Massachusetts Broker Fee Law: Who Pays, and Who Doesn’t

I have had the same conversation a dozen times since last summer. A renter calls, half relieved and half confused, and asks some version of the same question. “Wait, is it even legal for me to pay a broker fee in Massachusetts anymore?” Right behind them is a landlord asking the opposite. “I heard I can’t use a broker now. Is that true?”

Neither of those is what the law says. The headlines did a lot of damage here. “Massachusetts bans broker fees” makes for a clean banner, but it is not accurate, and the gap between the headline and the actual rule is exactly where people are getting tripped up. So let me set the record straight, for both sides of the deal, with the actual statute and the actual numbers.

The myth: broker fees are banned in Massachusetts

They are not banned. Nobody outlawed the broker fee. What changed is who is on the hook to pay it.

Before August 1, 2025, the standard Boston move worked like this. A landlord hired a broker to list and show the apartment, and then at lease signing the tenant was handed the bill for that broker’s fee, usually a full month’s rent. The tenant never picked the agent, never hired the agent, and often met the agent for the first time at the showing. They paid anyway because that was the price of getting the keys.

The new law ends that specific arrangement. It does not ban brokers, it does not ban fees, and it does not stop a renter from hiring and paying their own agent if they want one. It says the fee follows the hire. Whoever engages the broker pays the broker. That is the whole idea, and almost everything else is detail.

What the law actually changed on August 1, 2025

Governor Maura Healey signed the change into law on July 4, 2025 as part of the Fiscal Year 2026 state budget, and it took effect on August 1, 2025. It was not a standalone tenant-rights bill. It rode in on the budget, which is part of why so many people missed the fine print.

The provision adds a new section to Chapter 112 of the Massachusetts General Laws, the chapter that governs real estate broker and salesperson licensing. The operative line is plain. A broker’s fee “shall only be paid by the party, lessor or tenant who originally engaged and entered into a contract with the licensed broker or salesperson.” Note the word “only.” In other words, the person who hired the agent owes the agent. You cannot hire a broker and then assign the bill to someone who did not.

The same budget also reached into a second statute, Chapter 186, Section 15B, the law that already lists what a landlord can collect at move-in. That is where the first month, last month, and security deposit rules live. The amendment slipped the words “to the lessor or to any agent of the lessor” into that section, which is the legal way of saying a tenant cannot be forced to cover the landlord’s broker as a condition of getting the apartment. Two statutes, one idea.

The state’s own guidance says the same thing in less lawyerly terms. The Massachusetts FAQ on residential rental broker fees puts it directly: as of August 1, 2025, a landlord is not permitted to hire a broker and pass that cost on to a tenant. Fees for rental units must be paid by the person who hired the broker.

So who pays now? Three situations

Strip away the noise and there are really only three setups. The answer falls out of one question every time. Who hired the agent?

That second row is the one the “broker fees are banned” crowd keeps forgetting. If you are a renter and you genuinely want someone in your corner, walking you through neighborhoods, pulling listings, negotiating on your behalf, you can absolutely hire a renter’s agent and pay them. The state confirms a broker can charge a tenant when the tenant chooses to engage them and the agent works on the tenant’s behalf. The fee did not disappear. The default just flipped.

Why this is a bigger deal in Boston than almost anywhere else

For most of the country, this is a shrug. Most U.S. renters have never paid a broker fee in their lives. Greater Boston was one of the few markets where handing a stranger a full month’s rent just to get the keys to an apartment was considered normal, right up there with New York.

Here is what that did to the math. Before the change, a renter signing a lease was often staring down four separate upfront charges. First month, last month, a security deposit capped at one month under Chapter 186, Section 15B, and on top of all that a broker fee equal to another month. Four months of rent before you have slept a single night in the place.

Run that on a real Greater Boston number. Average asking rent for a one-bedroom has been hovering around $3,540. Watch what the law does to the move-in cost on an apartment at that price.

That single removed month is real money for the people it hits hardest. A nurse moving to Somerville for a new job, a grad student near Tufts, a couple priced out of buying who are renting another year. The Boston metro routinely had renters fronting north of $12,000 just to get in the door. Cutting one month off the top is the difference between making the move and not.

The catch: plenty of renters are still being charged

This is the part I want to be honest about, because the celebration headlines skipped it. Nearly a year in, renters are still getting hit with broker fees. The law is being dodged, and the dodge has a name.

It is called the open listing. When a landlord does not sign an exclusive agreement with one brokerage and instead lets the unit float out to multiple agents, some brokers argue that the tenant who calls about it has “effectively hired” them by engaging in the conversation. Then they bill the tenant the old way. The Boston Globe found dozens of listings on Zillow, Apartments.com, and Craigslist still flagging a tenant-paid fee in 2026.

I will give you my read as someone who does this for a living. Answering a public ad is not the same as hiring an agent to work for you. There is no contract, no engagement, no representation. A broker who finds a listing, posts it with the owner’s blessing, and then charges the responding tenant is doing exactly what the statute was written to stop. I am not the only one who reads it that way. The Attorney General’s advisory calls an online listing that requires a tenant fee “highly likely illegal,” and a Greater Boston Legal Services attorney put it more bluntly, saying the argument that an inquiring tenant somehow “hired” the broker completely misconstrues the law. The deeper problem is leverage. Renters do not push back because the market is too tight to risk losing the apartment over a fee dispute.

