Deposit calculator — what to take now, what to charge later

Type an order value, pick a deposit, read the split. Everything below the tool explains the numbers it shows — and the decisions the arithmetic can’t make for you.

How the numbers are computed

There is no cleverness here, which is rather the point. Every amount you type is read to the nearest cent, so a stray third decimal cannot leak into the split. The deposit is the order value multiplied by your percentage, rounded to the nearest cent — or the fixed amount you typed. The balance is the order value minus the rounded deposit, not a second percentage calculation, so the two halves always sum to exactly the total. When a percentage produces a fraction of a cent, the deposit rounds and the balance absorbs the difference. One number, one rounding, no drift.

Two assumptions, said out loud. A deposit is not a discount — the customer pays the full order value, in two pieces — and if you are here because search muddled the two, how to take a 50% deposit on Shopify (not 50% off) untangles them properly. And the dollar sign is formatting, not an assumption: the arithmetic is identical in any two-decimal currency, the calculator just has to display something.

The page loads with a $3,000 order at a 50% deposit — $1,500 at checkout, $1,500 at fulfillment — because that is the worked example the rest of our guides use. It is an example, not a recommendation.

Is there a standard deposit percentage?

Mostly, no — and this page would rather tell you that than invent one. The presets above are 25%, 30% and 50% because those are the splits merchants actually weigh against each other, not because any of them is an industry figure. In August 2026 we went looking for a published standard — a percentage from a trade association, an established trade publication or a government body — across six made-to-order verticals. Here is what the search actually found.

Five of the six verticals have no citable percentage at all. The Home Furnishings Association (furniture), the Association of Bridal Consultants (weddings), Jewelers of America and the American Gem Society (jewellery), the American Rental Association (event and equipment rental) and the National Association for Catering and Events (catering and cakes) publish no customary deposit percentage on their public sites. The figures in circulation — 30–60% for wedding dresses, 50% for custom cakes, 20–40% for catering — trace back to retailers, wedding media and vendor blogs, never to an association or a statute. The three individual furniture-retailer policies in that sample were 15%, 40% and 50%.

The one vertical with a hard number is regulated, and the law caps deposits rather than recommending them. California limits the down payment a licensed home-improvement contractor may collect — a category that covers installed custom cabinetry — to $1,000 or 10% of the contract price, whichever is less (Business and Professions Code §7159.5, which exempts contractors who post a performance and payment bond). Maryland caps a home-improvement contractor’s deposit at one-third of the contract price, taken before or at signing (Business Regulation §8-617). Both govern home-improvement contracts rather than retail sales, and a crated cabinet order shipped for someone else to install is a different-looking transaction — but which one yours is, is a question for a lawyer licensed in your state, not one this page can settle. This is general information, not legal advice. If cabinetry is your business, the fuller picture is on deposits for cabinetry and millwork.

Where lawmakers touch retail deposits at all, they regulate what happens to the money, not how much of it you take. New York’s furniture-delivery statute (General Business Law §396-u) sets no ceiling on the deposit — but if the disclosed delivery date slips, the customer must be offered a full refund, a credit equal to the deposit, a new delivery date or a different item, at their choice. And when the New York Attorney General settled with a bridal shop in 2020 over undelivered special-order dresses, the deposit terms it imposed were about refunds, not size: the deposit comes back if the dress does not arrive within three weeks of the promised date, or at least one month before the event. Both retail examples we could cite are New York’s.

So “what should I charge?” is a judgement call about your lead time and your cancellation exposure, and we have laid that judgement out — 50/50 against 30/70 against 25/75, in a table that says plainly it is reasoning rather than data — on the 50% deposit page.

Reading the cash-flow view

The three tiles are doing three different jobs.

The deposit is the only money that exists before the work does. For made-to-order work it is what buys materials and books the production slot, which is why the optional cost field is there: type what it costs you to deliver the order and the calculator states the gap. If your cost is higher than the deposit, that gap is you financing the customer’s build until the balance lands — better to see the number now than feel it mid-build.

The balance is money that does not exist yet. Taken at Shopify checkout, it is a scheduled charge against a card saved when the order was placed — and the longer the lead time, the more chances that card has had to expire, be replaced or be cancelled before the charge fires. That is the structural argument for a larger deposit on a longer build, and it is our reasoning rather than a statistic: a 25% deposit on a nine-month build is not just less cash today, it is three quarters of the price riding on a card that has to survive nine months. What actually happens when that charge declines is its own page: the second payment declined.

The total is the number you started with, and the third tile exists to keep it that way. A deposit rearranges when the money arrives. It does not change how much.

One aside from our own research. In August 2026 we scanned 120 made-to-order storefronts — a hand-assembled sample, not a random slice of Shopify — and of the 54 Shopify stores where the question could be answered, 52 offered no deposit option on the products we sampled. Read that as an upper bound: a control store known to take deposits reads as a no to this method. The method and its limits are on the research page.

What this calculator can’t tell you

Three decisions sit directly on top of these numbers, and arithmetic answers none of them.

• Whether the deposit is refundable. A policy decision, not a calculation — and the one to write down before you take anyone’s money, since (as New York’s furniture statute shows) the law can dictate the customer’s options once delivery slips. The reasoning and the wording live on non-refundable deposit policies on Shopify.
• When tax is due on each half. Jurisdictions differ on whether tax attaches at the deposit, at the balance or at delivery, and a rate can change between the two charges on a long lead time. This page is general information, not tax or legal advice — the longer treatment is on deposits and sales tax / VAT, and the answer for your store comes from your accountant.
• Whether your store can take the split at all. A deposit at Shopify checkout with an automatic balance charge needs a gateway that can store a card — Shopify Payments, PayPal Express, Stripe, or Adyen, which is Shopify’s requirement for saved-card charges, not any app’s. If yours is not one of the four, the arithmetic above still holds; the collection method changes entirely. The full decision tree, including the free method, is on taking a deposit on a Shopify custom order.

If you came here to price real orders rather than out of curiosity, this is the part where I tell you what I build. DepositDesk is a $29-a-month flat-rate deposits app for standard Shopify plans — percentage or fixed deposits, with the balance due a set number of days after checkout, on a date, or when you fulfill the order, charged automatically to the card Shopify saved at checkout. No per-transaction fee, no revenue share, no cap on order value, and a 14-day free trial — every feature free for 14 days, and you are only billed if you keep it. When a balance charge declines it retries after 1, 3 and 7 days, emails the customer each time, and flags the order for you when the ladder runs out. The split you just calculated becomes a deposit option on your product page: install it from the App Store and set the first plan up inside the trial.

Its real limits, because the habit of this page should not stop at its own product: Online Store channel only — not POS, not B2B, not draft orders. It needs an Online Store 2.0 theme, because the deposit option is a theme app block you add in the theme editor. It needs one of the four card-storing gateways above. And it is one deposit plus one later balance, not an instalment plan.

Related: choosing the split itself works through 50/50 against the alternatives, and the deposit-app comparison is where to go once the numbers here have settled the what and you are choosing the how.

Questions merchants actually ask

Sources for this page: New York General Business Law §396-u; California Business and Professions Code §7159.5; Maryland Business Regulation §8-617; the 2020 New York Attorney General settlement with a bridal retailer over undelivered special-order dresses; and the public sites of the Home Furnishings Association, the Association of Bridal Consultants, Jewelers of America, the American Gem Society, the American Rental Association and the National Association for Catering and Events — all checked August 2026, and all silent on a standard deposit percentage. Where nobody publishes a number, this page says so instead of inventing one. If you find something here that is wrong, I would rather hear it: support@depositdesk.app.