The December 31 TPT deadline: a checklist for Premium sellers

If you are a Premium seller, you have until December 31, 2026 at 11:59pm ET to opt in to Exclusive. If you do nothing, you become a Basic seller on January 1, 2027. This checklist spreads the work over the weeks between now and then, so the choice is made calmly and not on New Year’s Eve.

The facts in one place

From TPT’s Exclusive Seller announcement, its FAQs and its fees page, as of October 3, 2026:

	Exclusive	Basic
Payout	77.5%	55%
Transaction fee	None on orders over $3; 15¢ per resource on orders under $3	30¢ on every resource
Cost	$59.95 a year	One-time $29
Digital educational resources off TPT	Not allowed	Allowed
You keep on a $10 sale	$7.75	$5.20

• Premium (80%, $8.00 on a $10 sale) ends December 31, 2026.
• Opting in to Exclusive between October 1 and December 31 keeps your 80% payout until January 1.
• Doing nothing makes you Basic on January 1, with a prorated refund of $5 per remaining month.
• You can leave Exclusive for Basic at any time, with no refund of the annual fee and a one-year wait before rejoining.
• If you have several stores, all must be on the same membership.

Week of October 5: get informed

• Read TPT’s announcement and FAQs yourself, start to finish.
• Attend or follow up on the seller town hall scheduled for October 8. Write your questions down first.

Week of October 12: gather your numbers

• Download twelve months of TPT sales reports.
• Work out your monthly average, your average price per resource, and how many of your orders are under $3.
• Add up twelve months of sales everywhere else: your own site, Etsy, other marketplaces, memberships.
• Run the free calculator with those figures.

Week of October 19: sort what you sell off TPT

List everything you sell or give away outside TPT and mark each item:

• Allowed under Exclusive: free resources, physical products, courses and professional development, Boom Cards on the Boom platform, Kindle books, hard-copy workbooks on Amazon, and digital items unrelated to education such as clip art and fonts.
• Not allowed under Exclusive: digital educational resources, memberships or subscriptions that include access to them, licenses for them, and payment plans for them.
• Unsure: send these to TPT support in writing and keep the answer.

Also check that nothing you give away free elsewhere is a paid listing on TPT.

Week of October 26: back up

This is worth doing whichever way you go.

• Final files and editable source files for every resource, stored in two places.
• Titles, descriptions, tags, covers and previews for each listing.
• Your sales reports.

You cannot take TPT reviews or the TPT buyer list with you, so there is nothing to back up there.

November: make a draft decision and test it

• Weeks 1 and 2: write down your choice and the reason in one sentence. If the reason is not a number, look again. Show the figures to your accountant if you have one. Nothing in this checklist is financial or tax advice.
• Week 3: if you are leaning Exclusive, plan how you would stop any outside sales that are not allowed, and what you owe existing members or customers. Ask TPT when the exclusivity requirement starts to apply to you once you opt in, so you know when those sales must end.
• Week 4: if you are leaning Basic, be honest about where outside sales will come from. A store of your own does not come with marketplace search traffic. Sales come from your email list, Pinterest, your blog, social media and search. If you plan to sell on your own site, ask an accountant how your state treats sales tax on digital downloads.

December 1 to 14: prepare

If Exclusive

• Remove checkout for digital educational resources on any other site, or set the date for it.
• Keep your website, blog and email sign-up. Those are allowed.
• If you run more than one TPT store, plan to opt in for all of them.

If Basic

• Recheck your prices. The 30-cent fee per resource falls hardest on low-priced items. On a $3 resource Basic keeps $1.35.
• Get your other selling place ready before January, so your first Basic month is not also your setup month.

December 15 to 21: act

• If you are choosing Exclusive, opt in now. Do not leave it to the last evening. Opting in before the deadline does not reduce your payout before January 1.
• If you are choosing Basic, you do not have to do anything. Still, read TPT’s pages once more to confirm nothing has changed since October.
• Take a screenshot or save the confirmation of whatever you did.

December 22 to 31: final check

• Log in and confirm your membership status shows what you intended.
• Download your year-end sales report.
• The deadline is December 31 at 11:59pm Eastern Time. If you live in another time zone, convert it.

Things not to do

• Do not opt in to Exclusive and keep selling digital resources elsewhere under another name, behind a password or through a second account. That risks your TPT account.
• Do not choose Basic for a store that has no audience yet without seeing what it costs you each month.

About us

Up At Last builds and hosts stores for teacher-sellers, from $25 a month. Our own teacher store, Literacy Stations, sells on its own site and on TPT and will be a Basic seller from January 1. Many sellers who run these numbers will find Exclusive is the right answer for them, and that is fine with us.

Up At Last is not affiliated with or endorsed by Teachers Pay Teachers.

What to do next

1. Run the free calculator with twelve months of real numbers.
2. Put December 31, 11:59pm ET in your calendar, and a reminder on December 15.
3. Start your backup this week.
4. For more on what each choice involves, see our page for TPT sellers.