When you stake ether, you never receive the reward the network pays out. You receive what is left once your provider has taken its cut. How large that cut is appears on the page where you dec
When you stake ether, you never receive the reward the network pays out. You receive what is left once your provider has taken its cut. How large that cut is appears on the page where you decide to stake at only a handful of providers. On September 12, 2026 we pulled the public staking and fee pages of 14 routes through which you can stake Ethereum from Germany. Five of them name a specific commission figure. The range runs from zero to fifty percent, depending on which part of the reward the provider touches.
cryptoticker.io compiled this survey itself on September 12, 2026.
The staking commission is the share of the rewards that the operator of your validator keeps for its work before the rest reaches you. It is not a fee you transfer, and it appears on no invoice. It is simply deducted from the yield, and that is exactly why it is easy to overlook.
That makes it the most important number in the whole offer. The yield itself is beyond your influence: it follows from the protocol and is identical for everyone. According to the reading from validatorqueue.com that we took on September 12, 2026, the network APR stood at 2.46 percent. At that level, the commission decides the difference between a usable offer and a pointless one. A ten percent commission costs you roughly 0.25 percentage points a year, which is one tenth of your entire yield.
The APR, meaning the reward rate annualised without compounding, is the number every provider puts in the shop window. Whether it is stated before or after the provider's own commission is rarely spelled out alongside it.
A validator earns in two separate places. The consensus layer is the layer of Ethereum on which validators are rewarded for proposing and attesting blocks; the protocol itself pays out this reward and it accounts for by far the larger part of the yield. The execution layer is the layer on which transactions are processed; that is where user tips and proceeds from block building accrue, known in the trade as MEV.
Some providers distinguish between the two pots, and that can distort a comparison entirely. The operator stakefish shows a commission of zero percent on the consensus reward on its Ethereum page and, at the same time, fifty percent on the pot of tips and MEV. Anyone who looks only at the first number takes this for a free offer. The calculator on the same page shows a combined APR of 2.61 percent, made up of 2.51 percent protocol reward and 0.09 percent from tips and MEV. The fifty percent therefore reaches into the smaller of the two parts, which is why this model works out cheaper in practice than the bare number suggests.
Keep the question in mind for your own offer: which of the two pots does the stated percentage refer to? A provider that names a single commission and means both layers is more expensive than one that charges fifty percent and means the tips alone.
The commission is deducted before the reward reaches you. It appears on no invoice. The method in one sentence: on September 12, 2026 we pulled the publicly reachable staking, fee and documentation pages of 14 providers and protocols through which investors in Germany can stake ether, and noted which commission figure appears in the text there.
We checked Lido, Rocket Pool, StakeWise, stakefish, Everstake, Allnodes, P2P.org, Kiln, Figment, Ledger Live, Kraken, Bitpanda, Coinbase and Bitvavo. Twelve of these fourteen pages answered with HTTP 200 and were readable. Coinbase and Bitvavo refused our requests with status 403, so their terms are missing from this survey. As a reference for the network data we additionally pulled ethereum.org and validatorqueue.com, both with HTTP 200.
The result in one sentence: of fourteen routes checked, five name a specific commission figure on their own page. A sixth names the figure of a partner. For the remainder, the page either says nothing at all about the commission or merely notes that one is charged.
The picture is clearest at the protocols that have to document their rules publicly in any case. The documentation of Lido states that the protocol keeps ten percent of the staking rewards, one half of which goes to the node operators and the other into the protocol treasury. Lido is a liquid staking protocol, meaning a service that swaps your staked ETH for a tradable share token, in this case stETH.
Everstake likewise names ten percent commission on its Ethereum page, with entry from 0.01 ETH and a stated yield range of 3.4 to 10 percent that varies by tier. For institutional amounts from $500,000 and for stakes from 320 ETH, the provider points to separate, negotiable terms.
Allnodes shows ten percent commission on its Ethereum staking page, entry from 0.01 ETH and a current yield of 2.9 percent plus 0.1 percent. The page also records that the service runs technically through StakeWise.
P2P.org is the cheapest provider with a stated figure in our survey: five percent validator fee on native Ethereum staking, at a stated net reward rate of 2.9 percent and a minimum stake of 32 ETH. For the variant with distributed validator technology the page names a fee of seven percent at up to 3.05 percent, and in combination with EigenLayer seven percent at up to 3.25 percent.
stakefish, finally, separates the two layers as described above, with zero percent on the consensus reward and fifty percent on tips and MEV, at a minimum stake of 32 ETH.
Ledger Live occupies a middle position in this list. The page explains that staking in the wallet runs through Kiln for native staking and through Lido for liquid staking, and in doing so names Lido's ten percent explicitly, split between node operators, the DAO and an insurance fund. For Kiln itself no commission figure appears there, although an average yield of about 3.5 percent against about 3 percent at Lido does. For stakes from 32 ETH, Ledger points to Figment and a validator of its own.
At the custodians through which most investors in Germany actually stake, matters look different. Kraken's German-language staking page lists Ethereum at 2.44 percent in the bonded variant and writes alongside it that the rates shown are estimates and stand before its own commission. How high that commission is does not appear on the page.
