How to price and sell your crochet in the UK

What an item really costs: yarn first, then time

Start with the yarn the item uses, not the ball you bought. Our existing guides give per-item figures from published patterns: 16 to 22 metres for a DK gift card holder, 183 to 247 metres for an adult medium or large DK beanie, and 1,028 to 1,461 metres for a 76 cm square DK pram blanket. At LoveCrafts’ price of £2.35 for a 295 m ball of Stylecraft Special DK, checked 1 November 2026, that is 13p to 18p, £1.46 to £1.97, and four or five whole balls at £9.40 to £11.75.

Time is the cost that sets the price. Handy Little Me gives an active time of one hour for her gift card holder and for her candy cane dishcloth. For a DK pram blanket, our blanket-time guide’s estimates, scaled from published times, run from 7 to 8 hours at pattern-card pace to 22 to 29 hours at the pace of two makers’ own totals. Time a sample yourself, from the first chain to the last end woven in, before you set a price.

Choosing an hourly rate

The rate is your decision. In the sums on this page we use £12.71, the National Living Wage for workers aged 21 and over from 1 April 2026, as published on GOV.UK. It is a legal minimum for employees, not for your own handmade sales; we use it as a reference point, and the price calculator lets you enter any rate.

Many makers charge less, and it helps to know what a lower price pays. Sold for £8 in cash, the gift card holder pays £7.82 an hour after its 18p of yarn; on Etsy the same £8 pays £6.60 an hour after fees. A DK beanie sold for £25 cash pays £7.78 an hour if it takes three hours, which is our placeholder, not a timed figure. Use the calculator’s “try a price” box to see the figure for your own times.

• Work out a price from your yarn, hours and fees
• Published crochet times, converted to minutes per m²

Etsy UK fees, from Etsy’s own pages

Etsy’s help pages, opened on 1 November 2026, list five charges that apply to an ordinary UK sale. The 0.20 USD listing fee is charged when you create or renew a listing, whether it sells or not, and again for each extra unit sold from a multi-quantity listing; listings expire after four months. At the European Central Bank’s reference rates for 30 October 2026, 0.20 USD was about 15p. The 6.5% transaction fee applies to the item price plus any postage and gift wrap you charge.

Payment processing for a UK bank account is 4% plus £0.20 per order, taken from the total including postage and any sales tax. Etsy also charges UK sellers a 0.48% Regulatory Operating fee on the item price, postage and gift wrap. Etsy says VAT applies to its payment processing fees, and lists VAT on seller services as “may vary”; our sums leave VAT out, so your fees can be higher. Opening a shop has a one-off set-up fee that Etsy says “varies by location”.

Offsite Ads are the fee that changes the arithmetic. If a buyer clicks one of Etsy’s ads elsewhere and buys from your shop within 30 days, Etsy charges 15% of that sale, capped at 100 USD per order. Shops that have never made 10,000 USD of sales in a 365-day period can opt out; once a shop reaches that, the rate drops to 12% and Etsy says it must take part “for the lifetime of your shop”. A 2.5% currency conversion fee applies if your listing currency differs from your payment account currency.

Card readers, your own website and the platforms we couldn’t check

Selling in person for cash costs no fee. For cards, the reader companies’ UK pricing pages list 1.69% per transaction for SumUp pay-as-you-go, 1.75% for Zettle by PayPal and 1.75% for UK cards on Square’s free plan, with no monthly fee on those options. The readers cost £25 (SumUp Solo Lite), £29 for a first Zettle reader and £19 for Square’s reader, all before VAT.

A shop on your own website has a monthly cost before any sale. Shopify’s UK Basic plan is £25 a month paid monthly or £19 a month paid yearly, with online card rates of 2% + 25p; using another payment provider adds a 2% Shopify fee. Big Cartel lists plans at $15 and $30 a month and a free, limited plan, without naming a currency or listing transaction fees on its pricing page.

We have no fee figures for Vinted or Facebook Marketplace. Vinted’s site refused our automated requests, and Facebook’s robots.txt asks automated visitors not to read its help pages, so we didn’t. Check the current seller terms in each app before listing, and add any percentage it charges in the calculator’s fee boxes.

A worked example: three items, five ways to sell

The table runs three items through the same formula our calculator uses: price = (yarn + hours × rate + any fixed fee) ÷ (1 − fee percentage), rounded up to the next pound. The rate is our £12.71. Yarn is Stylecraft Special DK at £2.35 a ball; the blanket is charged as whole balls because leftovers from five balls are rarely used up. The beanie’s three hours are our placeholder; the card holder’s hour is the designer’s, and the blanket’s eight hours is the top of the pattern-card estimate in our blanket-time guide.

Etsy’s percentage here is 6.5% + 4% + 0.48% = 10.98%, with £0.20 plus the roughly 15p listing fee as the fixed part. The Offsite Ads row adds 15% on top. Postage is left out: Etsy’s percentage fees also apply to the postage you charge, so add the same share to that figure. Shopify’s row ignores its monthly fee, which you would spread across all your sales.

