Do NFT creators still get royalties

Over 24 hours to the morning of 27 September 2026 (Singapore time), NFT collections on OpenSea that enforce their creator's royalty paid it on 711 of 719 sales. Collections where the royalty was optional paid it on 22 of 627.

So creators do still get royalties, when the collection's contract makes the sale pay them. When it does not, the royalty is a request, and on OpenSea the person who decides whether to honour it is the seller. That is not an oversight. The Ethereum standard that publishes a royalty, EIP-2981, says in its own text that "the royalty payment must be voluntary", because a token moving between wallets is not always a sale, and a contract cannot tell the difference.

The seller, who decides first

On OpenSea, a creator sets their "creator earnings" (the same thing other marketplaces call a royalty or creator fee) in the collection's settings, up to a maximum of 10%. Since 31 August 2023, for most collections those earnings are optional. OpenSea's help centre says a listing includes the creator's preferred earnings by default, that the seller can change the percentage, and that there is no minimum. The royalty comes out of the price the buyer pays, so every percentage point paid to the creator is a point the seller does not keep.

In our 24-hour sample, 22 of the 627 sales on optional collections paid anything, 3.5%. By value, those collections' creators asked for 4.90 ETH across the window and received 0.32 ETH, or 6.6%. The sample is one day on one marketplace, counting only sales carrying OpenSea's own fee in the collections among its hundred most-traded whose settings we could read, so it describes that day and not the market. It does show why our NFT royalty calculator starts with the royalty unpaid on optional collections.

Whether royalty income or a resale gain is taxable depends on where you live, and is not covered here; in Singapore and Malaysia the questions go to IRAS and LHDN.

The marketplace, which takes its cut either way

OpenSea charges 1% on a sale, included in the price the buyer sees. That has been the rate since 15 September 2025, when it rose from 0.5%, according to OpenSea's developer changelog. OpenSea's own developer guide still carried a worked example at 2.5% in August 2026, which gives some idea how fast fee tables go out of date.

Not every marketplace settles a sale the same way. Tensor, on Solana, charges a 2% fee to whoever takes the order, and its documentation says a buyer of a listing pays the royalty and the fee on top of the listed price, so the seller receives the full amount. On a collection where the royalty is optional, the buyer chooses to pay none, half or all of it. Our calculator shows what the buyer pays as well as what the seller keeps, so a Tensor listing comes out the way Tensor's documentation describes it. Foundation, once the best-known marketplace that enforced royalties, has been offline since 27 April 2026.