Bitpanda lists Ethereum in its staking overview at 2 to 4 percent and states explicitly that a commission is charged for providing the staking services and deducted automatically before the rewards are paid out. Here, too, the percentage is missing. The page additionally points out that with Ethereum, unlike other assets, an unbonding period follows from the protocol itself, so you cannot get back out again immediately at any time.
Kiln's home page carries yield figures, among them 2.6 percent for Ethereum, but no commission. At StakeWise we found no commission figure on the home page either. At Rocket Pool, home page and documentation answered with HTTP 200, yet no commission figure appeared in the extracted page text, which is why we list the provider as not checked and not as a provider without a figure. At Figment the home page was reachable; the Ethereum subpage answered with HTTP 404.
That a figure is missing from a marketing page does not mean it cannot be found anywhere. It often sits in the terms of use, in a help article or in the statement. The point is a different one: at the place where you make the decision, it is missing. How far that can go is shown by our own survey of the Bison app from September 6, 2026, which produced a retained share of 27 percent of the staking rewards for that provider. That is our own reading and not an outside confirmation, but it shows the order of magnitude at stake here. Anyone who wants to compare will find the offers bundled in our comparison of staking platforms.
The calculation is straightforward once you have both numbers. Take the network APR, subtract the commission from it, and you have your net yield before tax.
With the network APR of 2.46 percent measured on September 12, 2026, it looks like this: at five percent commission you keep roughly 2.34 percent. At ten percent you keep roughly 2.21 percent. At 27 percent you keep roughly 1.80 percent. On ten staked ETH, calculated over a year, that comes to roughly 0.234, 0.221 and 0.180 ETH respectively. The gap between the cheapest and the most expensive model thus amounts to a good fifth of your yield.
A second checkpoint is the reference figure. If a provider advertises a rate that already applies after its commission has been deducted, as P2P.org does with its net reward rate of 2.9 percent, you must not subtract the commission a second time. When in doubt, ask in writing whether the advertised number is meant gross or net. An answer by email also serves as evidence later on.
The network entry queue comes before the first reward. The commission is only one half of the calculation. The other is the time your stake is tied up without earning anything. Ethereum admits new validators to the active set only at a limited speed, and anyone who wants to join joins a queue.
On September 12, 2026 we measured 1,857,828 ETH in the entry queue at validatorqueue.com, with an estimated waiting time of roughly 32 days and 6 hours. The exit queue stood at zero, and the delay until actual payout after an exit at 7.9 days. 910,898 validators were active, and in total 43.1 million ETH sat in staking, which is 35.29 percent of the supply.
For comparison: in our own reading from August 17, 2026, 2,229,411 ETH stood in the entry queue, at roughly 39 days of waiting time. The queue has therefore grown shorter since then, yet it remains long enough to change your calculation. Anyone depositing today effectively earns in only about eleven of twelve months in the first year, and that depresses the actual yield more than the difference between five and ten percent commission does.
At liquid staking protocols and at custodians you often notice nothing of this queue, because they balance it out in the background against an existing stock. It has not disappeared for that reason. It then surfaces elsewhere, for instance in a discount when the share token is swapped back into ETH.
The three routes into Ethereum staking differ not only in price, but also in who carries the liability when things go wrong.
You need 32 ETH and run the software yourself or have it run for you. You then pay the commission to the technical service provider, in our survey five percent at P2P.org or the tiered model at stakefish. The keys and the risk of a penalty for validator misbehaviour, known in the trade as slashing, stay with you.
You hand over any amount you like and receive a share token that remains tradable. The commission is transparent, in our survey ten percent at Lido. In return you additionally carry the risk that the share token trades below the value of the deposited ETH for a time.
The most convenient route, and in our survey the least transparent one. At Kraken and Bitpanda no commission figure appears on the staking page. In return you need no technology of your own. The provider takes over custody, and with that you carry the risk that it fails.
In Germany, staking rewards have to be recorded for tax purposes at the moment they accrue. In practice that means what matters is the amount actually credited to you. If the provider deducts its commission before crediting you anything, only the smaller amount accrues to you from the outset. If instead it credits you the full amount and bills the commission separately, the starting position is a different one.
So establish which of the two cases applies at your provider, and do it before you carry the earnings over into your tax return. The statements are the right evidence for this, not the display in the app. How to record and document the earnings cleanly is a topic in its own right; you will find the tools that suit it in our comparison of crypto tax tools. This article does not replace tax advice, and with larger holdings professional support is worth the money.
Part of the honesty of a survey of one's own is what it fails to cover. Coinbase and Bitvavo refused our requests on September 12, 2026 with status 403, so their terms are missing here entirely. At Rocket Pool and Figment the page was reachable, but we were unable to find the commission figure in the extracted text; we list both as not checked and not as providers without a figure.
This survey is also a snapshot of public pages and not an audit of statements. We hold no accounts with these providers and have therefore not recalculated whether the commissions named are actually billed that way. What a page says today may read differently tomorrow. And yield figures fluctuate with network utilisation in any case.
What the survey does show is more modest for that reason and useful all the same: at the place where you make your decision, a majority of the routes checked give you no commission figure. Those that do name one sit between five and ten percent on the consensus reward.
(As of September 12, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)
