How the NAR Settlement Changed Commission Tracking for Brokerages

Since August 17, 2024, MLS listings can no longer include a buyer-broker compensation field. That's the core change from the National Association of Realtors' roughly $418 million settlement, and it's the one most homeowners and agents have heard about. What gets less attention is what it did to the accounting side of a transaction: buyer-agent compensation went from a number published once per listing to a number negotiated individually on every single deal.

That shift is a bookkeeping problem as much as it's an industry one, and it's worth understanding exactly what changed before getting to why it matters for how you track commissions.

What actually changed

Before the settlement, a seller's listing agent typically published an offer of buyer-broker compensation directly in the MLS — a standard percentage, visible to every buyer's agent searching that market. Buyer's agents could see the number before showing a property.

That field is gone. MLS participants can no longer advertise buyer-broker compensation through the MLS itself. Sellers can still choose to offer buyer-agent compensation or concessions — that part didn't change — but the offer now has to be communicated some other way: directly between agents, in remarks on the listing site, or negotiated as part of the purchase offer itself.

The other major change: buyers working with an MLS-participant agent generally need a signed written buyer-representation agreement before touring homes, and that agreement is required to spell out how the agent gets paid.

What didn't change

Commissions themselves aren't set or capped by the settlement — they never were fixed by NAR to begin with, and they still aren't. Early predictions that buyer-agent commissions would collapse toward zero haven't broadly played out; sellers in most markets are still choosing to offer buyer-agent compensation to keep their listing competitive to as many buyers as possible, and reporting a year into the new rules shows commissions holding roughly steady rather than disappearing.

What changed is how that number gets set and where it gets recorded — deal by deal, negotiated, rather than a standard rate everyone could see in advance.

Why this makes accurate per-deal tracking more important

A spreadsheet built around a standard, predictable commission structure was already a fragile way to track splits — see The Real Estate Commission Cap, Explained for how easily a running balance drifts even under a stable structure. Negotiated, deal-by-deal buyer-agent compensation makes that fragility worse in a specific way: the referral percentage, concession amount, or compensation split that applied to last month's deal may not apply to this month's, even for the same agent working with the same brokerage.

That's a harder pattern for a shared spreadsheet to hold correctly over time. A formula copied forward from last month's tab assumes this month's deal works the same way. When buyer-agent compensation is negotiated individually, that assumption breaks more often, and it breaks quietly — the kind of error that shows up on an agent's statement before anyone in the office notices.

The accounting fundamentals underneath all of this haven't changed — GCI is still sale price × commission rate, and it's still recorded gross, not net (see Real Estate Brokerage Accounting: What Every Broker Needs to Know for the full breakdown). What's changed is how often the negotiated terms feeding into that calculation vary from one deal to the next.

What this looks like in practice

Commission software built to handle per-deal variation — a referral percentage that's different this closing, a concession that reduces what's collected, a one-off adjustment that shouldn't carry forward to the next deal — handles this shift without any process change. SplitRE's deal overrides exist for exactly this: a referral fee, relocation percentage, bonus, or custom deduction that applies to a single deal, calculated correctly and frozen into that deal's record once it's confirmed, without touching the commission plan that governs every other deal.

Try the calculator with a deal that has a one-off referral or concession and see the breakdown, or see full pricing.