Who pays the buyer’s agent now?

The commission settlement got roughly one week of sensational headlines — commissions abolished, six percent dead, agents obsolete — and then crickets. Almost no outlet returned to report what actually happened, which is how we ended up where we are: consumers arriving at transactions genuinely confused, carrying a mental model from a news cycle that was mostly wrong the first time. This guide is the follow-up story the coverage never wrote, from inside the transactions themselves.

Two forms now sit at the center of every Arizona purchase: the buyer broker agreement, which you sign with your own agent before touring homes, and the seller compensation addendum (SCA), which travels with an offer and asks the seller to pay some or all of the buyer’s agent fee. Understand those two documents and the whole post-settlement world makes sense. Misunderstand them and you can genuinely get hurt — there is now a way for a buyer to owe two commissions on one house, and we will get to it.

The short version

• There is no standard commission. Every fee, on both sides, is negotiable on every transaction — that was true before the settlement and it is true now.
• You will sign a buyer broker agreement before an agent shows you homes. Read it: it can be one house or a broad search, and if the seller doesn’t pay the fee it commits you to, you owe the shortfall.
• Sellers still pay the buyer’s agent in nearly every deal — not because of habit, but because of arithmetic: most financed buyers have no other way to pay it.
• The one thing that truly changed: the number moved off the listing service and into the offer negotiation, one transaction at a time.
• The trap is signing two buyer broker agreements. The old referee for that dispute is gone; what remains is contract law, and contractually you can owe both.

What the settlement actually changed

In 2024 the National Association of Realtors settled the commission lawsuits for $418 million, and on August 17, 2024 two new rules took effect nationwide. First, offers of buyer-agent compensation can no longer be published on the multiple listing service (MLS) — the old field where a listing announced “3% to the buyer’s broker” is gone. Second, an agent must have a written agreement with a buyer before showing them homes.

Note what is not on that list. The settlement did not cap fees, abolish buyer’s agents, or prohibit sellers from paying them. The lawsuit’s premise was that buyers never got to negotiate their own agent’s fee — the seller pre-set it, the theory went, and inflated the price to match, so commissions were propping up home prices themselves. The remedy was to force the fee into the open, one negotiation at a time. Two years in, we can look at whether the theory held up. First, the two documents.

The buyer broker agreement: read it before you sign it

In our practice, nobody tours a home with us without one — a referral gets the signature request before they see anything. That is not us being difficult; it is the rule, and frankly it is the right rule. The agreement is where you and your agent negotiate the fee directly, which is the entire point of the settlement. That negotiation should happen on its own, before any offer exists — not buried in a signing stack — and you should be able to say afterward that you understood the key term: if the seller declines to pay your agent’s fee, the agreement obligates you to cover the shortfall. If an agent can’t or won’t explain that sentence, don’t sign until someone does.

Three things to settle before signing, and the questions to ask:

• Scope. These agreements come in sizes almost no consumer knows about. We often write house-specific buyer broker agreements — one property, one showing, no further commitment. For a buyer running a broad search with us, three months is our usual term. If you are not ready to commit to an agent, ask for a single-property agreement; it is how you see a house without getting married.
• Exit. Ask how the agreement ends early. Our answer: if it is not working, we let a buyer go. Get the answer to that question before you need it.
• The number. The fee in the blank is negotiable, and it is yours to negotiate. In practice we see buyers negotiate far less than sellers do — which is ironic, since giving buyers this negotiation was the settlement’s whole purpose.

Take the commitment seriously, because these agreements have teeth. In December 2025, a Florida arbitration panel ordered a buyer to pay $24,000 to a brokerage after the buyer signed an exclusive buyer broker agreement and then purchased a home through a different firm. The buyer never closed anything with the original brokerage — the signature alone carried the obligation.

The trap: signing two

Which brings us to the mistake that can genuinely cost you. Under the old system, when two agents both claimed the same buyer, the industry had a referee: a doctrine called procuring cause, argued before an arbitration panel, deciding which agent truly produced the sale. That machinery was built around the MLS compensation offer — and with the offer gone, the referee has largely gone with it. What remains is contract law, and contract law is not interested in who showed you the house first. If you sign exclusive agreements with two agents and buy a home, you can contractually owe two commissions. We have not yet watched that collision play out in practice, and you do not want to be the case everyone learns from. One agreement at a time — and if you want to tour one house with a different agent, that is exactly what the house-specific agreement is for, provided your existing agreement doesn’t already cover the property.

