The Real Cost of Selling a Home in Washington State

Ask what it costs to sell a house in Washington and you will get a percentage, usually somewhere between six and nine, and usually without much explanation of what is inside it. The percentage is a fair rule of thumb. It is also the wrong starting point, because the two largest pieces behave completely differently: one is negotiated, and one is set by statute in tiers that most sellers, and a surprising number of online calculators, apply incorrectly. Here is each cost on its own, a worked example on a real Seattle price, and the one number that dwarfs all of them.

The Two Costs That Scale With Price

Everything a seller pays falls into two groups. Commission and the real estate excise tax both scale with the sale price and together make up the large majority of the total. Title insurance, escrow, recording, and the smaller items are a few thousand dollars and change little whether the house sells for $700,000 or $1.2 million.

That split matters for how you think about the number. The excise tax is fixed by law and you can calculate it to the dollar before you list. Commission is a decision, made in your listing agreement, and it is the one place a seller has real room to shape the total. The rest is mostly custom, set by the standard purchase and sale agreement, and rarely worth negotiating over.

Real Estate Excise Tax, Done Correctly

Washington's real estate excise tax, usually shortened to REET, is the seller's tax on the transfer. It is the seller's obligation by statute and escrow collects it at closing, so you never write a check for it, but it comes straight off your proceeds.

The state portion is graduated, which is the part most people get wrong. The rates apply in tiers to slices of the price, the way income tax brackets work, not as a single rate on the whole amount. For sales closing through December 31, 2026:

On top of the state tiers, Seattle and nearly every city in King County add a flat local rate of 0.50% on the full price. Renton is the same. Only Skykomish, at the far edge of the county, sits at 0.25%, so for anywhere I work the local rate is half a percent.

Here is what that produces on a $920,000 sale, which was the median Seattle house in August:

That is about 1.7% of the price. Notice what the tiers did: a seller who read "1.28%" as the rate on the whole house would have budgeted $945 too much on the state portion, and a seller who saw the 2.75% tier and assumed it applied would have been off by more than $13,000. The higher tiers only ever touch the slice of price above their threshold, so even a $2 million house pays 1.10% on its first $525,000.

One timing note, because it is about to show up in your search results. The thresholds adjust every four years, and the next adjustment takes effect January 1, 2027, moving the tiers up to $551,000, $1,551,000, and $3,051,000. The savings from waiting are real and small. On that same $920,000 house, the state tax falls by $47. On a $1.6 million house it falls by about $430. Nobody should move a closing date for that, and in a market where a listing that sits for three months gives back tens of thousands, trying to would be a poor trade.

Commission After the Settlement

Commission is the largest single cost for most sellers, and it is the one nobody can quote you a statutory number for, because there is none. It is negotiated between you and your listing broker and written into the listing agreement. My guide to selling a home in Seattle covers the listing agreement itself. The point here is what changed and what did not.

What changed is the buyer's side. Since the 2024 industry settlement, offers of compensation to the buyer's broker no longer run through the MLS, and buyers now sign their own agreements with their brokers before touring. Whether you offer anything toward the buyer's broker, and how much, is now an explicit decision in your listing agreement rather than something inherited from custom.

What did not change is the arithmetic of why sellers usually still do. A buyer with a limited down payment who has to fund their own broker out of pocket has less to bring to your price. Offering to cover some or all of that cost widens the pool of buyers who can actually close on your house, and in a market with 27% more listings than a year ago, the pool is worth protecting. It is a marketing spend, and it deserves the same scrutiny as any other, but treating it as an expense to eliminate rather than a lever to use is how sellers lose more on price than they saved on commission.

Ask your broker to walk you through the compensation section of the listing agreement line by line before you sign. If the explanation is vague, that tells you something.

Title, Escrow, and the Smaller Lines

Most of the remaining costs are set by the standard Northwest MLS purchase and sale agreement, and a Seattle sale rarely departs from the defaults.

