How much US tax is withheld from my royalties?

Without a valid W-8BEN, US-sourced royalties are withheld at the statutory foreign-person rate of 30%. With the form filed, the rate depends on whether your country has an income tax treaty with the United States. Per IRS Table 1 (Rev. May 2023), the copyright royalty rate is 0% for Pakistan, 10% for Morocco, Turkey and Indonesia, and 15% for Egypt, Tunisia and India. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Lebanon, Algeria and Brazil have no treaty with the US, so the statutory 30% applies with no reduction available.

What is the per-stream rate on Spotify?

There is no per-stream rate. Spotify states directly that it does not pay according to a per-play or per-stream rate. It distributes net revenue from subscriptions and advertising by streamshare: if your music accounts for one percent of all streams, you receive roughly one percent of the royalty pool. Payouts therefore differ between countries because each territory has its own revenue pool set by local subscription prices and advertising rates, not because a rate card exists. No streaming service publishes a per-country payout rate, and any tool showing you one is inventing it.

Is a percentage or a flat annual fee cheaper?

It depends entirely on how much you earn, and the crossover is arithmetic rather than opinion. A flat fee costs the same whether a release earns nothing or a great deal, so it is expensive at low earnings and cheap at high ones. A percentage is the reverse. At a 5% share, a $24.99 annual fee becomes the better deal once your net royalties pass roughly $500 a year. The calculator works out where that line falls for your own numbers and says so when a competitor is the better choice.

Is anything I enter here uploaded?

No. The calculator runs entirely inside your browser. Nothing you type is uploaded, stored or sent to any server, and no account is needed. You can disconnect from the internet after the page loads and it still works.

No. This is an estimate built from published sources, and we are not tax advisers. Withholding treatment depends on facts this tool cannot see, and the IRS treaty table carries footnotes that can condition a rate. The table used here is dated May 2023. Check with a qualified adviser in your country before relying on any figure.

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Find out what actually reaches your bank account

Two things quietly take most of the money between a stream and your account: US tax withheld at source, and your distributor's cut. This calculator shows both, using the IRS treaty table and each distributor's own published pricing — including the cases where Mazufa is the worse deal.

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Everything on this page runs inside your browser. Nothing you type here is uploaded, stored or sent anywhere, and no account is needed. This is an estimate, not tax or financial advice — we are not tax advisers, and you should check with a qualified adviser in your country before relying on any figure.

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How this works, and why it matters

There is no such thing as a per-stream rate

Spotify states it plainly: it does not pay artists according to a per-play or per-stream rate. It pools net revenue from subscriptions and advertising, then divides it by streamshare — if your music accounts for one percent of all streams, you receive roughly one percent of the pool. Everything else follows from that. Payouts differ between countries because each territory has its own revenue pool, set by local subscription prices, local advertising rates and currency, divided by local listening volume. That is a consequence of the model, not a published price list. No streaming service on earth publishes a per-country rate, which is why this calculator asks for the figure from your own statements instead of inventing one for you.

The 30% that disappears before anyone tells you

Royalties sourced in the United States are subject to withholding at the statutory foreign-person rate of 30% unless you file a valid Form W-8BEN. Whether filing lowers that rate depends entirely on whether your country has an income tax treaty with the US. Egypt is 15%, Morocco 10%, Turkey 10%, Indonesia 10%, Tunisia 15%, India 15%, and Pakistan is 0%. But Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Lebanon, Algeria and Brazil have no treaty at all — the statutory 30% applies and no reduction is available. Filing the form is still correct there, because it establishes your foreign status, but it will not lower the rate. Almost nobody explains this before an artist signs up.

You almost certainly do not need a US tax number

This is the single most common reason artists abandon a distribution signup, and it rests on a misunderstanding. The official W-8BEN instructions say that to claim treaty benefits you may complete line 5 with a US SSN or ITIN, or line 6 with a foreign tax identification number. A foreign TIN — the tax number your own country already issued you — is generally sufficient. Most artists never need to apply for a US ITIN at all. The form then stays valid through the last day of the third calendar year after you sign it, so it is roughly a three-year task rather than an annual one.

Why a percentage and a flat fee are not comparable in the abstract

A flat annual fee is cheap if you earn a lot and expensive if you earn nothing, because you pay it either way. A percentage is the reverse: it costs nothing on a release that earns nothing, and more than a flat fee once you are earning well. There is a crossover point, and it is arithmetic, not opinion — at a 5% share, a $24.99 annual fee becomes the better deal once your net royalties pass roughly $500 a year. The calculator above works out where that line sits for your numbers and tells you when we are on the wrong side of it. We would rather you knew.

What we deliberately refuse to show you

We do not show a payout rate for your country, because no service publishes one and we will not invent a number about your income. We do not tell you whether PayPal, Payoneer or Wise can receive money where you live — we tried to verify it and could not, because the official country lists are either unreadable to automated checks or return errors, and a guess about whether you can be paid at all is worse than an admission that we do not know. We do not publish withdrawal fees, currency spreads or minimum payout thresholds for the same reason. Where a gap exists in this tool, it is a gap we found rather than one we filled.

Sources. Withholding rates and treaty articles: IRS Table 1, Rev. May 2023 (irs.gov/pub/irs-lbi/tax-treaty-table-1.pdf) and the IRS list of treaties in force. Form mechanics: Instructions for Form W-8BEN, Rev. October 2021. Streamshare model: Spotify's own royalties documentation and Loud & Clear. Per-1,000-stream reference figures: Duetti 2024 Music Economics Report — an estimate from Duetti's own independent-catalogue sample, primarily US and UK, not an official rate and not per-country. Distributor pricing: each vendor's own pricing page, fetched 7 September 2026; entry tier only. Treaty tables carry footnotes that can condition a rate, and the table is over three years old — verify before relying on it.