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More than a year after the National Association of Realtors announced a landmark antitrust settlement, evidence continues to mount that agent commissions are mostly holding steady.
The latest data comes from Redfin, which on Friday reported that during the first quarter of 2025 buyers’ agents averaged commissions of 2.40 percent. Redfin’s report notes that the figure is actually a slight uptick compared to the final three months of 2024, and a bit of a dip from a year prior. But a graph of buyers’ agent commissions that Redfin included in its report illustrates how little commissions have changed over the past two years.
Credit: Redfin
Redfin’s report further notes that commissions have performed differently at different price points. For homes that sold for $1 million or more, buyers’ agent commissions have fallen relative to a year ago. But for homes that sold for less than $500,000, commissions in the first quarter of this year actually went up compared to the same time in 2024.
“Commissions are lower for high-priced homes because agents have more room to reduce their fees and still earn a healthy paycheck,” the report further notes.
The report includes less data on sellers’ agent commissions, but cites anecdotal reports from agents who say that sellers are also still willing to pay commissions.
Redfin ultimately attributes these trends to the fact that the “lion’s share of recent sellers — 45.9 percent — did not try to negotiate.” Additionally, the report found that buyers were less likely to negotiate their agents’ commission than sellers.
The report’s findings fall largely in line with those from recent Inman Intel Index survey data. Earlier this week, for example, Intel reported that 58 percent of agents surveyed in late April said that commission rates have remained unchanged or even increased since the new NAR rules went into effect last August. The rules were part of NAR’s settlement agreement in antitrust commission cases such as Sitzer | Burnett and Gibson. Among other things, they barred sellers’ agents from making offers of compensation to buyers’ agents in their multiple listing services.
Intel also found that only 6 percent of agent respondents in April said more than half of their buyers were trying to negotiate their compensation downward. Additionally, 11 percent of agents told Intel that they have seen an increase in their negotiated compensation rates since the new rules went into effect.
However, there are signs that change is coming, if slowly. Nearly 2 in 5 agent respondents to Intel, for example, said that their rates had declined since August, though only 1 in 20 agents described a “significant” decrease. And 36 percent of agents in April reported working with sellers who have taken a hard-line approach against covering the commission. Notably, this share has climbed from 26 percent in December.
Redfin’s report also comes on the heels of a new analysis from the Federal Reserve that found that requiring buyers’ agent agreements has no effect on commissions. Such agreements are also a component in NAR’s new rules.
All of these findings, however, come against the backdrop of a market that has cooled significantly over the past several years, thanks to higher mortgage rates. But if those market conditions were to change, at least some agents envision commissions evolving as well.
“Sellers don’t seem to have any issue paying a buyer’s agent commission,” Chaley McVay, a Redfin agent in Oregon, is quoted as saying in Redfin’s report. “But if we enter a seller’s market similar to that of 2021 and 2022 — with rampant bidding wars — sellers may be inclined to offer low or no commission to the buyer’s agent, forcing buyers to bridge the gap. And if that happens, first-time buyers will be hit hardest because many of them can already barely afford to buy a home.”
