Apple's App Store Small Business Program in 2026: How the 15% Cut Actually Works

Most US small businesses considering an iOS app eventually trip over the same number: thirty percent. Apple's default commission on paid apps, in-app purchases, and subscriptions. For a $9.99/month service that is three dollars per user, every month, forever. People who learn that number tend to put the app project back on the shelf.

That thirty percent is not actually what most small businesses pay. Since 2020, Apple has run something called the App Store Small Business Program. If your annual proceeds across all your apps stay under one million US dollars, Apple takes fifteen percent instead. The official program page is at developer.apple.com/app-store/small-business-program, and the public-facing announcement that started it is the 2020 Apple newsroom post.

The program is genuinely good, but it is also messier than the headline implies. This guide is what I wish I had read before applying.

The two-line summary

If you earned under one million dollars in App Store proceeds last calendar year, you can apply for fifteen-percent commission instead of thirty. New developers can apply right away. You re-enroll each year, and the moment you cross one million you bounce up to thirty for the rest of that year.

That is the whole program. Every nuance below is built on those two sentences.

Who actually qualifies

Apple's eligibility wording is plain by tech-company standards, but it has a few traps. To qualify in 2026 you must meet all of these conditions:

• You are an existing developer who earned less than one million dollars in proceeds in 2025, across all of your apps and across both paid downloads and in-app purchases. The threshold is on what Apple paid you, not the gross revenue customers paid Apple.
• Or you are a new developer who has never enrolled in the program before. New developers get the 15 percent rate automatically from the day they ship.
• Your developer account is in good standing, which means no open contract violations and no unpaid balances.
• Your business is not part of a larger group of associated developer accounts that, combined, made over a million. This is the part most people miss. If you have multiple Apple Developer Program accounts that share a tax ID, beneficial ownership, or are otherwise associated, Apple aggregates them.

"Proceeds" is the keyword. If a user buys a $9.99 in-app purchase, Apple keeps roughly $1.50 under the Small Business Program and you receive about $8.49 (rough numbers, before payment processing fees, tax-withholding, currency conversion). The $8.49 is your "proceeds" for that transaction. Cross one million in those payouts and you lose the discount.

What 15 versus 30 actually saves you

The savings are bigger than they sound when you do the year-end math.

Take a small B2B app charging $19/month. Imagine 500 paying users at steady state. That is $9,500/month in customer charges. Under the 30 percent tier, Apple keeps $2,850 and you receive $6,650. Under the Small Business Program at 15 percent, Apple keeps $1,425 and you receive $8,075. Over a year, the program saves you $17,100.

For a slightly larger micro-business, say a $5,000/month app, the program saves about $9,000 a year. For a small one-person side-project earning $500/month, it still saves you $900. That is the entire annual Apple Developer Program fee ($99) plus a chunk of next year's hosting bill.

The independent calculator at UltimateFinanceCalculator runs the same math in the browser, which is useful if you want to model a specific revenue mix without doing it on a napkin.

How to actually apply

The application lives inside App Store Connect. Sign in to your developer account, open the Agreements, Tax, and Banking section, and scroll until you see "App Store Small Business Program". The application itself takes about ninety seconds. You confirm your annual proceeds were under the threshold, declare your associated accounts (or that none exist), and submit. Apple emails the decision back within a few business days. Most approvals come the same week.

Three things to know before you click submit:

1. You have to apply. Apple does not enroll you automatically. The default rate stays at thirty percent until you opt in.
2. The application asks about "associated developer accounts". If you maintain a second developer account for a client, a side project, or for legal partition, you must disclose it. If those accounts collectively crossed a million, none of them qualify.
3. Apply early in the calendar year. Approval is retroactive to the start of the next quarter, not the date of approval. Apply in February, the 15 percent rate kicks in April 1.

RevenueCat's engineering blog has a solid walkthrough with screenshots if you want to see what the App Store Connect screens look like before applying.

