Is my agency underpaying me? Check your own numbers in 90 minutes

Last updated August 21, 2026 · by the Perlage Studios team

This guide does one job: it checks whether the money you were paid matches the money you earned. It is not a performance review (whether your agency is any good is a different question with its own guide), and it presumes you already know how a fan’s $100 travels from card to payout; the basis guide covers that anatomy, and everything below leans on it. What’s left is bookkeeping: ninety minutes, three documents, no confrontation required. There is a reason to do it even when nothing feels wrong. A BBC investigation into creator management reported commissions commonly around 50%, some as high as 70%, managers given access to creator accounts including payment tools, and one creator told she would need to pay £10,000 to get out of her contract. That much money and access concentrated in other people’s hands is exactly the setting where a quiet self-audit is not paranoia. It’s hygiene. None of this is legal advice.

What do I need before I can check anything?

Four things: your own login to the creator dashboard, your agency’s last three monthly statements, the contract page that defines your split and its basis, and 90 minutes without anyone from the agency watching. If you don’t have your own login, that is the finding. Stop here and fix access first.

The login matters more than everything after it. The investigation cited above found managers routinely holding creator logins, including payment tools, which is exactly why “my manager sends me screenshots” is not a check. Screenshots are the agency reporting on the agency. If your credentials have drifted out of your hands, or you are not sure they haven’t, the lockout guide covers getting access back without starting a war. Do that before any of this.

Then the statements, exactly as they were sent to you. If what you get each month is one number in a Telegram message, collect those messages. If you get nothing at all, that absence is finding number two; the basis guide linked above sets out what a real monthly statement should show. Don’t ask for cleaned-up versions now; the point is to test the documents you were actually given.

From the contract you need one page: the clause that names your percentage and, crucially, its basis (gross fan payments, or net after the platform’s cut). If the contract never names the basis, write that down too. The contracts guide explains the standard architecture if yours reads like it was written to be skimmed.

Do the check from your own device, on your own network, without announcing it. Not because checking is hostile (it isn’t; it is the same thing the agency does to its own books) but because a check that gets “helped” stops being a check.

Which number in my own dashboard is the ground truth?

Your own dashboard’s earnings total — the money credited to you after OnlyFans takes its 20% — is the only number every other document has to reconcile against. Not the agency’s spreadsheet, not screenshots they send you, and not what fans appear to pay, which can include VAT you never see.

That number is authoritative because of how the platform is built. OnlyFans’ operator, Fenix International, collects every fan payment itself and distributes creators’ shares, keeping 20% of each payment. The mechanics are set out in detail in a 2023 judgment of the EU’s Court of Justice (C-695/20). The money flows fan → platform → account holder. An agency sits outside that pipe unless someone has put it inside — with your logins or your payout settings — and that is a fact about how your account is configured, never a requirement of the platform.

The same judgment closes off a tempting shortcut: fan-side evidence is useless to you. Fan payments appear on the fan’s bank statement as payments to Fenix, and what an EU or UK fan pays includes VAT. The court upheld the rule under which OnlyFans owes VAT on the full amount a fan pays, not only on its 20% cut. That VAT-inclusive figure never appears in your dashboard. So a loyal regular offering you his receipts, or a list price multiplied by a subscriber count, will never reconcile with your earnings total, and the mismatch means nothing.

The 20% itself is not worth auditing. For fiscal year 2024, OnlyFans reported $7.22 billion in gross fan payments and $5.8 billion paid out to creators — the standard 80/20 split, applied across the platform. Nobody negotiates a private platform rate. If a statement or a manager implies the platform took more than 20% in some month, that one line tells you the statement is not tracking reality.

So: open the earnings area of your own dashboard, set it to a defined period, and record the total. Whatever your agency’s paperwork says has to be derivable from that number plus your contract. Nothing else counts as ground truth — not the agency’s CRM, not a chatter’s tally, not your memory of a good month.

How do I reconcile 90 days against my agency’s statements?

Pick the last three full months. For each month, write down your dashboard’s earnings total, then the same period’s total from the agency statement, then the split the contract promises. Three lines per month: platform net, agency basis, your share. If line one and line two disagree, everything after is fiction.

Match the periods exactly before you compare anything. Agency statements don’t always run calendar months, so read the date range printed on each one (if no range is printed, that goes straight into your notes) and set your dashboard to the same range. A day of slippage at either end can move a few percent on its own and will send you chasing ghosts.

Then build the lines. Line one: platform net for the period, from your dashboard. Line two: the earnings basis your agency’s statement claims for the same period. Line three: your share as the contract computes it — basis times percentage. Then add the number that closes the loop: what actually arrived in your bank account, from your own bank statements, with dates. Dashboard, statement, contract math, bank. Ninety days of that is twelve numbers, and it is the 45-minute middle of the 90 minutes.

If the agency reports in a different currency, convert at one clearly stated rate per month and note which rate you used. Drift between conversion dates explains small gaps, so pin it down instead of eyeballing it. And ask where the payout physically lands. If the answer is anything other than an account in your name that only you control, stop reconciling and read the ownership guide — the routing question outranks the arithmetic.

Screenshot everything as you go, dates visible, into one folder. Not because you are building a case — most checks end quietly — but because a check you can’t reproduce later is a check you will end up doing again.

The numbers are off by a few percent — is that already underpayment?

Not necessarily. Small gaps usually have boring causes: statement periods that don’t match calendar months, currency conversion done on a different day, or a split applied to gross in one document and net in another. Rule those out first. A discrepancy that survives all three checks and repeats monthly is no longer noise.

Timing is the most common cause. A sale late on the 31st can sit on either side of a period boundary depending on who is counting, and three months of boundaries can stack into a visible gap that dissolves the moment you align the dates. Fix the ranges before you conclude anything.

