A fee is the price one pays as remuneration for services, especially the honorarium paid to a doctor, lawyer, consultant, or other member of a learned profession. Fees usually allow for overhead, wages, costs, and markup.

Traditionally, professionals in Great Britain received a fee in contradistinction to a payment, salary, or wage, and would often use guineas rather than pounds as units of account.

A contingent fee is an attorney's fee which is reduced or not charged at all if the court case is lost by the attorney.

A service fee, service charge, or surcharge is a fee added to a customer's bill. The purpose of a service charge often depends on the nature of the product and corresponding service provided. Examples of why this fee is charged are: travel time expenses, truck rental fees, liability and workers' compensation insurance fees, and planning fees. UPS and FedEx have recently begun surcharges for fuel.

Restaurants and banquet halls charging service charges in lieu of tips must distribute them to their wait staff in some U.S. states (e.g., Massachusetts, New York, Montana), and may keep them in others (e.g., Kentucky).

A fee may be a flat fee or a variable one, or part of a two-part tariff.

It is now very common in the United States for fees to be used to hide the real price of a service or product, in a widely-used form of deceptive advertising.

Advance-fee fraud is a scam, although some contractors or other businesses may legitimately go bankrupt after accepting an fee in advance.

Telecom

For telecommunications services such as high-speed Internet and mobile phones, an activation fee is commonly assessed, although most companies fail to include it in the advertised price, and activation means only typing some customer information into a computer. For example, as of 2008, Verizon Wireless has begun charging 20 dollars for activation of its phones, even for existing customers who want to upgrade. Customers are told that the phones can be returned or exchanged within 15 days, but are not told that the extra fee (which has been disclosed only in fine print) will not be returned, and that yet another fee will assessed against him or her for getting a different new phone, or even going back to their old one.

Another fee is the early-termination fee applied nearly-universally to cellphone contracts, supposedly to cover the remaining part of the subsidy that the provider prices the phones with. If the user terminates before the end of the term, he or she will be charged, ofter well over 100 dollars. In the U.S., mobile phone companies have come under heavy criticism for this anti-competitive practice, and the FCC is considering limits to prevent price gouging, such as requiring the fees to be prorated.