wallet – bitcoin-cli list Why is the transaction fee amount so different?

This happens when one of the inputs is unknown to the wallet (e.g. when participating in a multi-party transaction like CoinJoin).

The wallet calculates the fee by checking how much of the input it knows, subtracting the output if it is non-zero, and then negating it. The underlying assumption for this calculation is that all inputs in a transaction belong to the wallet. If the inputs are known, the calculated input value will be nonzero, but for this calculation to be accurate, all inputs must be known.

So what has happened here is that your transaction has two inputs. One of them is known and one is not. What is known appears to be the second input of 0.003. Using these as “input values” the calculated fee is -(0.003 – 0.00896777) = -(-0.00596777) = 0.00596777.

One thing to note here is that although the fees are given as positive numbers, the wallet should report them as negative numbers. This is an indicator of this particular problem.