Either can pay, and where your platform allows it, you choose for each event. There are two separate fees in play, the platform's registration fee and the payment processing fee, and each can be passed to the entrant or absorbed by you. The decision that matters more than who pays at entry is who loses the fee when an entry is refunded, transferred or deferred.
Races, classes and workshops differ from a ticketed show here. People get injured, change distance, swap with a friend or roll their place to next year, and each of those touches the fees.
Two fees doing two different jobs
The platform fee pays for the registration system: forms, entrant management, start lists, emails. The processing fee pays for moving the money. They may appear as one combined line or as two.
When fees are passed through, the entrant sees the entry price plus a fee line at checkout. When they are absorbed, the entrant pays the entry price and you receive less. Whichever you choose, state it on the entry page before the form begins, so the fee line is not a surprise at the last step.
Refunds, transfers and deferrals
Suppose an entry costs 50 and the entrant paid a further 3 in fees on top. When they withdraw, there are several amounts you could send back: the full 53, the 50, or the 50 less a processing charge that was not returned to you. These figures are invented for illustration. The point is that your refund policy has to say which amount applies, and your platform has to be able to do it. Find out the following from your contract and your platform settings.
- On a full refund, is the platform fee returned to you, returned to the entrant, or kept?
- Is the processing fee returned on a refund, or is it gone once the payment is taken?
- Can you refund part of an entry, and how are fees worked out on a partial refund?
- Is a transfer to another person a new entry with a new fee, an edit with no fee, or an edit with a transfer fee you set?
- Does a deferral to next year's event carry the original payment across, or is it a refund followed by a new entry, with fees charged twice?
- If the whole event is cancelled, who bears the fees on every refund?
Write the answers into your entry terms in plain words. If those terms would carry weight in a dispute, have them read by a lawyer.
Reading your payout report
The payout report is where the real cost shows. For one event, find these figures: gross entry revenue, fees collected from entrants, platform fees charged, processing fees charged, refunds issued, fees returned on those refunds, and the net amount paid to your bank.
Check that gross, less fees, less refunds, equals what arrived. Then look at refunds on their own. If fees were passed to entrants but not returned on refunds, the gap shows up as platform and processing fees on entries that produced no revenue. With a generous withdrawal policy, that gap is a cost you bear even though on paper the entrant pays everything.
Do the same for transfers and deferrals if the report separates them. If it does not, export the entry list and count them.
Putting a yearly figure on it
Add the platform fees across every event in the year, whoever paid them. Entering your per-registration fee and entry count into our free calculator for per-ticket and per-unit bills gives the yearly and three-year totals.
Where a platform earns that fee through its entrant audience, timing integrations and support, renting is the sensible choice. If you use it mainly as a form and a list, it is worth reading what event organisers rent and which parts can be rebuilt and our guide to renting versus owning software. Processing fees would remain in either case, since card processing is not something we replace.