Re-enrollment, and what happens when you cross the line

Once approved, you are good for the rest of the calendar year. Every January Apple re-checks your proceeds from the previous year. Stay under a million, and you keep the 15 percent rate. Cross the line in mid-year, and Apple flips you to 30 percent starting the next calendar quarter. There is no warning email. The first you usually hear about it is when your monthly payout statement shows the higher commission.

The next calendar year, you start fresh. If your 2026 proceeds end up under a million, you re-qualify for 2027 at 15 percent. This is genuinely the same way the program treated developers in 2021 and 2022. Apple has not nibbled at it the way it has nibbled at other small-business programs over the years.

Edge cases the FAQ does not cover well

Transferring an app

If you transfer an existing app to a new developer account, the receiving account inherits the app's revenue history for the current year. So you cannot escape the 30 percent tier by transferring to a fresh Small Business account once you cross a million. Adapty's reference guide covers transfer mechanics in more depth and is worth reading if you are considering any kind of corporate restructuring around an app.

Associated accounts

Apple has tightened its definition of "associated" over the years. Beneficial ownership counts. Shared bank accounts count. The same person being a director of multiple LLCs counts. Apple does not publish an exhaustive list, and they are increasingly aggressive about pulling accounts out of the program when an audit flags an association you did not disclose. Disclose generously. The cost of disclosing a borderline association is usually nothing. The cost of getting caught by an audit is being kicked out of the program, sometimes retroactively.

The Reader Rule and external payments

Apple's "Reader app" rules and the post-2024 external payment rules in the EU and US (which followed the Epic v. Apple ruling) let some apps direct users to a web checkout. If you use external payments, Apple's commission on those purchases is not 15 or 30; it is its own rate (currently 12 percent for Small Business developers in the US under the Link Out flows, 27 percent for the rest). The accounting gets messy fast. Passion.io's overview is a reasonable starting point if you want to dig into external payments.

Subscriptions auto-renewed past a year

This is the under-known one. Even on the standard tier, Apple drops its commission to 15 percent on subscriptions that have been active for more than one year. Under the Small Business Program, those subscriptions stay at 15 percent. The benefit of the program for subscription-heavy businesses is mostly on the first-year revenue. If your retention is good and most of your revenue is in year-two-plus customers, the program matters less than you would think.

Google Play's parallel program, briefly

Google runs a very similar program called the Service Fee Tier. The first one million dollars of annual revenue per developer is at 15 percent, the rest at 30. Subscriptions are 15 percent from day one for all developers (Google moved here in 2022). For most small business apps, Apple and Google end up at roughly the same effective rate, but the Google math is simpler because there is no "apply once, lose if you cross the line" cliff. Google just charges 15 on the first million each year, 30 above. Appbot's side-by-side comparison lays this out clearly.

If you are still deciding whether iOS is worth it

The honest answer for most US small businesses building their first app is that iOS gives you better-paying customers but a more expensive supply chain. The $99 annual Apple Developer Program fee is the cheap part. The real cost is the time spent on App Store review, on Apple's design and review guidelines, and on dealing with rejections (a separate problem we cover in the 12 most common rejection reasons in 2026). For most small businesses, Android is faster to ship to and easier to iterate on, and iOS is where the money is.

You do not have to choose. Most no-code and low-code app builders generate both an Android APK and an iOS IPA from the same project, which means you submit to both stores from one codebase. If you are looking at the path forward generally, our how to build an app guide walks the full pipeline.

The bottom line

If your iOS app makes less than a million dollars a year, apply to the Small Business Program. There is essentially no downside, the application is short, and the savings are real money. The program has been stable for five years and Apple has not given any indication it will be wound down.

Just remember the three things people forget:

• It is opt-in, not automatic.
• Cross one million and you lose it for the rest of the year, no warning.
• "Associated developer accounts" are aggregated. Disclose generously.

Do those three things right and you keep that extra 15 percent permanently.