The seller compensation addendum: how the fee actually gets negotiated

Here is the part the headlines never explained. With the MLS field gone, how does a buyer’s agent find out what a seller will pay? The honest answer: they don’t. There is no permitted back-channel — no calling the listing agent to ask, wink-wink, whether the seller is paying three percent. The question arrives formally or not at all.

It arrives as the seller compensation addendum, crafted with the offer and specific to the property: the offer packet lands complete — price, terms, earnest money, and an SCA asking the seller to pay the buyer’s agent a stated amount. The seller reads it the way they read everything else in the packet: as one number inside the whole deal. They can accept it, counter it, or strike it — and every response ripples through the rest of the offer, because it all comes out of the same pot. (For how the rest of that packet works, see our guides to contract deadlines and earnest money.)

Why nothing changed for the consumer

Now the thesis, and we will show our work. Two years of data, national and our own:

Nationally, a February 2026 survey of 533 agents put the average total commission at about 5.7 percent — 2.88 on the listing side, 2.82 on the buyer side — squarely inside the historical range, with Arizona’s buyer-side average slightly above the national figure. On prices, the settlement’s core theory has been tested directly: a Federal Reserve analysis examined states that adopted written buyer-agreement rules before the national settlement and found effects on commissions of a few basis points — not statistically distinguishable from zero. If pre-set commissions had been inflating home prices, removing them should have shown up somewhere. Two years in, no measurable settlement-caused change in prices has appeared, and our own brokerage sees none either.

In our own book, it is starker: since the settlement, every seller we have represented has agreed to pay buyer-agent compensation — except one. Not most. All but one.

The buyer was always paying. Seller-paid was never a gift — it was financing.

Here is why the old structure snapped back, and it is arithmetic, not conspiracy. Picture a financed buyer putting five percent down — or three and a half on a government-backed loan. Their agent’s fee of two and a half or three percent of the purchase price is most of their down payment. They do not have it in cash, and they cannot get it. The only workable structure is the one we have always had: the seller pays the fee at closing, the fee lives inside a price the loan is written against, and the buyer pays it back over thirty years. “Seller pays the buyer’s agent” was never really a description of who bears the cost — it is a description of how the cost gets financed. The settlement changed where the number is written down. It could not change the arithmetic.

The exception that proves it

Consider how it plays out when a seller does refuse — because we have lived it once, and the math is instructive. An offer comes in near asking with an SCA requesting three percent. The seller counters: price accepted, SCA at zero. The buyer counters back: fine — and the purchase price drops by two and a half percent, with the buyer paying their agent directly. Everyone signs. Run the numbers and every party nets out almost exactly where the original offer had them. An accounting line moved from one column to another. The seller felt better, and feelings are not nothing in a negotiation — but nothing changed. That is the settlement, two years on, in a single transaction.

What we do see moving is modest and real: where our market was a solid three percent when sellers set the number, we now see more two-and-a-half. Sellers have also learned they can counter the SCA itself — we have watched a seller trim one from three to two and a half and the buyer’s agent absorb it. Compression at the edges, negotiated deal by deal. Which is, to be fair, what the settlement said it wanted — it just isn’t the revolution anyone was promised.

When we’re on both sides

One situation deserves naming plainly, because it is a real conflict and most of the industry prefers not to print it. Sometimes the listing agent finds the buyer. The awkwardness is structural: we would be negotiating a buyer broker agreement knowing that every dollar in it will likely be requested from our own seller client through the SCA. Four-dimensional chess, and the only honest way through it is transparency plus restraint. Our approach: when we end up on both sides, the combined fee should land meaningfully below what two separately negotiated sides would total — in our own deals that has meant roughly four and a half points combined against a three-percent listing — and both parties hear the arrangement stated out loud. If an agent on both sides of your deal can’t explain how they are handling exactly this, ask why.

What this means for you

• Buying: read the buyer broker agreement before signing, know the term and the exit, ask for a house-specific agreement if you are not ready to commit — and never hold two exclusive agreements at once.
• Buying, part two: understand the shortfall clause. If the seller pays less than your agreement’s number, the difference is yours. It usually gets negotiated away — but “usually” is not “always,” and you should know it before you sign, not at closing.
• Selling: expect nearly every offer to arrive with an SCA, and evaluate it as part of the whole number, not as an insult. The buyer pool at most price points is financed; a seller who categorically refuses buyer-agent compensation is mostly shrinking their own market. And remember the arithmetic above — a lower price with no SCA and a higher price with one can net you the same dollars.
• Both: every fee in this guide is negotiable, including ours. Anyone who tells you a rate is “standard” is telling you they would prefer not to negotiate it.