Do Buyer's Agents Still Get Paid in 2026? The Honest Numbers

Yes, buyer's agents still get paid in 2026, and in the Brainerd Lakes Area most of them still collect between 2.4 and 2.9 percent of the sale price on the deals they close: what changed after the NAR settlement is the channel, not the check, with seller-funded concessions negotiated into the purchase agreement replacing the old offers of compensation posted on the MLS.

I lead Elevate Group inside eXp Realty in the Brainerd Lakes Area, so when agents ask whether buyer-side income is dead, I have a stake in how this article lands. That is exactly why it tells the truth, even when the truth cuts against recruiting. In most cases the settlement did not shrink buyer-side pay. It did make the unskilled version of the job unprofitable, and that distinction decides your next move. Here are the sourced numbers, the rules you actually have to run, and what to demand from whoever holds your license.

What actually changed for buyer's agents after the NAR settlement?

The settlement’s practice changes took effect August 17, 2024, and three of them are load-bearing for how you get paid. Learn them cold, because every one of them is now part of a normal listing or buying transaction in Crow Wing, Cass, Morrison, Aitkin, and Mille Lacs counties.

A useful definition before the rest: a buyer representation agreement is the written contract that makes you the buyer’s actual agent, the one who owes fiduciary duties and the one who gets paid, rather than a facilitator who shows homes and hopes. Minnesota built this into statute decades before the settlement, so the state transitioned into the new national rules on familiar footing. Minnesota’s Chapter 82 already defined a buyer’s broker as a licensee representing a buyer under a signed agreement, required an agency disclosure at first substantive contact, and let sellers authorize payment to a buyer’s broker who solely represents the buyer. For an agent in the Brainerd Lakes Area, that means the core skill, getting the agreement signed and being worth what it says, is not new. It is just no longer optional anywhere.

How are buyer's agents getting paid in 2026?

In practice the money arrives through three routes, and the table below is the honest map of them. The pattern agents describe in forums is consistent: most transactions still end with the seller funding the buyer’s agent, because most agents ask for it in the offer and most sellers accept it rather than lose a buyer.

One more 2026 wrinkle worth knowing: the VA buyer-broker fee rule was made permanent in April 2026, so veterans may now pay buyer-agent fees at closing rather than being blocked from doing so. It is a small line in the national picture, but this area sees veteran and service-family buyers every year, and it removes one excuse for leaving an agreement unsigned.

Is the buyer's agent commission actually shrinking?

The fear in 2024 was that commissions would collapse. The data says otherwise. Redfin’s national read shows buyer-agent commissions running around 2.4 percent in early 2025 and 2.43 percent by mid-2025, versus 2.38 percent a year earlier: flat to slightly up, not down. Minnesota’s statewide average buyer-side compensation sits near 2.88 percent per a 2026 survey, against a total commission of roughly 5.84 percent, and agents in the Brainerd area report total seller-paid commissions around 6 percent. The settlement did not cap rates, cut rates, or fix rates. It made them negotiable and visible, and it moved them out of the MLS and into your contract.

Now make it local. Crow Wing County’s median sale price sits near $342,000. At 2.5 percent, a buyer-side check on that deal is about $8,550 of gross commission; at the statewide 2.88 percent average it is roughly $9,850. On the higher-priced side of this market, lakefront and water-access properties routinely sell above $600,000, and a 2.5 percent buyer side on a $650,000 deal is about $16,250. The money did not leave the industry, and the bigger the deal, the bigger the check that now depends on a conversation happening before the first showing.

What does this look like in the Brainerd Lakes Area?

Two things about this market make the post-settlement rules more consequential here than in most places, and both point at the same skill.

First, the buyer pool is out-of-area and seasonal. Roughly one in three housing units in Crow Wing County is vacant or seasonal, and the buyers who keep agents busy in Nisswa, Crosslake, Pequot Lakes, Breezy Point, and East Gull Lake are often second-home buyers from the Twin Cities, or from out of state entirely, hunting lakefront from a laptop. That buyer cannot tour without a signed agreement, so the paperwork and the compensation conversation happen before they ever step out of the car, often while they are still three hours away. The agents who treat that as an inconvenience lose the deal; the ones with a clean remote process close it.

