Legal and tax basics, France and the United States

The starting point: who is the taxpayer

Before talking about thresholds, you need to identify who receives what. This is a point the contractual framework settles without ambiguity.

The OnlyFans terms of service state that fan payments are received and processed by a third-party payment provider approved by the platform, that the 20% commission is deducted from each payment, and that if a third party helps a creator manage her account, “this does not affect your legal responsibility. Our relationship is with you, and not with any third-party”.

Consequence: the creator receives income and declares it. The manager receives service income paid by the creator, and declares it separately. Two taxpayers, two flows, two returns. Invoicing a service to a creator is not an administrative detail: it is what makes the setup legible.

France: under which regime

For a service activity carried out as an independent, the French administration publishes the thresholds of the micro-entreprise tax regime. On the verification date, the official page states, for income received in 2026, a threshold of 83,600 euros excluding tax for services falling under industrial and commercial profits as well as for liberal professions falling under non-commercial profits, and 203,100 euros for the sale of goods. These thresholds are assessed against the revenue of the two previous years.

Three practical remarks.

First, these thresholds frame a simplified regime, not a license to operate: above them, you do not leave the trade, you leave the micro regime for an actual-profit regime. The site’s French micro-entreprise simulator lets you place your assumptions against these thresholds.

Second, social contributions and the VAT exemption follow rules distinct from the tax thresholds, and those rules have moved several times since 2024. The rates are not quoted here because their official page was not accessible at the time of verification; refer to the Urssaf site dedicated to auto-entrepreneurs, which is authoritative.

Finally, if you invoice a service to a creator established outside France, or if you collect on a foreign platform, the territoriality rules of VAT and the obligation to declare accounts held abroad become full subjects in their own right. That is typically the question to ask a professional, and the exercise in this lesson asks you to formulate it.

United States: under which status

The US tax administration publishes a simple framework and a low threshold. The resource center for the self-employed states that you are self-employed if “you carry on a trade or business as a sole proprietor or an independent contractor”, and that you must “file an income tax return if your net earnings from self-employment were $400 or more”.

The rate, published on the topic sheet devoted to self-employment tax, “consists of 12.4% for Social Security and 2.9% for Medicare taxes”, that is 15.3% in total, on top of income tax. The forms cited are Schedule C for the result of the activity, Schedule SE for self-employment tax, and Form 1040-ES for quarterly estimated payments.

The detail that surprises Europeans: this is not an optional regime with a comfort threshold, it is a filing obligation that triggers at 400 dollars of net result, and payment is quarterly.

What counts as much as tax

A clean tax file does not protect you from a dispute over content or over access. Four pieces are to be built from day one, whatever the country.

Proof of age. Every person appearing in sold content must be an adult, and you must be able to prove it, not assume it. The platforms check it at sign-up; you must check it on your side for any person you do not know.

Written consent on use. Content produced for a given use does not become usable for every use. A dated, signed document listing what may be published, resold, translated, or used in advertising avoids most disputes. It protects the creator as much as the manager.

The service contract. Duration, notice period, percentage, scope, return of accesses at the end. The lesson Agency or solo listed three clauses that should make you refuse a contract; the contract you offer must contain none of the three, and the next lesson takes it apart clause by clause.

The access register. Who holds which account, which email address, which payment method, which tool. This register is tedious to keep and becomes priceless on the day of a separation, an account loss or a dispute.

Platform rules are not the law

Last point, and it comes back throughout the course. The rules published by a platform are not law: they are contractual terms, which change without notice and vary from one platform to another. Telegram, for example, publishes in its terms for its internal currency that “All sales of Telegram Stars are final and Telegram does not issue refunds for unwanted or unintentional purchases of Stars”.

Complying with a platform’s terms does not bring you into compliance with the law of your country, and being in good standing with your tax administration does not protect you from an account closure. These are two independent systems, and a serious operation handles the two separately. Module 7 comes back to the second one, from the angle of account loss and recovery.