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What is an NFT royalty?
An NFT royalty is a fee, set by the creator as a share of the sale price, meant to be paid to the creator each time the NFT is resold. The NFT can publish the rate and recipient, but payment depends on the marketplace choosing to honor it.
What it means for you
When you sell an NFT, a royalty can come out of your sale proceeds, so check the rate the marketplace applies before listing. Royalties are not enforced by the token standard: a marketplace may skip them, and a plain transfer between wallets pays nothing.
How it works
ERC-2981 standardises how an NFT contract announces royalties. Given a token ID and a sale price, its royaltyInfo function returns the address to pay and the amount owed. The standard moves no money itself. It states that payment must be voluntary, because transfer functions also move NFTs between wallets when no sale happened, and that if a marketplace does not implement it, nothing is paid on secondary sales. The royalty is therefore a published request that marketplaces can read, not a rule the blockchain enforces.
An example
Say an NFT sets a 5% royalty and you resell it for 2 ETH on a marketplace that honors ERC-2981. The marketplace calls royaltyInfo, sends 0.1 ETH to the creator's address, and you receive 1.9 ETH, minus any marketplace fee.
Source: ERC-2981: NFT Royalty Standard · checked 4 October 2026
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Educational content, not financial advice. Written by hand and checked against the source named above. Something wrong? Tell us and we reply within two business days.