Do sellers still have to pay the buyer’s agent commission?
No — it is optional, and it has been since the National Association of Realtors settlement took effect in August 2024. Offers of buyer-agent compensation can no longer be advertised in the MLS, and each side negotiates its own representation. In practice most sellers still contribute something: roughly 78% of 2025 sellers offered buyer-agent compensation, averaging about 2.4%, because it can widen the buyer pool.
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The change is procedural rather than economic. Before the settlement, a single commission was commonly split between both sides and the buyer-side share was published in the MLS. Now buyers sign their own written representation agreement with their agent before touring, and whether the seller contributes to that cost is a term of the deal like any other.
That means you have three realistic choices: offer nothing and let buyers pay their own agents, offer a specific amount or percentage, or offer a general concession the buyer can apply to their agent, closing costs, or rate buydown as they prefer. The third is increasingly common because it is flexible without being a commission promise.
Whether contributing helps depends on your market. Where inventory is tight and buyers are competing, sellers can often offer little or nothing. Where homes sit, a contribution can be the difference between a showing and a skip — particularly for buyers stretched by their down payment who cannot also fund their agent out of pocket.
Commissions did not collapse the way many predicted. Total commissions averaged about 5.70% in a February 2026 Clever survey of 533 agents, and a Cotality/ResiClub survey around the same time found roughly two-thirds of agents reporting no significant change since the settlement. The rules changed; habits mostly did not.