What renters should actually do

You do not need to memorize the statute. You need a few habits.

Ask one question early: who hired the agent I am talking to? If the answer is the landlord, or if the agent is the one who posted the listing, the fee is not yours. Full stop.

Get every fee in writing before you sign anything. The City of Boston’s guidance is blunt on this. No one can require you to pay a broker fee unless you agreed to it in writing. Get agreements in writing, keep your records, and do not pay a fee you cannot see explained on paper. If a number only shows up verbally at the lease signing, that is a flag.

Do not let “open listing” end the conversation. It is the most common script you will hear. Push on it. Ask the agent to put in writing that you hired them and what specifically they are doing on your behalf. Most of the time the charge evaporates once you ask for it on paper.

If you do want representation, it is fine to pay for it. A good renter’s agent in a market this competitive can be worth a month’s rent, especially if you are relocating from out of state and cannot tour in person. Just make it a real, agreed arrangement up front, not a surprise at closing.

What landlords should know

The number of property owners who think they can no longer use an agent is higher than you would expect, so let me clear that up too.

You can absolutely still hire a broker to list, show, and lease your unit. Nothing about that changed. What changed is that the fee is now your cost of doing business, not a charge you hand to the incoming tenant. If you are a small landlord who has always leaned on a broker to fill a vacancy, budget for it the way you budget for any other service.

Can you raise the rent to cover it? Massachusetts has no rent control, so yes, that is legal. I would be careful with it. Spreading one month’s fee across a twelve-month lease is a real cost, and in a market where renters now compare total move-in numbers, an obviously padded rent makes your unit less competitive against the landlord next door who just absorbed it. A lot of owners are doing exactly that, quietly listing units as landlord paid and using it as a selling point.

One thing I would not do is try to run the open-listing play to dodge the fee. The early enforcement signals are pointed right at it, and getting flagged for a 93A violation over one month’s rent is a bad trade.

How Massachusetts compares to New York

If this all feels familiar, it is because New York City did nearly the same thing a few weeks earlier. The FARE Act, short for the Fairness in Apartment Rental Expenses Act, took effect on June 11, 2025, and it runs on the identical principle. Whoever hires the broker pays the broker.

The two markets that made tenants pay are the two markets that just stopped requiring it. That is not a coincidence. It is the practice finally catching up to the rest of the country.

How it gets enforced, and where the gap is

The teeth here come from the Massachusetts Consumer Protection Act, Chapter 93A. A renter who gets charged a fee they did not owe can pursue up to triple the amount plus attorney’s fees. There is a second pressure point too. The agent’s license is on the line. The Board of Registration of Real Estate Brokers and Salespersons can fine or even revoke the license of an agent who breaks the rule, which matters more to a working broker than any one fee. Improperly charged renters can file with the Attorney General’s Consumer Advocacy and Response Division at 617-727-8400, and the City of Boston’s Office of Housing Stability will help residents who think they were charged unfairly at 617-635-4200.

Now the honest part. A law without enforcement muscle is a suggestion. So far the Attorney General’s office has been resolving complaints informally, pushing for refunds rather than bringing formal cases, and it has fielded only a modest number of complaints. The head of MassLandlords made a point I agree with even though we are on different sides of the table on plenty of issues. Passing the law is one thing, but if nobody puts resources behind cracking down on the people ignoring it, the change is softer than the headline suggests. The rule is good. The follow-through is still being built.

The bottom line

So, does a tenant have to pay a broker fee in Massachusetts? If the landlord hired the agent, no, and that is the case for the vast majority of apartments out there. If you hired your own agent to represent you, then yes, and that has always been fair. Anyone telling you broker fees are flat out illegal is wrong, and anyone telling you nothing changed is also wrong. The default flipped, and the default is what matters for most renters.

If you are renting and someone is trying to charge you a fee that does not smell right, get it in writing and ask who hired the agent before you pay a dime. If you are a landlord trying to figure out how to fill a vacancy cleanly under the new rules, or a renter thinking about whether buying makes more sense than another year of these move-in costs, that is the kind of thing my team works through every week. Reach out anytime. I would rather you ask first than overpay and find out later.

Sources

• Mass.gov, Frequently asked questions about residential rental broker’s fees
• Massachusetts General Laws, Chapter 112 (real estate broker and salesperson licensing)
• Commonwealth of Massachusetts FY2026 Budget, residential rental broker fees outside section (statutory text)
• WBUR, Massachusetts broker’s fee rules: renters’ questions answered
• WBUR, A year on, the broker’s fee law and the open-listing dispute
• Massachusetts General Laws, Chapter 186, Section 15B (security deposits)
• Massachusetts General Laws, Chapter 93A (Consumer Protection Act)
• Mass.gov, Governor Healey commits to signing budget provision on renter-paid broker’s fees
• City of Boston, Broker fees: things to know about the new law
• Bernkopf Goodman, MA law changes who pays the residential rental broker fee
• K&L Gates, Massachusetts bans tenant-paid broker fees
• Boston Globe, Massachusetts banned broker fees, so why are renters still paying them?
• StreetEasy, What the FARE Act means for NYC renters
• CBS Boston, Broker’s fees eliminated for Massachusetts renters under new budget bill