OnlyFans terms of service and rules, in plain English

The short answer

The OnlyFans Terms of Service require all users to be 18+ with verified ID for creators, ban prohibited content categories, set the revenue split at 80% to creators, and make payments final. The clause creators most often miss: you keep ownership of your content — OnlyFans takes a license to host it, not your copyright.

Plain-English summary, not legal advice, and not a substitute for reading the real thing: onlyfans.com/terms.

The rules that actually matter, grouped

OnlyFans' terms run long and legal. Here's what they come down to for a working creator, with each point checkable against the live terms.

Age and identity

Everyone on the platform must be 18 or older. Creators verify with government ID and a selfie check before they can post, and anyone appearing in content must be verified and consenting too — that's the release-form flow. This isn't platform caution for its own sake: US producers of adult content operate under the federal record-keeping requirements of 18 U.S.C. § 2257, and the platform's verification is how the paperwork holds up.

Content rules

The terms prohibit the categories you'd expect (anything involving minors, non-consensual content, and a specific list of banned acts and themes in the Acceptable Use section). Content that's fine elsewhere can still be banned by the platform's list, and enforcement is account suspension — read the current Acceptable Use policy rather than assuming.

Money

The split is 80/20: creators keep 80% of subscriptions, PPV, and tips; OnlyFans takes 20%. Payments from fans are final by policy — refunds are discretionary, and chargebacks tend to end with the disputing account banned (we cover the mechanics in OnlyFans refunds and chargebacks). Payouts have minimums and timing that vary by country and method.

The clause creators miss: you own your content

The terms are explicit that creators retain ownership of the content they upload. OnlyFans takes a license to host and display it — it does not take your copyright. Two big consequences:

• Subscribers get access, not rights. A subscription is a license to view, personal and revocable. Downloading and re-uploading your content elsewhere is copyright infringement, full stop.
• You can enforce. Because the copyright is yours, DMCA takedowns under 17 U.S.C. § 512 are yours to file (or to have a DMCA takedown service file for you) against any site hosting your leaked content. OnlyFans polices its own platform; off-platform enforcement is on you.

That second point is the entire legal basis for leaked content removal, which is why it's the one paragraph of the ToS worth actually memorizing.

What gets accounts banned

The recurring causes are unverified people appearing in content, prohibited content categories, chargeback abuse (fan side), promoting competitor links in ways the terms restrict, and off-platform conduct that violates the Acceptable Use policy. If your income depends on the account, the Acceptable Use page is a twenty-minute read that pays for itself.

FAQ

Sources

You own it. We enforce it.

The ToS gives you the copyright; Fanlock does the enforcement. Pirate-Intent Search finds leaks by scanning Google for the same terms pirates use, then removes them automatically across Google, Bing, Yahoo, Telegram, and the leak sites themselves — 97.5% Google removal, verifiable in Google's public Transparency Report. Filed under our name, so yours stays off public records.