Where does the money go?
What selling a house actually costs, line by line
Eight or nine figures come off the price between the offer and the wire. Here is each one, who sets it, and which of them move.
September 21, 2026 · about a 4 minute read · Keighbor Research
Almost nobody is surprised by the . Almost everybody is surprised by the rest. A seller who agreed a price of $400,000 and expected to walk away with $400,000 minus the loan is usually out by five figures, and the gap is not one big charge. It is eight or nine small ones, each set by a different person, arriving on a single sheet of paper on the last day.
So here is the sheet, before you see it. Each line below says who decides the number, when it gets decided, and whether it is the kind of figure that moves.
The loan payoff
The biggest line, and the one most often guessed at. Your remaining balance is not the payoff. The payoff is the balance plus interest to the day the money actually arrives, plus whatever your servicer charges to produce the statement, minus anything sitting in that comes back to you.
Only your servicer can produce that number, and it expires. A payoff quoted for the fifteenth is wrong on the twentieth. Sellers commonly order one as soon as a is set, and then a second one if the date moves.
The commission, or what stands in its place
If you have a , this is whatever your says, and it is the number agents themselves treat as negotiable more than sellers expect. If you are selling without one, there may still be a figure here: a buyer working with their own agent has to pay that agent somehow, and how that gets handled varies by sale now in a way it did not a few years ago.
Either way it is set early, in writing, before the home is listed. It is the only large line on the whole statement that is decided months before closing and then does not move.
and closing charges
A cluster rather than a line: the settlement or closing fee, the where custom says the seller buys it, a search, a few small charges for and couriers. Who customarily pays which of these is genuinely local. In some states the seller buys the buyer's owner's policy, in others the buyer does, and in a few it is openly negotiated on every deal.
Because it is local, there is a page for it: what each state customarily does, with the research behind it.
, where there is one
A tax on the act of transferring the property, charged by the state, the county, the city, or several of them at once. Some states have none at all. Some have a rate that changes above a price threshold. Your state's page says which. A handful of cities charge more than their state does.
proration
The line that confuses everybody, because it can go either way. Property taxes are paid on a schedule that has nothing to do with when you sell, so at closing the year gets split: you owe for the part of it you owned the house, the buyer owes for the rest.
Whether that shows up as a charge to you or a credit to you depends on whether your state bills in advance or in arrears. In an arrears state you are usually paying the buyer for the months you lived there and they will be billed for. In an advance state it can come back the other way.
Repairs, credits, and whatever the inspection turned up
Unknown until it is known, which is usually three to four weeks into the month after you accept an offer. A buyer who asks for $6,000 of work and settles at a $3,500 credit has moved your bottom line by $3,500 on a Tuesday afternoon, six weeks after you agreed the price.
Sellers who have already worked out their number find this easier, not because the number was right but because they can see what the change actually does. Comparing two offers side by side is the same exercise a week earlier.
The small ones
- A , where one was part of the deal.
- An estoppel or resale package, which the association charges for and which can run into the hundreds.
- A second loan or a line of credit secured on the house, which has its own payoff and is forgotten surprisingly often.
- Outstanding utility or municipal bills where the state clears them at closing.
- Recording a release, a courier, a wire fee.
The number that matters is not the price. It is the price minus eight things, six of which you can know in advance.
What to do with all of that
Sellers who are comfortable at closing are almost always the ones who wrote the number down early and then changed it as the real figures arrived. That is what the proceeds calculator is: your figures where you have them, clearly labelled estimates where you do not, and a note saying which is which.
The estimate moves. That is the point of it. A number you set in March and never touched is worth less than one you corrected four times.
An underlined word opens what it means, here, without losing your place. Every word a sale uses is a page of its own.
Your own sale, in one place.
Everything above happens to one house on one set of dates. A Room keeps that house's steps, papers, people and numbers together, and tells you what needs you today.
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