How Much Does an Estate Sale Cost? Every Fee Explained

The short answer: a share of what sells, plus a few extras

An estate sale company is almost always paid from the sale itself. You do not write a check before the sale, and if nothing sells the company earns nothing either. Its fee is a commission: a percentage of the gross, deducted before the balance is paid to you. Quotes commonly land somewhere between roughly a third and a half of gross sales, and the figure varies by region and by estate. A house full of good furniture, tools and jewelry in a large metropolitan area will draw a different quote from a modest house of everyday goods in a rural county.

Beside the commission there may be a minimum, and there may be separately itemized fees for work the commission does not cover, most often clearing the house after the sale. There are also costs nobody quotes you for, because they are yours rather than the company's. The honest answer is therefore not a number but a way of working one out for your house, which is what the rest of this guide does.

One thing to hold onto from the start: the cost you should care about is the gap between the gross and what reaches you. A company charging a lower percentage is not cheaper if it sells less, and a company charging more is not expensive if its buyers pay more.

Commission: the cost that dwarfs the others

Commission is the bulk of what an estate sale costs, and it is worth understanding exactly what it buys. In most contracts it covers the company's work from the first walk-through to the last day of the sale: sorting and staging the house, researching and pricing every item, photographing and advertising the sale, staffing the sale days, running the checkout and handing you an accounting at the end. That is several days of skilled labor from several people, and the percentage is how it is paid for.

Two features of the model shape everything else. First, the percentage applies to gross sales, not net. Every item rung through the till counts, including pieces you might have expected to be treated differently, and the commission is taken before any other cost is subtracted. Second, the company's interest and yours mostly point the same way: it earns more by selling more for more. Mostly, but not entirely, which is why the extras matter.

Some companies quote a sliding scale rather than a single rate, with a higher percentage on the first portion of sales and a lower one as the total rises, or a different rate on individual high-value pieces. Either structure is legitimate as long as you can calculate the result yourself. Our guide to estate sale commission rates explains what pushes a quote up or down and how to compare two rates that are built differently, and flat fee vs. commission covers the less common arrangement where a company charges a fixed sum instead.

Minimums: the cost that appears when a sale disappoints

Many companies set a minimum commission in dollars, and it is the part of a quote families most often skim past. The rule is simple: the company is paid the agreed percentage or the minimum, whichever is larger. On a sale that does as well as everyone hoped, the minimum never comes into it. On a sale that brings in half of what was expected, the minimum can take a much bigger share of the gross than the headline rate suggests.

A minimum is not a warning sign in itself. Setting up a sale takes the same days of work whether the house turns out to be full of treasures or not, and a company that does not protect itself from a sale that earns almost nothing does not stay in business. What you are looking for is a minimum stated plainly, in dollars, in the contract, and a company that can show you on paper what you would receive if the sale brought in half its estimate. If it cannot, the minimum is doing work you cannot see.

Some companies set a different kind of minimum: a minimum expected gross below which they will not take the sale at all. If a company declines your estate on those grounds, that is useful information rather than an insult. It usually means the estate would be better served by a smaller company, a partial sale, or a clean-out with a few valuable pieces sold separately. Estate sale minimums and small estates goes through the options.

Fees that can appear beside the commission

None of the following is improper if it is disclosed before you sign, and several are ordinary in the trade. The difference between a fair company and an unfair one is not whether these fees exist but whether they are named up front, with a figure or a basis for calculating one, rather than produced at settlement.

The clean-out is the one that most often catches families, because the house is not actually empty when the sale ends. A company that folds the clean-out into a higher rate may cost less overall than one that quotes a lower rate and charges by the hour afterwards. Estate sale fees explained goes through each of these one at a time, with what a fair version looks like, and estate clean-out services covers the largest of them in detail.

The costs nobody quotes you for

Some of what an estate sale costs never appears on the company's paperwork, because it is not the company's cost. It is still money, and it belongs in your estimate.

