenSea says it will never ask for your seed phrase and will not message you first on social media.

Is opensea.oi the official OpenSea website?
No. OpenSea’s official domain is opensea.io, and the company says it sends emails only from that domain. The “.oi” ending is not a valid top-level domain in IANA’s root zone list, so “opensea.oi” is a typo, and searches for misspellings such as “opensae” can surface lookalike sites or ads used for phishing. Type the address carefully or use a bookmark.