• 01Owner's title insurance. The seller pays for the buyer's owner's policy, which insures the buyer's title to the property. The premium scales gently with price and runs into the low thousands on a typical Seattle sale. The buyer pays separately for the lender's policy their mortgage requires.
• 02Escrow fee. Split equally between buyer and seller by default. If the buyer is using a VA loan, expect to pick up the buyer's half as well, since VA rules restrict what the veteran can pay.
• 03Recording and filing. The excise tax affidavit and the deed carry small county and state filing fees, usually well under a hundred dollars combined.
• 04Prorated property taxes. King County bills in two halves, due April 30 and October 31. At closing, escrow settles your share of the current period to the day, so a sale in early October may show a credit or a debit depending on what has already been paid.
• 05Final utility bills. In Seattle, escrow orders final water, sewer, and electric balances and pays them from your proceeds, because unpaid Seattle Public Utilities charges can attach to the property.
• 06Condo resale certificate. If you are selling a condo, state law requires you to provide a resale certificate from the association, and the association charges a fee to prepare it. Ask your HOA what theirs is early, because some take weeks.
• 07Mortgage payoff. Not a cost of selling, but the largest deduction from your proceeds for most sellers. Expect a small reconveyance fee from your lender to release the lien, and confirm there is no prepayment penalty.

Then there are the costs that depend on how the sale goes. Repairs or credits agreed after the buyer's inspection come off the top, and in August 41% of Seattle sales involved a price change before closing, so those conversations are common right now. A home warranty for the buyer is optional and a few hundred dollars. None of this is large on its own. Together it is why the honest range is six to nine percent rather than a single number.

A Worked Example on a $920,000 Sale

The excise tax below is exact. The commission and the title-and-escrow lines are illustrations, and you should swap in the figures from your own listing agreement and escrow estimate. Commission is shown at five percent only to give the example a realistic shape; yours is whatever you negotiate.

That is 7.0% of the price, squarely inside the six-to-nine range, and it shows the shape of nearly every Seattle sale: commission is the largest line, the excise tax is a firm second at roughly a quarter of the total, and everything else together is smaller than either. From that $855,569 you would then subtract your mortgage payoff, settle prorations, and clear any credits agreed during the inspection.

Two things fall outside this table and outside Washington entirely. My guide to capital gains on a Seattle home sale covers the federal side, where most sellers owe nothing thanks to the $250,000 or $500,000 exclusion. And if the house came to you through an estate, my guide to selling an inherited house in Washington explains why the stepped-up basis usually erases the gain before the exclusion even applies. In both cases the selling costs in this article reduce the taxable gain, which is one small consolation for paying them.

What Moves the Number More Than Any Fee

Every cost above is a rounding error next to the price the house actually sells for, and that is where a seller's real money is made or lost.

Preparation first. Most South Seattle sellers I work with spend between $2,000 and $8,000 getting a house ready, all in, and my guide to preparing your home for sale covers what is worth doing. A pre-listing inspection runs $475 to $750 and a sewer scope $200 to $500, and on an older house both are cheap insurance against a buyer's inspector setting the terms of the negotiation.

Then pricing, which is the number that matters. In August, Seattle homes that found a buyer inside 15 days sold at 100% of their original asking price. Homes that sat past 90 days closed at 88.8% of theirs. On a $920,000 house that gap is roughly $100,000, more than every closing cost in the table above combined, and the August market update shows that 41% of sales needed a price cut to get there. A seller who shaves half a point off commission and then prices to a neighbor's 2025 sale has optimized the wrong line.

What Does Not Apply

A short list, because sellers regularly budget for costs they will never pay.

• 01There is no Washington capital gains tax on your home. The state's capital gains excise tax exempts real estate outright.
• 02There is no state income tax.
• 03There is no transfer tax beyond the excise tax already covered.
• 04You do not pay the buyer's loan costs, appraisal, or lender's title policy.
• 05You do not pay the buyer's half of the escrow fee, outside the VA case above.
• 06Federal capital gains apply only to gain above the exclusion, and only after your basis and selling costs are subtracted.

The Bottom Line

Selling a house in Washington costs six to nine percent of the price for most people, and the useful version of that number has three parts: a commission you negotiate, an excise tax you can calculate to the dollar using the tiers above, and a few thousand in title, escrow, and closing items set by the standard contract. On a $920,000 Seattle house the excise tax alone is $15,431, and the tiers, not a flat rate, are what get you there.

What I would not do is let any of those lines distract from price and preparation, which move the outcome by far more. If you want to know what you would actually walk away with, I will build a net-proceeds estimate for your house using its real value in today's market, not an online guess, with every line in this article filled in. My guide to what your Seattle home is worth covers how that value gets established, and my free Seller Guide covers pricing, prep, and timing. Free, no obligation, and a number you can plan around.