What LiveAuctioneers Costs an Auction House (2026 Fee Math)

The number on the rate card

LiveAuctioneers publishes a seller rate card, which puts it ahead of most marketplaces. As of September 2, 2026, the card reads like this for a U.S. auction house:

Bronze, Silver, and Gold are partner tiers based on volume. The commission is the same 5% at every tier. What changes is the event fee, and the gap between Bronze and Gold on a live sale is $370 per day.

Five percent doesn't sound like much until you run it against a real sale. So let's run it.

A worked sale

Take a live estate auction with 300 lots that hammers at $120,000. The house is a Silver partner and charges an 18% buyer's premium. Seventy percent of the buyers pay by card through LivePayments, on invoices that include premium and tax, so the card volume comes to about $84,000 across 60 invoices.

That is 8.4% of hammer for one sale. A house that runs one sale like this a month sends LiveAuctioneers about $120,000 a year.

Now the fair part of the math. The card processing isn't all a marketplace cost. If you collected those same payments yourself through a standard processor at 2.9% plus $0.30, you'd pay about $2,454. So the marketplace premium on processing is roughly $900 per sale, and the pure marketplace cost is the commission plus the event fee: $6,675 on this sale, or 5.6% of hammer.

What you're buying for it

Bidders you don't have. That's the whole product. LiveAuctioneers puts your catalog in front of a national audience, and the buyer who drives your painting from $800 to $1,450 may live three states away and has never heard of you. On a lot like that, 5% of $1,450 is $72.50, and it's the cheapest marketing you'll ever buy.

The math turns the other way on your regulars. The dealer who comes to every sale and would have bid on the same lots from a folding chair in your gallery is now bidding through the platform, and you're paying 5% on a buyer you already had. Most houses have both kinds of bidders on every sale, and the question is what share of your hammer comes from each.

The split most houses land on

Look at your last few sales and mark each winning bidder as one you already had or one the platform brought you. If more than half your hammer comes from your own list, you're paying the marketplace for reach you don't need on those lots. Houses in that position tend to do one of three things.

They keep the big sales on the marketplace, where the specialty lots need the audience, and move the weekly consignment sales somewhere cheaper. A Gold-tier timed sale on LiveAuctioneers is only $25, so for those it's the 5% that matters, not the event fee.

They move their regulars to their own branded bidding site. LiveAuctioneers offers a white-label version starting at $500 a month, and AuctionMethod and BidWrangler sell flat-fee white-label platforms with no commission. The tradeoff is that you bring your own bidders, which is the point.

They stay, and stop thinking about it, because the marketplace brings enough new buyers that the 5% on regulars is the cost of doing business. That's a legitimate answer too.

Invaluable, HiBid, and Proxibid

Invaluable doesn't publish a seller rate card. Ask for the contract and run the same table. HiBid publishes: 2% of online proceeds, $0.25 per unique bid capped at $150 per auction, $75 webcast setup, and $1 per card authorization capped at $50. On the $120,000 sale above, HiBid's commission alone is $2,400 against LiveAuctioneers' $6,000, and the audiences are different animals. Proxibid, like Invaluable, prices through sales.

Do the math on your own sale

Here's the worksheet. Fill in your last sale.

That last line is the number to sit with. It's what you're paying for a reach you already had.

Keep the money in your own system

Whatever you decide about the marketplace, invoice and collect through your own system. Estimint builds buyer invoices when you close a sale, with your premium and tax, and emails them with a pay link that deposits straight into your own Stripe account. Estimint takes no cut of the payment, so processing costs you Stripe's rate and nothing more. It exports your catalog to LiveAuctioneers, Invaluable, Proxibid, HiBid, and BidWrangler, so you can sell wherever the bidders are and settle where the money is yours.

Estimint isn't a bidding platform. If you're thinking about running your regulars on a branded site with no percentage, we're talking with auction houses about that now, and we'd like to hear how you'd want it to work. Tell us here.