Second, the price points make the negotiation real. A seller concession on a $400,000 to $700,000 lake property is a five-figure line item, and both sides care about it. Buyers ask bluntly what it costs to be represented, sellers ask what it costs to sell, and the agent who cannot answer both questions from a position of obvious value is the one who gets negotiated down to a number that stops making sense. The same seasonal rhythm that decides your pipeline, covered in finding consistent leads in a seasonal market, is now also deciding how often you get to practice this conversation.

Why do agents actually lose income in this market? It is not the settlement.

The honest diagnosis is uncomfortable, and it is the part no brokerage pitch will say out loud: buyers still pay, sellers still pay, and the agents losing money are losing it on process, not on price. Early in the transition, an email circulated in agent circles noting that only about 30 percent of agents had successfully gotten buyer representation agreements signed. Think about what that means for the other 70 percent: no agreement before touring means no enforceable compensation, means a deal where the seller declines to pay, means the agent works for zero. The settlement did not create that failure. It gave it a price tag.

The pattern in the forums is unmistakable. When the settlement rules landed, a running thread filled with agents weighing whether to leave the industry, and the replies that aged well were the ones pointing at the same diagnosis: the agents losing income were the ones who never ran the compensation conversation as a system. The ones who built the scripted ask, the signed agreement, and the offer that requests the concession kept closing, and their per-deal income barely moved. If you are on the struggling side of that line, the honest first question is not whether to quit, it is whether your current setup trains the conversation or abandons you to it. The math that decides between those plans is in should you quit real estate in 2026.

What should you demand from your broker or team?

Here is where recruiting gets honest, because a brokerage or team either trains the new process or it does not, and that is now the difference between an agent who earns and an agent who works for free. Put these demands in writing before you move your Minnesota license anywhere:

Do you need a team for this, or is solo still fine?

The truth goes both ways, and I will be straight about when it does not favor us.

If you already close eight or ten deals a year from a warm sphere, you sign the agreement before every tour, you request the concession on every offer, and you can quote your number without flinching, you do not need a team, your split is yours, and going solo was probably the right call. The settlement then reads as a paperwork upgrade, not a threat, and you should keep every point of commission you earn. The honest case against switching for its own sake, including the fees and caps that quietly eat a headline split, is in is a higher commission split always better and is eXp Realty worth joining.

If that paragraph made you slightly uncomfortable, that discomfort is the honest signal. A buyer-heavy agent who has never signed a touring agreement, who lets the compensation question slide, or who has no scripted way to request a concession is now running a charity with their evenings. For that agent, the value of a team is not the split, it is the enforced system: the Monday scripts, the agreement on the table, the teammate who has negotiated a concession this month, and the pipeline that keeps reps in front of buyers when the lake market thaws or freezes. The full decision framework, including when joining a team genuinely makes sense, is in join a team or go solo, and the model that runs your real numbers is the team vs solo calculator.

And if you are early in your career, the order of operations does not change because of a settlement. A newly licensed agent in Baxter or Breezy Point still needs the budget, the database, and the daily conversations before spending a cent on leads, which is the exact sequence in what a new agent should do first, and the week-by-week version is the 90-day agent launch plan.

The honest bottom line: buyer's agents still get paid in 2026, at roughly the same rates as before the settlement, through seller concessions and signed agreements instead of MLS offers. The income risk was never the rule change, it was the 70 percent of agents who could not convert an inquiry into a signed representation agreement. That is a trainable skill, and every broker and team in central Minnesota is now either training it or cashing the fees of agents it is not training. If your current setup does not hand you the script, the agreement, and the mentor, the honest answer is that the split was never the problem, and switching brokerages deserves the same five-step checklist it always did.

That is the standard we hold ourselves to at Elevate Group. We run the buyer agreement conversation as a system, we share the scripts, and we will show you real numbers from real transactions, not averages from a pitch deck. And if your own honest read says you already have this wired and you are better off keeping your split solo, the right answer is for you to do exactly that, and this article did its job.