How much do estate agents charge to sell a house
- What reaches you after the mortgage is redeemed
- £293,510
- Agent's fee before VAT
- £3,600
- VAT on the agent's fee
- £720
Every figure on this site comes from the figures you enter and the method shown beside each line: your sale price, the fee your agent quoted, and the conveyancing, certificate and removal quotes you already hold. The one number Netsheetly supplies is the VAT rate GOV.UK publishes, and it is cited where it is applied. Nothing here is a market average.
How much do estate agents charge to sell a house is a contract question wearing the clothes of a market question, and that is why the published answers are so unhelpful. The fee is whatever you and the agency agree, and the Estate Agents Act 1979 requires the agency to tell you, before you enter the contract, the circumstances in which you become liable to pay and the amount of their remuneration. So the number that applies to you exists in writing before you commit to anything, and no national average can improve on it. What an average cannot tell you either is the thing you actually want, which is what is left afterwards. A commission is a percentage of a price nobody has agreed yet, VAT at the standard rate of 20 percent sits on top of it, and the conveyancing, the certificate and the van come off the same sale. This page sets out what decides each of those lines, and hands the arithmetic to a free sheet that works them on your own numbers rather than the country's.
Open the Estate agent fees calculator Free to use. No account, no card, no trial clock.
Get the fee in writing, before anything else
The agency has to give you the amount of their remuneration and the circumstances in which you become liable to pay it before you enter the contract, so ask for those terms at the valuation rather than at the point of signing. Read them at home. Everything below is easier once you have the actual clause instead of a remembered percentage.
Put both quotes on the same VAT footing
Establish for each quote whether the figure includes VAT at the standard rate of 20 percent or sits below it, then restate both the same way. This one step changes the ranking of competing quotes more often than any other, because a fifth of the largest line on the sheet is not a rounding difference.
Add the lines that do not move with the sale price
The conveyancing quote, the energy certificate or Home Report, and the removals. These are quotable today and they do not scale with the house, which is why they matter more at the bottom of the market than at the top and why a percentage rule of thumb misleads on a smaller sale.
Run the sheet twice and keep both answers
Once at the price you are being advised to ask and once at the price you would actually accept. The gap between the two net figures is the part of the plan that depends on the negotiation rather than on the contract, and it is the number worth having in front of you when an offer arrives.
A sale the How much do estate agents charge to sell a house does not fit?
Tell us about the sale the sheet does not fit and we will tell you whether it can be made to.
About the How much do estate agents charge to sell a house
Is there a standard percentage estate agents charge?
There is no rate fixed by anyone. The fee is a term of the contract you sign, which is why the law makes the agency state the amount before you enter into it. Any percentage you read elsewhere describes somebody else's contract, not yours.
Does the fee come out of my pocket or the sale?
Normally it is settled from the completion funds by your conveyancer along with their own bill, so you never write the cheque. That is also why sellers underestimate it: the money that leaves is money that never arrives.
Can I be charged if I instruct a second agency?
Yes, depending on the contract. If you use more than one agency you may owe a fee to more than one of them when the house sells, and whether that happens turns on the type of contract and whether the first agency has sole selling rights.
Does the fee change if the house sells for less than the asking price?
On a commission it does, because the fee is a percentage of the sale price. On a fixed fee it does not. That difference is the whole trade between the two models and the sheet shows you where they cross.
Netsheetly Pro
Keep the sheet against the client you quoted it for
Keep this sheet under the name of the sale it was worked for, put your agency's name on it instead of ours, and send it as a document rather than a screenshot.
- Email the finished net sheet to the seller from inside the workspace.
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