What it costs to sell a house in Washington.

What comes out of the sale price?

On a normal Washington sale the buyer's money arrives at escrow, and escrow pays five things out of it before the rest reaches you: what you still owe on the house, the excise tax, the closing services, the brokerage fees you agreed to, and whatever you agreed to contribute to the buyer's side.

Everything else people worry about is a version of one of those five. Taken in order:

1. Your loan payoff, plus interest to the day it is paid and any recording fee to clear the lien.
2. The real estate excise tax: a state rate and a local one, both owed by you.
3. Closing services: title insurance, escrow's fee, recording.
4. The listing fee you agreed with your broker, and anything you agreed to contribute toward the buyer's agent.
5. Prorations: property tax and any prepaid utility or association charge, split at the closing date.

Two of those are arithmetic you cannot argue with: the excise tax comes off a published rate table, and the prorations come off the calendar. Two are quoted to you before you commit anything: your payoff by your lender, closing services by escrow. Only the fourth is negotiated, and only half of it is negotiated with your broker; the other half is negotiated with the buyer, on the offer.

What does the listing broker charge?

Whatever the two of you agree in the listing agreement. Commission rates are negotiable between a firm and its client and are not set by law or by any trade association, so there is no rate anyone can quote you as "the" rate. There is only the rate in front of you, in writing.

What you can do is compare two written proposals for the same job. The arithmetic is worth doing on paper, because a percentage of a house is a larger number than a percentage sounds: what a 1% listing fee comes to on a Kitsap sale lays the figures out at round prices.

Lorraine's own listing fee is 1% of the sale price, for homes in Kitsap County. The buyer's agent is paid separately and is not included in it.

Do I have to pay the buyer's agent?

No, and you never did have to, though for years it looked that way. What the buyer's agent is paid, and by whom, is negotiated on each sale and put in writing; since 2024 it is settled on the offer rather than advertised to other brokers inside a listing database the seller never sees.

In practice it lands one of three ways: the buyer pays their own broker under the agreement they signed; you agree to contribute some or all of it as a term of the offer; or the buyer asks for a closing-cost credit and pays their broker out of that. Which one happens is part of the negotiation over price, not a fee schedule you sign up to in advance.

The mechanics, and what Washington statute requires whatever the national rules say, are on who pays the buyer's agent in Washington.

What is the Washington real estate excise tax, and who pays it?

The seller pays it. RCW 82.45.080 puts the obligation on the seller in as many words, and it is collected at closing before the proceeds reach you. There are two parts to it: a graduated state rate, and a local rate set by the city or the county.

The state part is graduated, which means each rate applies only to the slice of the price inside its band, not one rate across the whole number. These are the current bands:

Washington's graduated state excise tax on a sale of residential real estate. Each rate applies only to the part of the price inside its band. In effect in this form since January 2023; read from the Department of Revenue in August 2026.

On top of the state's tax, the city or the county levies its own excise tax, and the rate depends on where the house sits. We do not publish a figure for it here, because it differs by address and we would rather send you to the office that keeps it: the Kitsap County Treasurer collects the excise tax on every sale in this county and can tell you the current local rate for an address before you list.

Worked through on a $500,000 sale, the state part looks like this:

The state excise tax on a $500,000 sale, band by band.

Farm and timber land sit outside this table at a single flat rate, which is why everything here says "a house". If your sale is of bare land, of a mobile home without the land, or of anything the county has classified as current-use, ask escrow before you assume the table above applies.

What do title and escrow cost?

It depends on the price of the house, on the company, and on which of the two sides pays which piece. In Washington that split is a matter of local custom and of what the offer says, not of law.

We do not publish a dollar figure for it, because we would be guessing at a number a title company will quote you exactly and for free. Ask escrow for a seller's estimated settlement statement as soon as you have a signed agreement. Two things are worth knowing before you do:

• The owner's title insurance policy that reassures the buyer is customarily a seller cost here, and it is priced off the sale price.
• Escrow charges a fee for handling the closing, and recording the deed and the release of your old loan each carry a county fee.

None of these is negotiable with your broker, and none of them changes because of what you pay your broker.

What should I spend on the house before listing it?

As little as will let a buyer see the house clearly, and nothing that a buyer's inspector will find anyway. There is no schedule for this and any figure we printed would be invented.

What we can tell you is which of it is knowable in advance. A buyer's inspector will look at the roof, the crawlspace, the electrical panel, the septic system if there is one, and whether the work that was done to the house was permitted. Some of that is already written down in the county's records before anyone walks in, which is why the free report on this site reads the permit history, the septic record and the flood map for your own parcel, and stops there.

Spend the money where the record is going to raise a question, and leave the rest.

What is left when it closes?

Your sale price, minus the payoff, minus the excise tax, minus closing services, minus the brokerage fees you agreed to, minus whatever you agreed to contribute to the buyer's side, plus or minus the tax and utility prorations.

On a $500,000 sale, two of those lines are exact before you list: a 1% listing fee is $5,000, and the state excise tax is $5,500. The local excise tax, title and escrow, and your own payoff are all quotable: by the Treasurer, by escrow, and by your lender. None of them requires you to hire anybody first.

Anyone who hands you a single "net to seller" figure before those quotes exist is estimating. Ask which lines are quoted and which are assumed.

What this page will not tell you

What your house is worth, and what anyone else charges.

The first one is not a number that can be written on a page in advance; it comes out of the record for your address and the sales around it, which is what the free report assembles. The second is not ours to state: other firms set their own rates and publish them themselves, and a page that told you what "everyone" charges would be telling you something it cannot prove.

What Kitsap houses have actually sold for is public, and we read it back at the sold record: the county's own filings, by community and by year.