Home Selling Guides

Commission after the NAR settlement

Effective August 17, 2024, MLS Participants covered by the National Association of REALTORS® settlement are prohibited from publishing offers of buyer-broker compensation on the MLS itself. Compensation can still be offered off-MLS, negotiated directly between a seller and their listing agent, or communicated through other channels — it just no longer appears as a standard field buyers' agents can filter on inside the MLS.

The same settlement requires agents working with buyers to sign a written buyer-representation agreement before touring a home with them, which makes the buyer side's compensation an explicit, negotiated line item rather than something baked invisibly into the deal. For a seller, the practical effect is that total commission is now something you negotiate directly with your own listing agent — both what you pay them and what, if anything, you choose to offer toward the buyer's side — rather than a rate the MLS effectively standardized.

Even with those changes, agent representation stayed the norm rather than the exception: NAR's 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers found 91% of sellers used a real estate agent or broker, while for-sale-by-owner sales fell to an all-time low of 5% of transactions.

The net-proceeds math

Net proceeds work backward from sale price: subtract commission, subtract seller-paid closing costs, subtract any transfer tax your state or municipality assesses, then subtract whatever's left on your mortgage. Transfer tax is entirely state-specific — New York, for example, charges the seller a base $2 per $500 of consideration (about 0.4%), with the buyer becoming liable only if the seller doesn't pay or is exempt — but the rate, and who's on the hook for it, varies by state and sometimes by city, so treat any single state's rule as an example rather than your own number.

Scale matters here: NAR reported a median existing-home sale price of $434,100 in July 2026, up 2.0% year over year — a single point of commission on a sale at that level is over $4,000. On the tax side, the IRS lets most sellers exclude up to $250,000 of gain ($500,000 filing jointly) from income, provided the home was owned and used as a primary residence for at least 2 of the 5 years before the sale — a real number to check before you assume commission and closing costs are the only things touching your proceeds. Run your own sale scenario with the cost to sell calculator and home equity calculator below, or compare selling against renting the place out instead.