The rules turned two this week. The practice changes from the National Association of Realtors antitrust settlement took effect nationwide on August 17, 2024, and the forecasts that ran alongside them were not subtle. Buyer agent pay was going to crater. Buyers were going to start writing checks to their own agents out of pocket. A large share of the agent population was going to wash out.
I have spent the two years since then writing offers in Melrose, Reading, Stoneham and Malden. Here is the scoreboard.
The Two-Year Scoreboard
Three predictions dominated the coverage in the summer of 2024. All three are now testable against real closed-transaction data rather than opinion.
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One out of three. And the one that landed is the one nobody wrote headlines about, because a procedural change is boring next to a price collapse. It is also the only one that will actually show up in your homebuying process this fall.
What Buyer Agent Commissions Actually Did
Redfin tracks this from its own closed transactions, thousands per quarter, which makes it far more reliable than asking agents what they charge. The line is close to flat.
Read that chart honestly and the story is a wobble, not a collapse. Fees dipped seven basis points in the quarter the rules landed, then climbed back within a year. A February 2026 survey of 533 agents by Clever Real Estate put the national buyer side at 2.82% and the total at 5.70%, which is higher than the pre-settlement norm, not lower.
There is one real pattern underneath the flat average, and it matters in this market. Commission rates scale inversely with price. In Q1 2025 Redfin measured 2.49% on homes under $500,000, 2.29% between $500,000 and $1 million, and 2.17% above $1 million. Percentage points compress as the dollar amount grows, because a percentage of a Lynnfield sale price is already a large number.
The Massachusetts Number
The state-level data lands in the same place. Clever’s February 2026 survey put the Massachusetts buyer agent average at 2.67%, with a 5.56% total. In my own market, Boston and the North Shore, the working band on buyer side compensation is 2.0% to 2.5%, and 2.5% is now the top of the range rather than the middle of it.
That band is essentially where it sat in 2023. If you were told two years ago that representation was about to get cheaper, the honest answer is that in Greater Boston it did not.
What I will not do is hand you a precise statewide figure for how many deals still have the seller paying. Nobody publishes clean Massachusetts transaction data on that, because the number is no longer recorded in any MLS field. Redfin’s national estimate is roughly 70% of 2025 sales. On my own deals in Greater Boston it runs well above that, close to universal, and I would rather tell you that it is my desk observation than dress it up as a statistic.
The Money Did Not Disappear, It Moved
Here is the part the coverage got wrong, and it is a plumbing question rather than a price question.
Before August 2024, a seller’s willingness to pay the buyer’s agent was published on the listing itself. Every agent could see it before showing the house. After August 2024, offers of compensation were banned from the MLS, and MLS PIN, the system that runs most of Eastern Massachusetts, deleted the field outright. Not hidden. Deleted, including from agent-only remarks.
The money did not stop flowing. It changed address.
Same dollars, different document. That is the actual reform, and I think it is a genuine improvement even though it delivered none of the savings people were promised. A buyer in 2023 had no idea what their agent was being paid. A buyer in 2026 signed a piece of paper with the number on it.
Why Sellers Kept Paying
The prediction that buyers would start paying out of pocket failed for a reason that was obvious to anyone actually working deals, and apparently not obvious to anyone writing about them.
A buyer who has to fund their agent’s fee in cash, on top of a down payment and closing costs, is a weaker buyer. Agent compensation is generally not financeable in the mortgage. It comes from the same pile of savings as the down payment. Push a $21,000 fee onto a Melrose buyer and you have not saved the seller anything, you have shrunk what that buyer can offer and thinned out your own buyer pool.
Sellers worked this out fast. Listing agents advised accordingly. The concession kept flowing because it was in the seller’s interest for it to keep flowing, not because a rule required it. Take away the rule and the economics were still there.
If you want to see how these dollars stack against everything else you bring to closing, our buyer closing cost calculator runs the full picture for a Massachusetts purchase.
The One Thing That Actually Changed
You will not notice the commission math. You will notice this: before an agent shows you a single property, in person or over live video, you sign a written buyer agency agreement.
Two points of precision here, because most explanations of this get them wrong.
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First, it is an MLS rule, not a Massachusetts statute. No law on Beacon Hill requires you to sign a buyer agency agreement. The obligation binds agents who participate in an MLS, which in practice is nearly everyone, and it flows from the settlement rather than the legislature. Separately, Massachusetts does have a state requirement: under 254 CMR 3.00, a licensee must give you the Licensee-Consumer Relationship Disclosure at the first personal meeting to discuss a specific property or your needs. That disclosure is not a contract and does not commit you to anything.
Second, they are two different documents, and you will likely be handed both. The disclosure explains who the agent works for. The agency agreement hires them and states what they get paid. I have watched buyers sign both in the same thirty seconds without registering that only one of them creates an obligation.
