On 1 January 2024 the withholding line on my royalty statement went from zero to 30 per cent.
Nothing changed on my listings. I did not tick a new box. No marketplace sent me a warning.
Two governments had ended a treaty. My payout page was where I found out.
What actually ended
The US Treasury told Hungary on 8 July 2022 that it was terminating their income tax treaty. The termination itself took effect on 8 January 2023.
The date that reached my bank account came a year later. The IRS says the treaty stopped applying to tax withheld at source on 1 January 2024.
Under that old treaty, royalties were taxed only where the seller lives. For a studio in Budapest that meant zero US withholding.
Why it happened, in one line
Hungary blocked the EU's 15 per cent global minimum tax. Treasury decided the treaty no longer gave the United States anything back.
Hungary later accepted the minimum tax anyway. The treaty has not come back.
I sell textures. I had no part in any of that, and neither did you.
30 per cent is the default, not a punishment
This is the part most artists get wrong. Thirty per cent is the ordinary US rate on royalties paid to a foreign person.
The treaty was the discount. When a discount ends, what is left is the normal price.
So there is nobody on the platform side to be angry at. I have written about ArtStation changing owners and about Superhive's support rules.
Those were company decisions, and I argued with them. This one no company made. The marketplace is only the office that hands the money over.
It only touches your US sales
Here is the part that turns fear into arithmetic. The 30 per cent applies to US-source royalties only.
A royalty counts as US-source when the right is used inside the United States. In plain terms, that is your sales to buyers there.
A sale to somebody in Poland is not in the calculation. Your loss depends on your US share, not on your revenue.
The number I am not going to print
I will not publish my own US percentage. I have not pulled a clean twelve-month export from every platform, and half a number is worse than none.
You can get yours today. Most seller dashboards break sales down by buyer country.
Take that share and multiply it by 0.3. That is your real exposure, and it is usually much smaller than the headline.
The form, and the advice that is wrong
Every seller forum says you need a US tax number to claim a treaty rate. Read the W-8BEN instructions instead.
They say to complete line 5 with a US SSN or ITIN, or line 6 with the tax number your own country gave you. For most treaty claims the foreign number is enough.
That matters. An ITIN application takes months. Your local tax number is already in your drawer.
If you file nothing at all, the same instructions are blunt. Not providing a W-8BEN when it is requested leads to withholding at the 30 per cent foreign rate.
Some of you have no treaty to claim
I read the mail this blog gets. A lot of you are in Brazil.
Brazil has no income tax treaty with the United States. There is no reduced rate to ask for, and there never was one.
Know that before you spend a week on paperwork. The form still matters, because it proves you are foreign. The rate will not move.
What I could not confirm
Whether each marketplace applies your treaty rate automatically once a valid W-8BEN is on file. I could not verify that from outside for ArtStation, Fab or Superhive.
So check it yourself. Compare the withholding on your statement against your US sales for the same month.
If those two numbers disagree, that is a support ticket, not bad luck.
Where this leaves me
My catalogue sits on four marketplaces plus my own shop. Spreading it protects me from a ranking change. It does nothing at all about a tax rate.
What this taught me is how far away the decision can be. My statement moved because of an argument in Brussels about corporate tax.
I am a texture seller, not an accountant. This is my reading of public documents, and your accountant outranks it.
Read your own payout page this week. Find the withholding line and the buyer-country split. That is twenty minutes, and it is the only version of this article that is about you.