Tax: the £1,000 trading allowance and when to register

HMRC’s guidance on tax-free allowances says that if your gross trading income in a tax year is £1,000 or less, you do not need to tell HMRC, with some exceptions listed on that page. If it is more than £1,000, you must register for Self Assessment by 5 October in the following tax year. Gross means the total before expenses, so the allowance is measured on what buyers pay you, not on your profit. At £8 an item, that is passed on the 126th sale.

GOV.UK’s guidance on selling through digital platforms says that from 1 January 2024 platforms report sellers’ details and income to HMRC, unless you make fewer than 30 sales of goods in a calendar year and receive less than €2,000, about £1,700. The same page says that a report does not automatically mean you owe tax, and that if you make goods to sell at a profit you are likely to be trading. The tax year runs from 6 April to 5 April. This is a summary of GOV.UK pages, not tax advice.

• GOV.UK: tax-free allowances on trading income
• GOV.UK: selling goods on a digital platform

Selling things made from someone else’s pattern

The Intellectual Property Office’s copyright notice on knitting and sewing patterns, last updated 4 January 2021, says that making an item from a pattern will generally only infringe copyright if the item is itself an artistic work, and that otherwise selling it is not an infringement either. It also says that a pattern can come with a licence restricting the sale of finished items, and that breaking those terms may be a breach of contract. Its advice is to check any stated conditions and, if in doubt, ask the copyright owner or take legal advice.

So the designer’s own terms are what to read. The table below records what four designers’ pages said when we read them, and nothing more: Moogly’s from the Wayback Machine’s copy of 1 May 2026, the others opened on 1 November 2026. Some pages by the same designer say different things, so check the page of the pattern you are using. None of these terms lets you copy or sell the pattern itself.

Our sources and method

Fees come from Etsy’s help centre, SumUp’s, Zettle’s, Square’s, Shopify’s and Big Cartel’s UK pricing pages, all opened on 1 November 2026. Etsy’s main fees page refused our automated request, so the Etsy figures are from its help articles on fees, payment processing, the Regulatory Operating fee and Offsite Ads. Tax and copyright points come from GOV.UK pages opened the same day. Pounds for Etsy’s US-dollar fees use the ECB reference rates for 30 October 2026.

Yarn quantities are from our own guides, which compile designers’ published figures; yarn prices are LoveCrafts’ single-ball prices, checked 1 November 2026, before delivery. Every price is our arithmetic using the price calculator’s formula and our chosen £12.71 rate. We haven’t made or timed these items ourselves.

• Selling at a Christmas craft fair: pitch fees and stock
• What a blanket costs in yarn, 23 yarns compared

Common questions

Sources and scope

• help.etsy.com/hc/en-gb/articles/360035902374
• help.etsy.com/hc/en-gb/articles/360000344908
• help.etsy.com/hc/en-gb/articles/115015628847
• help.etsy.com/hc/en-gb/articles/1500011073202
• help.etsy.com/hc/en-gb/articles/360000338367
• help.etsy.com/hc/en-gb/articles/115014483627
• www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/eurofxref/eurofxref-daily.xml
• www.sumup.com/en-gb/pricing/
• www.sumup.com/en-gb/card-readers/
• www.zettle.com/gb/pricing
• squareup.com/gb/en/pricing
• www.shopify.com/uk/pricing
• www.bigcartel.com/pricing
• www.gov.uk/national-minimum-wage-rates
• www.gov.uk/guidance/tax-free-allowances-on-property-and-trading-income
• www.gov.uk/set-up-sole-trader
• www.gov.uk/guidance/selling-goods-or-services-on-a-digital-platform
• www.gov.uk/government/publications/copyright-notice-knitting-and-sewing-patterns/copyright-notice-knitting-and-sewing-patterns
• web.archive.org/web/20260501070250/https://www.mooglyblog.com/about/
• bellacococrochet.com/pages/copyright-notice
• www.handylittleme.com/crochet-christmas-bauble-cover/
• www.handylittleme.com/crochet-gift-card-holder-pattern/
• www.handylittleme.com/candy-cane-crochet-dishcloth/
• doradoes.co.uk/portfolio/the-christmas-gift-hat-free-crochet-pattern-in-7-sizes/
• doradoes.co.uk/disclaimer-safety/
• www.lovecrafts.com/en-gb/products/stylecraft-special-dk

All fee, tax, wage and designer-terms pages were opened on 1 November 2026, except Moogly’s About page, read from the Wayback Machine’s copy of 1 May 2026. Yarn prices are LoveCrafts single-ball prices checked the same day; per-item yarn and time figures come from our earlier guides’ published-pattern compilations. Fees change: check each platform before you list. Label facts come from the linked references; worked purchase examples and arithmetic are our own illustrations. Original pattern and product names retain their source spelling.