There are only four things you can do on the market

Every market action is one of these four, and each carries different costs.

Action	How	Broker fee	Sales tax	Escrow
Instant buy	Take an existing sell order	None	None	None
Instant sell	Dump into an existing buy order	None	Yes	None
Place buy order	List a price you'll buy at	Upfront	None	100% locked
Place sell order	List a price you'll sell at	Upfront	On fill	None

One rule covers most of it: taking someone else's order is free of broker fee; creating a new order costs you one. And selling always incurs sales tax — whether you dump into a buy order or your sell order fills.

That's why classic station trading (buy with a buy order, sell with a sell order) pays the broker fee twice and sales tax once. Those three cuts are what eat your margin alive.

Tip: The broker fee is charged the moment you place the order, and it is not refunded if you cancel. New traders who can't read the price and keep re-listing orders bleed ISK on broker fees alone.

Escrow: the hidden capital lock on buy orders

When you place a buy order, that full amount is locked out of your wallet. A buy order for 1,000 units at 1M ISK each ties up 1 billion ISK, sitting there untouchable until it fills. That's escrow.

It used to be softer. The Margin Trading skill once cut the escrow requirement by up to ~76%, letting you leverage a small bankroll into large buy orders. That's gone. Since the 10 March 2020 rework, every buy order requires 100% escrow. The Margin Trading skill itself was renamed and repurposed into Advanced Broker Relations at the same time (more on that below).

Why this matters in practice: the size of your buy-order operation is the amount of cash you have sitting idle. If your wallet holds 500M, your total outstanding buy orders top out at 500M. Pile buy orders onto a slow-moving item and that capital is stuck while opportunities pass you by. A buy order isn't just "how much will I make" — it's "how much do I lock up, and for how long."

Broker fee: the price of making an order

In NPC stations the broker fee starts at 3%. Skills and standings bring it down.

Broker fee % = 3% − 0.3% × Broker Relations level
                  − 0.03% × faction standing
                  − 0.02% × corp standing

• Broker Relations skill: −0.3 percentage points per level. At V, 3% → 1.5%.
• Standings: the better your standing with the faction and corp that owns the station, the more comes off. Maxed (10) standings shave off another ~0.5 points.
• Floor of 1%: even with Broker Relations V and perfect standings, an NPC station won't go below 1%. There's also a hard minimum of 100 ISK per order.

So a new player pays 3%, a skilled one pays 1.5%, and a trader who manages standings pays 1%. In station trading — where you place two orders — that difference lands directly as ~2 points of margin.

Player structures can be cheaper

At player-owned structures (Citadels and the like), the broker fee is set by the structure owner, plus a minimum 0.5% SCC surcharge. A well-configured structure market can undercut the NPC 1% floor, which is exactly why high-volume traders sometimes run their orders out of a specific structure. The catch: a structure can be locked to you or blown up at any time, so leaving assets parked in one is a real risk.

Sales tax: the cut you always pay to sell

Sales tax applies to every sale — instant sells and filled sell orders alike. The current base rate is 7.5% (as of patch 22.02, 12 March 2025).

Sales tax % = 7.5% × (1 − 0.11 × Accounting level)

Accounting knocks off 11% per level, so at Accounting V you're paying 7.5% × 0.45 = about 3.375%. This is the skill nearly every trader maxes first — it more than halves the rate, so the payback is the fastest of any trade skill.

For context, sales tax wasn't always this steep. CCP has raised sales tax and broker fees several times as ISK sinks to fight inflation, which is how they reached today's levels. Trust an old guide quoting "2% sales tax" and your math will be off.

The real cost of the 0.01 ISK war: relist fees

Spend an hour station trading and you'll watch people undercut you by 0.01 ISK. You re-price to reclaim the top of the book, they re-price back — the endless 0.01 ISK war. The problem: editing a price isn't free.

Changing an order's price triggers a relist fee.

Relist fee = (1 − relist discount) × broker fee % × new order value
             ( + broker fee % × the increase, only when raising a buy order's price )

• The relist discount is 50% by default. Advanced Broker Relations (the old Margin Trading) adds 6 points per level, reaching 80% at V.
• Minimum fee is 100 ISK.

Say you've got a 100M ISK sell order at a 1% broker fee and you drop the price once to undercut:

• No Advanced Broker Relations (50% discount): (1 − 0.5) × 1% × 100M = 500,000 ISK
• Advanced Broker Relations V (80% discount): (1 − 0.8) × 1% × 100M = 200,000 ISK

That's 200k–500k ISK per edit. Touch the price ten times a day and 2–5M ISK evaporates in fees alone. If you're serious about station trading, that's your answer for why Advanced Broker Relations is worth training.

