Apple takes 30% of App Store sales, and 15% when you meet a condition.

What is Apple's commission on the App Store today?

Thirty per cent on the sale of digital goods and services, fifteen per cent if a programme rate or a qualifying subscription applies. Apple puts both in one sentence on the membership details page for the Apple Developer Program. The commission is charged on the sale, so it comes out of what the customer pays before anything reaches you.

The word to watch on that page and the next one is proceeds. Apple defines proceeds as your sales net of its commission and certain taxes and adjustments. Proceeds are therefore what lands in your account, not what customers were charged. Two developers can both say they earned a million dollars and mean quite different amounts of money, and the difference decides whether one of them still qualifies for the reduced rate.

Apple also names the places where its own figures do not hold. Different commission rates and fees may apply for certain apps distributed in Brazil, the European Union, Japan, the Netherlands, Russia and South Korea. The United States is not on that list. What changed for United States apps is the freedom to link out to your own website, not the rate Apple charges when a sale does go through in-app purchase.

So there are only two numbers to carry around, plus a short list of countries to check separately. If you are picking between a one-off price, a subscription and something sold off the device, run each option through the picker below before you write the paywall. The answer changes the design of the product, not just the invoice.

Apple, Apple Developer Program membership details, read 10 October 2026

What actually reduces the 30% commission?

Four programmes, one subscription rule, and the kind of thing you are selling. The programmes are the App Store Small Business Program, the Video Partner Program, the Mini Apps Partner Program and the News Partner Program. Enrolment in any of them puts you on 15%. Most independent developers are looking at the first one, because the others are built for specific industries and come with their own entry requirements.

The subscription rule needs no application at all. During a subscriber's first year of service you receive 70% of the subscription price at each billing cycle, minus applicable taxes. Once that subscriber accumulates one year of paid service, your net revenue increases to 85%. Three details decide when that happens. Days of paid service are specific to each subscription group. Free trials and renewal extensions are excluded from the count. And if a subscription lapses through cancellation or a billing problem, the count stops, then resumes from the recovery date if the subscriber comes back within 60 days. A long-lived subscription business therefore pays an average rate somewhere between the two numbers, weighted by how well you retain people.

Then there is the category question, which is the one people get wrong in both directions. Guideline 3.1.1 says that if you want to unlock features or functionality within your app, you must use in-app purchase. That covers subscriptions, in-game currencies, levels and premium content, and it rules out licence keys and QR codes as a way round it. Guideline 3.1.3(e) points the other way: if your app lets people buy physical goods or services that will be consumed outside the app, you must use a payment method other than in-app purchase. A cleaning booking or a bag of coffee is not an App Store sale at all, which is why which payment layer to use is a product decision before it is a billing one.

Guideline 3.1.3 carries the rest of the carve-outs. Reader apps may let a user reach content or subscriptions they bought already, specifically magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music and video. Multiplatform services may unlock what a user bought on another platform, as long as the same items are also sold as in-app purchases in the app. Enterprise sales to organisations for their employees or students may use another route, while consumer, single user and family sales must use in-app purchase. And free apps acting as a stand-alone companion to a paid web tool need no in-app purchase, provided nothing is sold inside the app. On linking out, Apple's guidelines say developers may apply for entitlements to link to a website they own, and that these entitlements are not required in United States storefront apps. If none of that applies to you, wiring up in-app purchases is the shortest honest path to taking money.

Is the 15% rate per app or per developer account?

Per developer account, and it is added up across everything you publish. Apple's condition is that you and your Associated Developer Accounts must have earned no more than 1 million USD in total proceeds during the 12 fiscal months occurring within the previous calendar year, and no more than 1 million USD during the current year. There is no way to park a successful app in one account and keep the reduced rate on another, because the figure is a total and not an app-by-app test.

Associated Developer Account has a definition worth reading before you answer. It is an Apple Developer Program account that you own or control, or one that owns or controls yours. Apple fixes that through a majority interest of over 50%, corporate, individual or partnership, or through ultimate decision-making authority, in either direction. A studio with three accounts under one owner has one threshold between them.

Then the measurement trap. The threshold is a million dollars of proceeds, and proceeds are sales net of Apple's commission and certain taxes and adjustments. A developer on the reduced rate has to sell well over a million dollars of apps before a million dollars of proceeds arrives. Modelling the ceiling on gross sales makes you think you are about to lose the rate while you still have room. It is the same confusion that makes people underestimate what it costs to publish an app in the first place.

Enrolment is not automatic, and the timing is specific. You complete the steps in App Store Connect, including listing any Associated Developer Accounts, and Apple says your proceeds will be adjusted fifteen days after the end of the fiscal calendar month in which your enrolment is approved. Apple's own example is an enrolment approved on 10 February 2022, with proceeds adjusted from 14 March 2022. Two more rules close the loop. If a participating developer passes the 1 million USD threshold in the current calendar year, the standard commission rate applies to future sales. If proceeds fall below the threshold again in a future calendar year, the developer can re-qualify for the 15% rate the year after, so a single strong year does not cost you the programme for good.

Apple, App Store Small Business Program, read 10 October 2026

Where does the commission change by country?

In six places, by Apple's own count. The membership page says different commission rates and fees may apply for certain apps distributed in Brazil, the European Union, Japan, the Netherlands, Russia and South Korea. Each of those exists because of a local ruling or a local law, which is also why the figures move more often than the headline rate does. Treat any number you read about them, including the ones here, as something to re-read on Apple's page before you put it in a forecast.

The European Union is the one with real detail behind it. Apple publishes a separate support page for apps in the European Union, and as read on 10 October 2026 it lists a commission of 26% on sales processed by Apple In-App Purchase and 20% on sales processed by alternative payment processing inside the app. Participants in the Small Business Program, the Mini Apps Partner Program or the Video Partner Program pay 15% on the first of those routes and 10% on the second, and so do sales of auto-renewable subscriptions after a subscriber's first year. The same page says that, effective 1 October 2026, the Core Technology Fee was replaced by the Core Technology Commission, a 5% commission on digital transactions in apps distributed outside the App Store, through an alternative app marketplace or web distribution.

That last change is worth understanding even if you never leave the App Store. The old fee was charged per install once an app reached scale, which made a free viral app expensive. The replacement is a share of sales, which means distributing outside the App Store in the European Union now costs nothing until money changes hands. For a small app that is a friendlier shape, and it makes the alternative route worth pricing out rather than dismissing on cost.

The practical advice is dull. Pick the storefronts that matter to you, read the rate for each one on Apple's page on the day you build the model, and write the date next to the number in your own notes. Anyone quoting a rate without a date is quoting a rate from some other year.