The Industry Paid Over $1 Billion to Settle Price-Fixing Claims. Commissions Went Up Anyway.

On July 9, 2026, the National Association of REALTORS® reported that the median U.S. existing-home price hit $440,600 in June — the 36th straight month prices have risen year over year.▸ Buried in the same release is a quieter fact: on every one of those sales, the buyer's and seller's agents together still take a combined cut that a national agent survey now puts at 5.70% — higher than it was in 2021, two years before a Missouri jury decided the industry had been illegally inflating that exact number.

Residential real estate commissions are one of the largest fee pools in the American economy.▸ A Federal Reserve analysis of Bureau of Economic Analysis data put 2024 commissions and related costs at about $170 billion — 0.6% of U.S. GDP, roughly on par with what the country spends on air transportation. For decades the mechanism was simple and largely invisible to buyers: a seller's listing agreement set a total commission, typically split with whichever agent brought the buyer, and that split was advertised to other brokers directly on the Multiple Listing Service — a practice critics said gave buyer's agents an incentive to steer clients toward homes offering a fatter cut.

On October 31, 2023, a federal jury in Kansas City agreed.▸ In the Sitzer/Burnett trial, jurors found NAR, Keller Williams, and HomeServices of America had "knowingly acted" on a conspiracy to keep buyer-agent commissions artificially high, and awarded home sellers close to $1.8 billion in damages — a figure automatically tripled under antitrust law. Facing that exposure, NAR moved to settle. Its own settlement FAQ sets the price at $418 million, paid into a court-controlled trust over roughly four years. NAR's magazine confirms the court granted final approval on November 26, 2024 — and NAR's fee is only part of the bill. The official settlement administrator's site lists more than thirty other settling brokerages — Anywhere, RE/MAX, Keller Williams, Compass, Redfin, and dozens of regional firms among them — and puts the combined total paid to resolve the litigation at over $1 billion.

The rule changes that came with NAR's settlement took effect on August 17, 2024: compensation offers can no longer be posted on the MLS, and buyers must sign a written agreement disclosing their agent's fee before touring a home.▸ The theory, pressed by the plaintiffs and the Justice Department alike, was that forcing buyers to see and negotiate their agent's fee directly would push it down. On a sale at today's median price, that fee and its counterpart on the listing side still take a five-figure bite:

Eighteen months is enough time to see whether the theory worked.▸ It didn't — not yet, and not in the direction anyone advertised. Clever Real Estate's ongoing national survey of licensed agents, cross-checked against Zillow and Federal Reserve home-price data, put the average combined commission at 5.50% in 2021: 2.72% to the listing agent, 2.70% to the buyer's agent. By its February 2026 wave — the most recent — that combined average had risen to 5.70%: 2.88% to the listing agent and 2.82% to the buyer's agent. Both sides of the transaction now cost more than they did before the case that accused the industry of overcharging ever reached a jury:

The Federal Reserve's own economists hedge rather than deny the finding: their note says outside estimates suggest buyer-agent commissions "may have declined some but have remained at relatively high levels" since the rule change — a description that, on Clever's numbers, undersells what actually happened.▸ There was a real dip in the immediate aftermath: buyer-agent commissions were reported as low as 2.58% in 2024, the year the rules changed. But by 2025 they had climbed back to roughly where they started, and by early 2026 they had gone past it.

The settlement's premise assumed competitive pressure would also thin the ranks of agents splitting that $170 billion pool.▸ It hasn't happened either. NAR's own count, reported live from its June 2026 Legislative Meetings, put membership at 1,438,569 as of June 13, 2026 — down from 1,463,352 a year earlier, a decline of about 25,000 members, or 1.7%. That is a retreat from the industry's 2022 peak, but nowhere close to the exodus that would be needed to meaningfully thin the commission pool, let alone match the association's own budgeting. National dues, held at $156 per member for a fourth straight year through 2027, generate roughly $224 million a year in national association revenue alone at that membership count — a figure this piece calculates by multiplying NAR's reported dues rate by its reported membership, not one NAR itself publishes.

Commission-rate figures come from a private agent survey (Clever Real Estate), not a government census of transactions — no federal agency tracks per-sale commission rates directly — and are presented here with that sourcing made explicit. The Federal Reserve's $170 billion figure and NAR's own settlement, membership, and sales figures are drawn directly from their original publications.