Every trade skill on one page

Skill	Effect	Notes
Accounting	Sales tax −11%/level (V: 7.5% → 3.375%)	Train first. Fastest payback
Broker Relations	Broker fee −0.3 pts/level (V: 3% → 1.5%)	Second priority
Advanced Broker Relations	Relist discount +6 pts/level (V: 80%)	Old Margin Trading. Must-have for active traders
Trade	Order slots +4/level	You start with 5
Retail	Order slots +8/level	Requires Trade
Wholesale	Order slots +16/level	Requires Retail
Tycoon	Order slots +32/level	All four at V = 305 slots
Marketing	Remote sell orders (region-wide at V)	Sell without traveling
Procurement	Remote buy orders	Buy without traveling
Daytrading	Modify orders remotely	For the undercut war
Visibility	Range of remotely-placed buy orders	Pairs with Procurement

The priority order is clear: Accounting V → Broker Relations IV–V → order slots (Trade→) → Advanced Broker Relations → remote skills. Cut taxes and fees first, then scale up volume (slots) and convenience (remote).

Order duration and range

When you place an order you also set two things:

• Duration: Immediate / 1 day / 3 days / 1 week / 2 weeks / 1 month / 3 months. The cap is 90 days (3 months), after which it expires automatically. "Immediate" doesn't sit on the book — it fills whatever it can right then and disappears.
• Range (buy orders only): from station-only out to the whole region. A wider range means distant sellers can haul goods to your order, so it fills more easily — but you're also competing against every order across that area.

There's a practical reason to care about duration: an old order can be a stale "ghost" from a price that moved weeks ago. Mistake a buy order that's been sitting there for 89 days at a nonsense-low price for real demand and your calculations fall apart. When you read an order book, look not just at the volume but at how recent the orders are.

In practice: what's the break-even margin?

Back to the opening question — "I bought it 10% cheap and still lost money?"

Say an item in Jita has a top buy order at 1M ISK and a bottom sell order at 1.1M ISK. That's a 100k spread, or 10%. You place a buy order just above the top bid and a sell order just below the bottom ask to capture it.

Three costs apply:

• Buy-order broker fee = broker fee % × 1.0M
• Sell-order broker fee = broker fee % × 1.1M
• Sales tax = sales tax % × 1.1M

Net profit = 100k − broker fee % × 2.1M − sales tax % × 1.1M

Case A — zero skills (broker 3%, tax 7.5%)

100k − 0.03 × 2.1M − 0.075 × 1.1M
= 100k − 63k − 82.5k
= −45.5k ISK  → a loss

Case B — maxed (broker 1%, tax 3.375%)

100k − 0.01 × 2.1M − 0.03375 × 1.1M
= 100k − 21k − 37.1k
= +41.9k ISK  → a profit

The same trade is a loss for a new player and a profit for a skilled one. That's what people mean when they say skills are capital in EVE trading.

From this you can pull one working rule of thumb. Treat buy and sell prices as roughly equal, and the round-trip cost is about (broker fee × 2 + sales tax):

• Zero skills: 3%×2 + 7.5% = 13.5%
• Maxed: 1%×2 + 3.375% = ~5.4%

Your spread has to clear that just to break even. A new trader needs at least 13–14%; even a maxed one needs 5.4%. That "5% margin" everyone gets excited about is marginal even when maxed, and a guaranteed loss for a beginner. Keep this break-even line in your head while reading an order book — or a trading tool — and the trap listings start to jump out at you.

Recap — a pre-trade checklist

• Take an order → no broker fee. Make an order → you pay one. Sell anything → sales tax, always.
• A buy order locks the full amount (100% escrow). Size = cash tied up.
• Broker fee starts at 3%, floors at 1% with skills and standings. Not refunded on cancel.
• Sales tax starts at 7.5%, drops to ~3.375% at Accounting V. Train Accounting to 5 first.
• Every price edit costs a relist fee. Undercut a lot? Advanced Broker Relations pays for itself.
• Break-even spread: ~13.5% new, ~5.4% maxed. Below that, skip it or go train skills.

Doing this math by hand on every listing gets old fast. ISK Scout pre-filters routes and items by realized net profit — broker fee, sales tax, and order consumption already baked in — so the break-even calculation above is done for you.

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Sources: EVE University Wiki (Trading, Skills:Trade), EVE Online patch notes 22.02. Figures current as of July 2026; CCP balance patches can change tax and fee rates.