Basis confusion is next, and it looks different: a share agreed on net but calculated on gross (or quoted on gross and paid on net) produces a consistent, repeating percentage gap, not a random one. The basis guide walks the arithmetic; run your months through both readings and see which one the agency’s numbers actually match. If the answer is “the reading that pays me less, and that is not what my contract says,” you have found something real, and it repeats every single month.

Currency and rounding cover most of the rest, and they give you the general test for benign noise: it is small, it has a nameable cause, and it does not always point in the same direction. Honest drift favours you some months. A gap that is small, unexplained, and always in the agency’s favour is not noise. It is a rate.

Keep all of this separate from revenue falling. Earning less than last quarter is a performance question with its own diagnostic. A bad month is not evidence of theft, and treating it as one wrecks the conversation you may need to have later. Underpayment is strictly a gap between what the platform says you earned and what you received.

Which discrepancies are real red flags?

Three patterns matter: payouts that land anywhere other than an account you control, deductions your contract never names, and statements that cannot be tied back to your own dashboard at all. Document each in writing the day you find it. Allegations of withheld earnings have reached open court in this industry.

Routing first. The platform’s own design pays the account holder — the court record above describes Fenix collecting fan payments and distributing them to the creators itself. OnlyFans does not need your agency’s bank account to pay you. So if money reaches the agency before it reaches you, forwarded on minus their share, that is an arrangement someone configured, not a platform requirement, and it converts every month of your income into a promise. Unwind it even if every statement so far has been honest.

Second, deductions that exist nowhere in your contract. “Marketing costs,” “processing fees,” “chargeback reserve” — the label does not matter. What matters is whether the signed agreement names the deduction and its size. A contract that promises one percentage and a statement that pays that percentage minus something are two different deals, and only one of them carries your signature. Ask for every deduction itemized in writing, and give recurring round numbers particular attention.

Third, statements that cannot be tied to the dashboard at all: one total, no period, no breakdown, nothing your own numbers can be laid against. One month of that is sloppiness. Every month of that is a design.

None of this is hypothetical for the industry. In Machabeli & Doe v. Unruly Agency LLC (Los Angeles Superior Court, case no. 21STCV41395, filed November 11, 2021), two creators allege, among other claims, that the agency misclassified employees as independent contractors and withheld wages; the plaintiffs’ law firm separately describes one model as alleging the agency “unlawfully took control of her personal bank accounts and finances.” Those are allegations, presented by one side, not findings of any court. A separate matter before the California Labor Commissioner, Sarah Stage v. Unruly Agency LLC (case no. TAC-52876), ran to a formal Determination of Controversy in August 2024. The point is narrow: disputes over who kept what money reach real courts and real regulators in this business, and the creators who come through them intact are the ones holding their own records.

The numbers don’t match — what do I say to my agency?

Send the arithmetic, not the accusation. One email: here are my dashboard totals for these three months, here are your statements, here is the gap, please explain the difference by this date. Attach nothing you can’t afford to share, keep the tone flat, and keep every reply. How they answer tells you most of what you need.

The template is short. “For these months, my dashboard shows these totals. Your statements show these. My contract computes my share as this percentage of this basis, which comes to these amounts; I received these amounts. Please walk me through the difference by this date.” No adjectives, no theory of what happened, no deadline theatrics (two weeks is reasonable). Email, not a call, because you want the reply in writing too.

A good reply is itemized, specific, and lands inside your deadline: here is the period mismatch, here is the conversion rate, here is an error we made, here is the correcting transfer. Good agencies make errors; what marks one out is how fast the correction moves once the error is found. A bad reply is offended, vague, or attacks the ground truth — “the dashboard is misleading,” “it’s complicated,” “why don’t you trust us.” The dashboard total is the figure the platform itself pays out on. A spreadsheet does not outrank it.

Where it goes next depends on what came back. If the explanation holds: thank them, keep the monthly habit, done. Most checks end here, and that is a good outcome, not a wasted evening. If it half-holds: tighten the loop — monthly reconciliation, statements with periods printed on them, every deduction itemized. If it does not hold, or the money does not move, this has stopped being bookkeeping. The underperformance guide covers how to run the bigger conversation before you decide anything, the exit checklist covers leaving cleanly if it comes to that, and if the missing amount is significant, an hour with a lawyer who reads contracts for a living is worth more than another month of email. None of this is legal advice.

How do I make sure I never have to do this again?

Make the check routine instead of an event: fifteen minutes on the first of each month, same numbers, filed in the same note. Keep your own login and payout details permanently under your control, and insist on statements that reference your dashboard totals. A clean agency will not mind any of this.

The monthly habit is the whole defense. First of the month, the same four numbers — dashboard, statement, contract math, bank — into the same note. What made the first pass take ninety minutes was assembling documents and pinning down date ranges; from now on, both already exist. And an agency that knows you reconcile monthly is an agency whose statements get more careful, which is the cheapest incentive alignment available.

Once a year there is an independent cross-check that exists whether or not anyone asked for it. In the EU, digital platform operators are legally required to report sellers’ earnings to the tax authorities; in Germany the rules are set by the PStTG, administered by the BZSt. What exactly gets reported, and how you get sight of it, varies by country, so put the question to your accountant rather than to your agency. A platform-reported annual figure is one more number your own records should be able to meet without surprises.

And when the contract is next renegotiated (or when you sign the next one), write the audit into it: the basis named explicitly, statements with printed periods, every deduction listed with an amount, payouts only to an account in your name. The contracts guide linked above covers the architecture. An honest operator agrees to all of it without flinching, because none of it costs an honest operator anything.