How Apple calculates your App Store net proceeds: commissions, taxes, and currency explained

A complete walkthrough of how Apple computes what you actually receive from each sale — covering the two commission tiers, managed tax remittance across storefronts, and how currency conversion creates invisible leakage in your global pricing.

You set a price. A customer pays. But what actually lands in your bank account is rarely the number on the storefront. For developers building subscription apps or one-time purchase products, the gap between listed price and net proceeds is one of the most practically important numbers in your business — and one of the least explained.

This post walks through exactly how Apple computes your proceeds: the commission structure, how tax remittance works across storefronts, how currency conversion creates silent leakage at the edges of your global pricing strategy, and what all of it means for the way you should think about your unit economics.

The two commission tiers — and who qualifies for which

Apple takes a platform commission on every paid transaction. The headline rate is 30%, but there are two meaningful exceptions that reduce this to 15%:

• App Store Small Business Program: Developers who earned less than USD 1 million in App Store net proceeds in the prior calendar year qualify for a 15% commission on all sales. Eligibility is not automatic — you must apply each year, and the clock resets annually. A developer who earns .2 million in year one loses eligibility for year two even if revenue drops back below the threshold mid-year. Our post on the App Store Small Business Program and your pricing strategy covers the eligibility mechanics in full.
• Subscriptions beyond the first year: Apple reduces its commission to 15% for any subscriber who has been continuously subscribed for more than 12 months. This is calculated from the subscription's start date and survives interruptions of up to 60 days. If a subscriber cancels and resubscribes more than 60 days later, the clock resets and the 30% rate applies again until the new 12-month mark.

Free apps and free in-app items carry no commission. Developers who monetize through advertising, lead generation, or free content with no paid upgrades are unaffected by commission tiers entirely.

How Apple manages tax remittance — and why it changes your effective price

In most countries, Apple acts as the merchant of record and handles VAT, GST, consumption tax, and equivalent levies on your behalf. This is not just an administrative convenience: it fundamentally changes what the listed price means across different storefronts.

There are two distinct tax models in use across Apple's storefronts:

Tax-inclusive storefronts — the majority of the world, including the EU, the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia, India, and most of Southeast Asia — require that the price displayed to the customer already include any applicable tax. The price you set in App Store Connect is what the customer pays. Apple then extracts the local tax rate before computing the base on which your commission is calculated.

Tax-exclusive storefronts — most notably the United States — add applicable state or local sales tax on top of your listed price at checkout. The customer pays slightly more than your listed price; your commission is calculated against the listed price itself, not the tax-inclusive total.

The practical consequence: two storefronts with the same nominal listed price do not produce the same pre-commission base. In Germany, where VAT is 19%, a €9.99 listing yields a pre-tax base of approximately €8.40. Apple's 15% commission then applies to that €8.40 base, not to €9.99. In the US, the .99 listing is the full base before commission. For a developer on the Small Business Program, that single VAT difference reduces German proceeds by roughly €0.24 per transaction compared with a US transaction at the same nominal price.

VAT rates across the EU range from 17% (Luxembourg) to 27% (Hungary), so proceeds from a single euro-denominated price will vary at the margin across member states. Japan applies a 10% consumption tax. Australia applies a 10% GST. These differences are small in isolation but material when you are modelling unit economics across a large subscriber base spread across multiple high-revenue European storefronts.

Currency conversion: where proceeds leak at the edges

Unless you manually set prices for each storefront — which App Store Connect's pricing tools and the App Store Connect API both support — Apple will auto-convert your base price to other currencies using internally maintained foreign exchange rates. These rates are updated periodically, include a conversion margin, and are not live market rates.

Two consequences follow. First, auto-converted prices land at non-psychological figures. A USD 9.99 base price may auto-convert to ¥1,540 in Japan — a number that does not align with common Japanese price conventions, where round numbers and ¥1,500 increments tend to perform better. Second, when exchange rates shift over months, auto-converted prices drift in real terms without any action on your part. This is the core problem that Apple's globally equivalent pricing feature is designed to address — and why developers should understand when to disable it in favour of manually managed local prices.

For proceeds purposes, Apple converts your foreign-currency proceeds to your bank account currency at the rates published in App Store Connect's Financial Reports section. The rate used is typically the exchange rate at the close of the fiscal period, not the rate at the time of individual transactions. This means proceeds from sales made in early March may be converted at a different rate than those from late March — and both will differ from the mid-month spot rate you might see on any public currency feed.

A worked example: one subscription, three storefronts

The following table illustrates how the three layers — commission tier, tax remittance, and currency — interact for a developer on the App Store Small Business Program (15% commission), using a notional subscription price equivalent to approximately USD 9.99 across three storefronts. Figures are approximate and for illustration; actual proceeds depend on Apple's applied FX rates and any period-specific adjustments.

For a developer on the standard 30% commission, the after-commission figures drop substantially: US proceeds fall to approximately .99, Germany to approximately €5.88, and Japan to approximately ¥955. The commission tier is the single largest lever on proceeds — larger than any realistic tax difference across storefronts — which is why applying for the Small Business Program is among the highest-return administrative actions available to eligible developers.

One subtlety worth noting: if your Japanese subscriber is in month 14 of a continuous subscription, the commission is 15% regardless of whether you are in the Small Business Program. Both paths converge to the same rate for long-tenure subscribers. The Small Business Program advantage is largest for developers with a young subscriber base and high month-one transaction volume.

What the proceeds formula means for your pricing strategy

Your effective margin is country-specific, not price-specific. Because tax rates differ across storefronts, two markets with the same nominal listed price produce different net proceeds. Developers who model their unit economics globally should work in after-tax, after-commission USD equivalents — not nominal prices — to get an accurate picture of margin by territory.

PPP-adjusted pricing changes absolute proceeds, not just conversion ratios. Lowering your India price to ₹399 to reduce churn in a low-purchasing-power market — a strategy covered in our post on iOS subscription churn in low-PPP markets — means accepting lower per-transaction proceeds in exchange for a larger, lower-churn subscriber base. Whether the trade is positive depends on your retention curve and volume projections — but it should be modelled explicitly, not assumed.

Commission tier transitions are silent revenue events. When a subscriber crosses the 12-month threshold, your net proceeds from that subscriber increase without any price change. This means subscriber lifetime value is non-linear: month 1 through 12 generate one proceeds curve; month 13 onwards generates a materially better one. Products with strong long-term retention are disproportionately rewarded by this structure.

Quarterly proceeds reconciliation catches configuration drift. App Store Connect Financial Reports provide CSV exports broken down by storefront, SKU, and period. Developers who reconcile these against their pricing assumptions regularly find issues — storefronts left on auto-conversion after a manual price update, subscriptions inadvertently excluded from a promotional offer, or price tiers that drifted out of the intended range after an FX update. An hour per quarter on this exercise typically pays for itself.

Sources and further reading

• Apple Developer — App Store Small Business Program (official overview and eligibility)
• Apple Developer — App Store Connect Help (payments, financial reports, and pricing)
• Apple Developer — App Store Connect API reference
• RevenueCat Blog — subscription economics, App Store commission analysis, and benchmark data
• Phiture Mobile Growth Stack — App Store pricing and localization research
• Apple Developer News — announcements on commission rates, program changes, and storefront updates