Do You Still Pay a Realtor Commission in Illinois After the NAR Settlement? (2026)

No. As of 2026, no Illinois home seller is required to pay a 6% real estate commission, and you are no longer required to pay a buyer’s agent at all. The 2024 NAR settlement removed the automatic, MLS-advertised commission that used to bundle both sides into one number. The cost did not vanish, but it is now negotiable, and the largest line on your closing statement, the listing commission, is a choice you control.

Here is exactly what changed, who pays what in Illinois now, and what it actually costs to sell a house in Chicago this year.

What the NAR settlement changed (August 2024)

Traditionally, a listing agent set a single commission, usually 5 to 6 percent of the sale price, and advertised a portion of it to the buyer’s agent directly inside the MLS. A seller effectively paid both sides as one bundled number.

The National Association of Realtors settlement took effect in August 2024 and changed two things across every NAR-affiliated MLS, including the Chicago market:

• A buyer’s agent commission can no longer be posted in the MLS. Any offer of buyer-side compensation is now negotiated and communicated outside the MLS.
• Buyers now sign a written agreement with their own agent before touring homes.

The automatic 6 percent is gone. What remains is a set of costs you can now see clearly and negotiate line by line.

Who pays the buyer’s agent in Illinois now?

As the seller, you can choose to, but it is your decision, not a default. You can offer a buyer’s agent a full commission, a reduced amount, or nothing, and let buyers compensate their own agent directly.

The honest trade-off: offering some buyer-side compensation can widen your buyer pool, which can matter in an active Chicago market. The difference in 2026 is that this is a strategic decision made with neighborhood data, not a percentage you inherit without questioning it.

Your leverage sets your negotiating power

How much room you have to negotiate any of this comes down to leverage, and leverage follows demand. The more interest your home pulls, the more power you hold. If you list and five or more offers arrive in the first week, you can hold firm on price and terms and offer little or nothing on the buyer side, because buyers are competing for your home. If the home sits and offers are thin, leverage shifts the other way, and offering a buyer’s agent some compensation can be what brings buyers to the table.

The caveat: nobody can promise which way it goes before you list. Leverage is set by real demand, the available supply of comparable homes, and how quickly homes like yours are going under contract in your neighborhood. That is why the decision should follow your actual local data, not a rule of thumb, and why we price every listing on 90 days of neighborhood sales before recommending a buyer-side strategy.

What does it actually cost to sell a house in Chicago in 2026?

Most of the cost of selling a Chicago home is set by someone other than you. Here is a typical breakdown on a $500,000 sale:

Cost	Typical on a $500K Chicago sale	Can you control it?
Listing agent fee	$1,995 to ~$12,500	Yes. Your choice, flat fee or percentage
Buyer’s agent compensation	$0 to ~$12,500	Yes. Your choice since August 2024
Transfer taxes (state + county + City of Chicago)	~$3,750 on this sale, scales with price	No. Set by law
Title insurance	~$1,800 to $2,200	No. Set rate
Attorney fee (Illinois closings require one)	~$500 to $1,000	No. Roughly flat
Recording and miscellaneous fees	~$200 to $500	No. Roughly flat
Repairs or concessions	$0 to ~$15,000	Depends on the home

On this $500,000 example, the costs you cannot negotiate land around $6,000 to $7,000. Some of them are flat dollar amounts, like the attorney and recording fees. Others, like the transfer taxes, scale with your sale price, but the rate is set by the state, county, and city, so you cannot move them either. That leaves one cost that both grows with your price and is entirely your choice: the listing commission.

The one cost that is a choice: your listing commission

Traditionally, the listing commission has been a percentage of your sale price. At 2.5 percent on a $500,000 home, the listing side alone is $12,500. That single line is usually larger than every other closing cost combined.

That is the line worth examining. The transfer tax scales with your price too, but you cannot choose it. The commission is the only large cost that scales with your home’s value and is entirely up to you, and a percentage grows with that value while the work of listing the home does not. A $700,000 home is not three times harder to list than a $250,000 home, but a percentage charges you as if it were.

The flat-fee alternative, and what “full service” includes

Net Gain Realty is a Chicago flat-fee brokerage built to remove that one variable. We list your home for a flat $1,995 instead of a percentage. For that flat fee you get full service, the same as a traditional listing agent:

• Full listing on the MLS (MRED, Midwest Real Estate Data)
• Syndication to Zillow, Redfin, Realtor.com, and 100+ sites
• Professional photography
• Pricing strategy backed by 90 days of neighborhood sales data
• Showing coordination
• Offer negotiation on your behalf
• Contract-to-close transaction management

How you pay: a non-refundable $595 covers your professional photography and gets your listing live on the MLS. The remaining $1,400 is due at closing, so the majority of the fee is paid only when your home sells. $1,995 total.

A flat fee is not the same as a cheap “entry-only” MLS listing for $95 to $399. Those only put your home on the MLS and leave pricing, showings, negotiation, and closing to you. A full-service flat fee gives you the representation of a traditional agent without the percentage.

	Traditional agent	Entry-only MLS	Net Gain Realty
Listing fee	2 to 3% of sale price	$95 to $399	$1,995 flat
On the MLS and major sites	Yes	Yes	Yes
Professional photography	Yes	No	Yes
Pricing strategy and data	Yes	No	Yes
Showings handled for you	Yes	No	Yes
Offer negotiation	Yes	No	Yes
Contract-to-close support	Yes	No	Yes

How much could you keep?

Because the listing fee is flat instead of a percentage, the savings grow with your home’s value. These figures are the listing side only, compared at a 2.5 percent commission:

Sale price	Listing commission at 2.5%	Flat fee	You keep
$350,000	$8,750	$1,995	$6,755
$500,000	$12,500	$1,995	$10,505
$650,000	$16,250	$1,995	$14,255
$800,000	$20,000	$1,995	$18,005

Will a flat fee hurt my sale?

Your buyer does not know or care what you paid to list. The same MLS, the same professional photos, and the same negotiation put your home in front of the same market. What changes is the fee, not the exposure. A flat fee does not claim to reproduce a different sale price. It charges for the listing work without scaling that charge to your equity, because the work of listing a home does not grow just because the home is worth more.

I will not pretend to be neutral about this. A fee that scales with your equity instead of with the work is not really a fee. Traditionally it has been treated as the cost of selling, but it is closer to a tax on the value you built, and I believe that model should be abolished. That is why I started Net Gain Realty: to take it apart in Chicago, one block at a time.

Questions to ask any Chicago agent before you list

1. What will your total fee come to in real dollars at my sale price?
2. What services are included in that fee?
3. Can you show recent sales data for my neighborhood?
4. How will you price my home, and what is it based on?
5. What marketing will my listing actually receive?

Ask every agent you interview, including us.

Related guides

• What real estate commission costs in Chicago (2026)
• Flat-fee realtor in Chicago, explained
• The NAR settlement explained
• Estimate your net proceeds with the home sale calculator
• What it costs to sell a 2-bed condo in Lincoln Park (2026)

Figures are examples, estimates and not guarantees. Commission rates vary by brokerage and are fully negotiable. Illinois closings involve an attorney. Buyer’s agent compensation is negotiated separately and decided by the seller.