• Carrying the house. Utilities, insurance, a mortgage or property taxes keep running through the weeks it takes to prepare and hold a sale. A company that can start in two weeks rather than eight may be worth a higher rate for that reason alone.
• Insurance during the sale. A homeowner's policy may not cover strangers walking through a house that nobody lives in. The company should carry its own liability insurance; ask for the certificate and call the insurer named on it yourself. If the house needs a vacant-property rider, that is your cost.
• Value lost before the company arrives. Families routinely throw away, donate or let relatives take the pieces that would have carried the sale, then wonder why the gross was low. This is the largest hidden cost of all and it is entirely avoidable; see what not to do before an estate sale.
• Your own time and travel, especially if you live out of state and the house needs visits.
• Taxes. How the money is treated depends on the estate, the items and the state, and rules vary. This is not tax advice; our guide to taxes on estate sale proceeds covers the general picture, and a tax professional can answer for your situation.

What actually reaches you at the end

The arithmetic is simple once every piece is on the table: gross sales, less the commission or the minimum, less every itemized fee, equals your net. The reason families are surprised at settlement is rarely that the arithmetic was wrong. It is that a piece was missing from the estimate, most often the clean-out, the minimum, or a gross that turned out lower than the walk-through suggested.

The numbers below are an illustration, chosen as round figures to show how the pieces interact. They are not typical, not an average, and not a prediction for any house. Suppose a company quotes 35 percent with a 2,500 dollar minimum, a 900 dollar flat clean-out, and passes on card fees that come to about 1.5 percent of the gross.

Notice what the two columns show. At the lower gross the minimum has replaced the percentage, the fixed clean-out has not shrunk, and less than half of the sale reaches the family. At twice the gross, well over half does. The fixed pieces are what make a disappointing sale disappoint twice, and that is why every estimate should be run at more than one gross. How to estimate your net proceeds walks through this step by step under a poor, expected and good outcome, and when you get paid after an estate sale explains what the settlement statement should show when the money arrives.

What it costs to run the sale yourself instead

The commission disappears if you run the sale yourself, and for a small estate, or a family with time and some knowledge of what things are worth, that can be the right choice. It is not free. You will pay for tables, tags, signs, a card reader and its fees, advertising, and possibly a permit, and you will spend days pricing, staging and standing at a checkout. The larger cost is usually invisible: items priced too low because nobody in the family knew what they were, and a smaller crowd because a company's mailing list did not bring one.

If you go that way, you can list your own sale here free, with its own page, up to 200 photos and the street address hidden until 24 hours before the sale by default, and how to run your own estate sale covers pricing, layout, staffing and sale day from start to finish. Whether the commission you save is larger than the value you leave behind depends on the house.

How to keep the cost down without cutting corners

The cheapest estate sale is not the one with the lowest percentage. It is the one where the gross is as high as the house allows and every fee was known before the contract was signed. A few habits get you there.

1. Leave the house alone until a company has walked through it. Take the documents, the photographs and the pieces the family has chosen to keep, and stop. Everything else is inventory, and “junk” is frequently what sells.
2. Get two or three quotes for the same job. Confirm each one includes or excludes the clean-out, and compare what reaches you rather than the rate. How to get and compare estate sale quotes shows how to do that without wasting anyone's time.
3. Ask what happens to what does not sell, and who decides. A contract that lets the company keep the unsold items without saying what they are can cost more than any fee.
4. Get every charge in writing, with a figure or a basis, and a payout date beside it.
5. Ask for an example settlement statement from a previous sale, names removed. An itemized list of what sold and for how much is what you want; a single figure on a check stub is not.

What to do next

If you are ready to hear what the sale would cost for your house, describe the estate once and local companies will reach out to you, free, or browse companies near you first. Before you sign with anyone, read the commission guide so the rate makes sense, and the contract checklist so every cost on this page has a line in the agreement.

Frequently asked questions