Both of you do. Which lines land on which side is decided locally — and then negotiated.

Somebody pays for the appraisal. Somebody pays to record the deed. Somebody pays the title company, and somebody pays the agents. Those bills are real and every one of them lands on a specific side of a specific closing table.

What doesn't exist is a national rule assigning them.

That's the honest answer, and it's the one you'll struggle to find, because a page that says it depends reads like a page that doesn't know. So here's the useful version: it depends on three things, they're identifiable, and you can find out which one is deciding your transaction.

The buyer's side travels. The seller's side doesn't.

Almost everything a buyer pays at closing exists because the buyer is borrowing. The appraisal, the credit and underwriting charges, the lender's title policy, prepaid interest, the insurance premium the lender wants paid up front, the money that seeds your escrow account. Those categories come from the loan and from the federal rules that govern lending, so the list looks broadly similar whether you're closing in Boise or Baltimore. The prices move. The line items mostly don't.

The seller's side is the opposite animal. It is built out of whatever your state taxes, whatever your state's title system requires, and whatever the local habit has hardened into. None of that is federal and almost none of it is uniform. This is why a closing-cost guide written for one state can be confidently, specifically wrong in another — and why the seller-side answers are the ones you should trust least from any national page, including this one.

What actually decides it

Three forces, and only one of them is written down anywhere.

Your state and county's law. This is the narrow part, but it's real. Recording fees are usually set by statute. Transfer or conveyance taxes exist in plenty of states and not at all in others, and where one exists it's often the largest single line on the seller's side. Sometimes the statute names who pays it. Sometimes it takes the money and says nothing about which side hands it over, which throws the question straight back to custom.

Local custom. This is most of the answer, and it is not law. Who buys the owner's title policy, how the escrow or settlement fee gets divided, who pays the closing agent — every one of those is a habit that a particular market settled into and now assumes. Nobody enforces it. No agency publishes it. It can differ between neighbouring counties in the same state, and it doesn't even go by the same name everywhere: it's escrow in some places and settlement in others, and in parts of the country a closing attorney runs the file instead of a title or escrow company.

Be precise about what custom is. It's the starting position — what the offer assumes if nobody says otherwise. It is not a rule, and treating it as one is how people end up paying for something they could have asked the other side to cover.

The contract. Which is where all of it actually gets decided. Every line above is a term in the purchase agreement and every one is available to argue about. A seller who wants the deal can pick up costs custom would have put on the buyer — that's a seller concession, it's routine and still permitted, though how much a lender will allow depends on your loan program. A buyer in a competitive market can cover something the seller would normally have paid. Neither move is exotic and neither requires anyone's permission.

The part that changed

Real estate commissions, and the sentence you should stop trusting

If you've read that the seller pays the commission, no law ever said so. But it wasn't only a custom either, and that's the part that gets left out. The industry's own rulebook required the listing side to make an offer of compensation to the buyer's agent, and made that offer a condition of putting the home on the MLS — which is not a place a seller can afford not to be. So the habit had a rule holding it up. The recent industry settlement took the rule away and left the habit standing there on its own.

What's true now: broker compensation is negotiable on both sides, the agreements have to say so in writing, and offers of compensation to a buyer's agent no longer travel on the MLS. Read that last part slowly, because it is the most misread sentence in the story. What ended was the channel, not the payment. A seller can still agree to cover the buyer's agent — the settlement expressly left that open — it just can't be advertised through the MLS any more. It went from something posted in the listing to a term somebody has to raise out loud and write down.

Seller concessions toward your closing costs are a separate thing that gets swept into the same confusion. They survived and they are still permitted. But "untouched" would overstate it: the settlement addressed them directly and attached a condition. A concession can't be limited to, or conditioned on, the money reaching the buyer's agent. It has to be help with your costs, not the commission wearing a different hat. And whether concessions show up in the listing at all is left to each MLS to decide, so if you are counting on seeing them advertised, check that yours displays them.

I'm deliberately not quoting a percentage, and I'd be sceptical of any page that does. That isn't only my preference: the settlement requires the professionals in your transaction to tell you that commissions are not set by law and are fully negotiable. A page that hands you a going rate is quietly working against a disclosure you are owed. Quoting a customary number as though it were a fixed cost of doing business is precisely the thing that stopped being true, and it does you no favours in a negotiation.

What I'm not going to give you

A percentage of the sale price. A dollar range. A tidy "buyers pay this much, sellers pay that much" figure you can budget against.

Not because the numbers don't exist. Because a figure that describes a closing in one county describes almost nobody else's, and publishing it here as though it were general would be the same mistake every national guide makes, made by someone who ought to know better. The transfer tax alone can swing a seller's total more than every other difference combined, and it's the line a national page is most likely to get wrong for you.

How to actually find out

Four questions that will get you a real answer this week

Ask your agent what's customary in your county — and ask them to say the word "custom." If the answer comes back as "the seller always pays that," ask whether it's law or habit. A good agent will tell you straight.

Ask your closer directly. The title, escrow or settlement company handles closings in that county all day. They know the local split better than anyone and they'll tell you for free, before you're a customer.

Read the standardised written estimate your lender has to give you. It separates what you're being charged from what you're allowed to shop for, and it exists specifically so you can compare lenders on the same footing. It covers your side of the table only, which is why the next one matters.

Get the settlement statement before closing day, not at it. That's the document with both columns on it. Every line, every side. If something on it surprises you, the time to find out is while there's still time to ask.

One line on it is already yours: the earnest money you handed over when the offer was accepted appears there as a credit against what you owe, not as a cost and never as the seller's money. If you've been quietly wondering where that money went — or whether you'd get it back if the deal fell apart — that one has a page of its own, at /learn/is-earnest-money-refundable/.

If your transaction is in Idaho

I've already done this county by county

Everything above is the honest national frame. For one state I can be far more specific, because I went and looked: filed escrow rates by county, statutory recording fees, what the transfer-tax situation actually is under the code, and a line-by-line table of who customarily pays what, drawn from my own transaction files rather than somebody's blog.

Who pays closing costs in Idaho has a page of its own. If you're buying or selling there, start with it instead of this one.

Send me the estimate you were given and I'll read it

Wherever your house is. If you've got a closing-cost estimate or a settlement statement in front of you, send it over and I'll tell you which lines are ordinary, which look high, and which are worth pushing back on before you sign. No credit pull, no application, nothing to sign to get an answer.

If your transaction is in Idaho, I can do rather more than read it.