If you bought a home before 2024, your agent's pay probably never came up. The seller set a commission, split it with the buyer's side, and the whole thing happened in the background. You signed, you got keys, and the money moved without a conversation. That quiet arrangement is what changed.
In 2024, the National Association of Realtors settled a set of antitrust lawsuits brought on behalf of home sellers. The practice changes took effect on August 17, 2024. They did not cap commissions or set a new standard rate. What they did was force the money out into the open and put it in front of you, the buyer, before you ever walk through a door. Then California layered its own law on top of that, effective January 1, 2025. Here is the plain version.
What actually changed
Two things, mainly. First, sellers and listing agents can no longer advertise buyer-agent compensation on the MLS, the shared database agents use to list homes. For decades, a listing would quietly tell every buyer's agent in town what they would be paid if they brought the buyer. That offer is gone from the MLS. Second, an agent now has to sign a written agreement with you before showing you a home, and that agreement has to spell out, specifically and conspicuously, what the agent will be paid and how.
The disclosure has to be a real number or a clear formula. A flat fee, a percentage, a fixed dollar amount, or an hourly rate. It cannot be open-ended, and your agent cannot collect more than what the two of you agreed to. There is no standard rate, and there never legally was one. The fee is negotiable, and the agreement is where you negotiate it.
The change is not that buyer's agents now get paid. It is that you now see what they get paid, and you sign off on it before they go to work for you.
So who pays my agent now?
This is the part that gets garbled in the headlines. The short answer: it depends, and it is negotiable. The settlement did not move the cost onto buyers by rule. It just stopped the seller from pre-committing the buyer-agent fee through the MLS. Sellers can still offer to pay buyer-broker compensation. They just do it off the MLS now, in the negotiation, rather than broadcasting it to every agent in advance.
In practice, here in Santa Clara County, plenty of transactions still end up with the seller covering some or all of the buyer-agent fee. A seller who wants the largest possible pool of buyers has a real incentive to offer it. What is different is the sequence. Your buyer agreement sets the fee you and your agent agreed to. When we write your offer, we can ask the seller to cover it. If the seller covers the full amount, you pay nothing out of pocket for representation. If the seller offers less than your agreed fee, the difference is on the table, and you and your agent decide how to handle it before you are committed to anything.
There is also a path that survived the settlement: seller concessions. A seller can offer concessions toward your closing costs, and that money can be applied flexibly within what your lender allows. The point is that nothing about this forces a buyer to write a separate check at closing. It forces a conversation, and a good agent walks you through the math before it matters.
California went further in 2025
California passed its own law, AB 2992, effective January 1, 2025, and it is stricter than the national settlement in a few ways worth knowing. The big one: the written buyer agreement requirement is not limited to homes listed on the MLS. It reaches off-market, for sale by owner, and pocket listings too. Under AB 2992, a buyer and agent have to sign the agreement as soon as practicable, and no later than when you sign your offer to purchase. In practice, with a careful agent, that means the conversation happens up front, before you are deep into a property.
A few more guardrails that protect you as the buyer:
- For an individual buyer, the agreement is capped at three months, defined as 90 days. No more open-ended, indefinite commitments that quietly follow you for a year. (Corporate and entity buyers can agree to longer terms.)
- Automatic renewal is prohibited for individual buyers. If you want to keep working together past the term, you both have to sign a new one in writing. It cannot silently roll over.
- Compensation terms have to be clearly stated, including what the fee is and the conditions for when it becomes due.
- The agreement has to spell out how it can be terminated, so you are not locked in if the fit is wrong.
None of this is meant to scare you off signing. A short, clear, terminable agreement that names the fee up front is genuinely more buyer-friendly than the old invisible system. You know what you are agreeing to, it has a time limit, and you can walk if it is not working.
How I handle it
I treat the agreement as a planning conversation, not paperwork to rush past. Before you tour anything serious, we talk about what the fee is, how I expect to get it covered in this market, and what happens in the cases where a seller offers less than the full amount. You should never be surprised by a number at the closing table. If you are weighing how all of this affects your bottom line on a purchase, or you are also selling and want to see both sides of the ledger, my net proceeds tool and a direct conversation are the fastest way to get clear. You can also read how I work with buyers, including the off-market side of the market, on the buyers page.
One last thing, and I mean it plainly: this is general education, not legal advice. The agreement you sign is a contract, and the right person to interpret your specific contract is a real estate attorney. If anything in yours looks unclear, ask before you sign. A good agent will hand you the time to do that.
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