There is also an exception worth knowing. If you walk into an open house on your own, no agreement is required. The agent hosting it works for the seller. You can tour Sunday open houses in Reading all afternoon without signing anything, which is a reasonable way to get oriented before you commit to representation.
Four Lines to Read Before You Sign
The form most Massachusetts agents use is MAR Form 800. It is short. Read these four things, and understand that every one of them is negotiable, because the settlement requires the document itself to say so.
None of this is adversarial. I hand clients this document myself and I would rather they read it. An agent who resists a shorter term or a tighter geography is telling you something useful about how they intend to work.
Your Concession Leverage Is Not Where You Think
Here is where the general advice breaks down and local data earns its keep.
Asking a seller to cover your agent’s fee costs you something in a competitive situation. It is one more term the seller weighs against a cleaner offer. So the practical question is: how much competition am I actually up against in this town?
I pulled every closed sale in six of the towns I work most, from MLS PIN, February 18 through August 18, 2026. The answer surprised me, and it is the opposite of what price levels would suggest.
Melrose, at a $944,500 median, is the most brutal market on this list. Homes closed at 106.3% of list and 65.2% sold above asking. Lynnfield, at a $1,140,000 median, is the softest, closing at 101.2% with a bare majority over ask.
The most expensive town on the list is the easiest place to ask for a concession. The mid-priced town is the hardest. Competitive intensity and price level are not the same thing, and if you assume they are, you will misplay your offer.
What that means in practice. In Melrose or Reading, treat a seller-paid fee as a term you may have to give up to win, and go in knowing whether you can cover it yourself. In Lynnfield, Woburn or Malden, where roughly half of homes still close at or below asking, ask for it. Ask for the whole thing. There is room in those negotiations that does not exist five miles south.
And note the dollars in that last column. At 2.25%, a Lynnfield buyer is negotiating over $25,650. That is not a rounding error on a settlement statement, it is a meaningful share of what most buyers have in the bank.
This Is Not Settled Yet
Anyone telling you the commission question is finished is not following the docket. Three things are live right now.
The Tuccori settlement. In April 2026, NAR agreed to pay $52.25 million to resolve nationwide homebuyer claims in Tuccori v. At World Properties, a case brought on behalf of buyers rather than sellers. The opt-in deals total more than $120 million, and the final approval hearing is set for November 2, 2026. Douglas Elliman, my own brokerage, opted in. It adds no new practice changes.
The Eighth Circuit appeal. Objectors appealed the original Sitzer-Burnett settlement, and the Eighth Circuit heard oral argument on January 14, 2026. As I write this in August 2026, the panel has not ruled. A decision was expected in late summer or early fall, which means it could land any week now. The practice changes stay in force while it is pending.
The DOJ. The Justice Department’s antitrust interest in commission practices has not closed. It has weighed in on related buyer cases and continues to signal that trade association rules may still be propping fees up.
My read: none of this is likely to hand buyers a cheaper agent. All of it is likely to produce more disclosure, more forms, and more language in the documents you sign. Expect more fine print over the next year, not less.
Four Questions to Ask the Agent Holding the Pen
You will be asked to sign before your first showing. That is normal and it is not a trap. But you are hiring someone, and these are the questions worth asking first, along with the answer that should give you pause.
Two years in, my honest summary is that the settlement made buyer representation more transparent without making it cheaper. Those were never the same goal, though a lot of 2024 coverage treated them as if they were. The fee is roughly what it was. What changed is that you now find out about it at the beginning instead of at the closing table, and you get a say in it.
That only helps if you read the document. Take the ten minutes.
If you are starting a search this fall and want someone to walk you through a buyer agency agreement line by line before you sign anything, including one from another brokerage, reach out. I am happy to read it with you. No obligation, and no pressure to sign it with me.
Sources
- Redfin, Real Estate Agent Commissions Haven’t Changed Much Since the NAR Settlement Took Effect
- National Association of Realtors, NAR Settlement FAQs
- NAR, Consumer Guide to Open Houses and Written Agreements
- NAR, Agreement to Resolve Nationwide Homebuyer Claims in Tuccori v. At World Properties
- HousingWire, NAR homebuyer commission settlement hearing set for Nov. 2
- Real Estate News, Appellants have their final say about commissions settlements
- Real Estate News, NAR and Elliman opt into Tuccori homebuyer settlement
- HousingWire, DOJ is still keeping a close eye on real estate commission rules
- Clever Real Estate, Average Realtor Commission Fees in Massachusetts (Feb 2026 survey)
- Clever Real Estate, Average Real Estate Agent Commission Rates (2026 survey)
- Mass.gov, Buyer Agency (Board of Registration of Real Estate Brokers and Salespersons)
- MLS PIN closed sale data, Melrose, Reading, Stoneham, Woburn, Malden and Lynnfield, February 18 to August 18, 2026 (859 transactions), compiled by BMN Boston.
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