When you actually get paid
"When do I get the money" deserves a straight answer, including — especially including — the part that puts a responsibility on you. Here is the whole of it.
Your own account, not ours
You connect your own Stripe account, and ticket money is routed to it as sales happen. It is your account, your bank details, your Stripe dashboard.
This is a structural difference from platforms that collect payments into their own account and pay you out later. In that model your money is on somebody else's balance sheet and your ability to be paid depends on their solvency and their goodwill. Here it never enters ours.
Practically, it means you can log into Stripe and see your own transactions, your own balance and your own payout history, without asking us anything.
The money is yours from the moment it lands
Stripe pays out from your connected balance to your bank on that account’s own payout schedule. For an event selling tickets in advance that is normally well before the event happens.
We never hold it, and we cannot: it is your Stripe account and your payout settings. That is the point of the arrangement, and it is worth being blunt about what it means for refunds.
A refund pulls from your Stripe balance. If ticket money has already been swept into a personal or business bank account and spent on deposits, marketing and staff — which is exactly what it is for — then a cancelled event leaves attendees owed refunds that cannot be funded. At that point there are only bad options: the organizer finds the money from somewhere, the attendees are not refunded, or somebody else absorbs it. Every ticketing collapse you have read about has this shape.
So keep enough of it where Stripe can reach it. An organizer whose event is cancelled by a venue is in a far better position with the ticket money still in the Stripe balance than with it spent, and a refund that cannot be funded becomes a chargeback, which costs more and is decided by someone else.
Keep enough back to refund with
Nothing on this platform stops you spending ticket money before the event. Before you do, weigh:
- how likely a cancellation is — a venue can pull a date at any point;
- your event’s refund policy, which is the money you have already promised to be able to return;
- any open disputes, which Stripe takes from your balance whether or not it is there;
- how far ahead you sold — the longer the gap, the more can change;
- and whether your Stripe balance could absorb a full refund run tomorrow.
This applies to every organizer, not only new ones. The events where the loss is largest are the established ones, because they sold the most tickets.
Scanning tickets at the door is still worth doing — it is how you know who actually came, and it is the evidence you will want if a buyer later claims they never attended.
You are the merchant
Your business is the merchant of record. Concretely:
- Your business name appears on the buyer's card statement, which reduces chargebacks — a line item nobody recognises is a line item somebody disputes.
- Stripe bills its processing fee to your account directly. We are not in the middle of it and we do not mark it up.
- Refunds and chargebacks come out of your balance. They are yours, as they would be for any other business selling to the public.
That last point is why the balance matters. A chargeback arriving against a funded balance is a deduction; against an empty one it is a debt Stripe will pursue.
Getting paid at all
To sell paid tickets you must complete Stripe's onboarding: identity, business details, a bank account, and card payments enabled on your account.
That is Stripe's verification, not a form we invented, and it is what makes you payable. It is also the reason a paid event cannot go live until it is done — including if you schedule the event rather than publishing it directly, which is not a way around the check.
The most common snag is an account that was connected before card payments were requested and holds only the transfers capability. Such an account cannot be the merchant on a charge, so paid checkout is refused rather than quietly falling back to us paying for your event. The fix is to reconnect, and your Stripe settings page will tell you if this applies to you.
Free events
None of this applies to free events. There is no money, no Stripe account required, no commission and no hold. If you only ever run free events you never have to think about any of it.