Ed 
Yes. If you want a Texas agent to show you a house, you have to sign a written buyer agreement first, because Section 1101.563 of the Texas Occupations Code has required it since January 1, 2026, and the NAR rule has required a written agreement before touring since August 17, 2024. So the answer to “do I have to sign a buyer agreement in Texas” is yes, and what you actually owe is spelled out in two documents, the agreement and the sales contract, not in the agreement alone.
That second part is the one nobody explains well (including, some days, us agents). The way I explain it to every buyer before we see a single house is pretty simple. You’re not going to owe us anything unless you agree to buy a house, and the sales contract you sign at that point shows what you pay and what the seller may pay. You have to agree to that contract before you owe us a penny. That’s not that scary right.
The Texas Real Estate Commission lists what the agreement has to contain, including the amount or rate the broker will be paid, how it gets determined, and a disclosure that broker compensation is not set by law and is fully negotiable. If you want the full legal breakdown, I already wrote it up in Texas buyer representation agreements in 2026, and the kitchen-table version is in the questions buyers actually ask me. This post is about the part in between. What you owe, when you owe it, and why the listing side is half the confusion.
How long has a buyer agreement been required in Texas?
If you’re asking do I have to sign a buyer agreement in Texas because a friend told you it’s brand new, here’s the timeline. People keep saying “since the settlement” like it’s one date. It’s two.
- August 17, 2024. The NAR practice changes took effect. MLS participants working with a buyer have to have a written agreement before touring a home, and offers of compensation to buyer brokers came out of the MLS entirely (NAR summary of MLS policy changes). That’s a little over two years ago now.
- January 1, 2026. Texas wrote it into state law. SB 1968 from the 89th Legislature changed the Real Estate License Act so a license holder needs a written agreement before showing residential property, or before presenting an offer if nothing gets shown (TREC). That’s nine months.
So your friend is half right. The association rule is two years old. The state law is still a baby.
The hardest part is explaining it to buyers
Honestly the form is not the hard part. The hardest part of the Texas buyer agreement is explaining it to buyers, because buyers are used to not being the responsible party for the buyer’s agent commission. For decades the seller paid it out of the listing and the buyer never really thought about it. Now there’s a line in a document with their signature under it that says what their agent gets paid, and that feels like a bill even when it isn’t one yet.
And I get it. Kahneman’s whole thing is that losses loom larger than gains, so seeing your own name next to a fee feels a lot worse than the same fee buried in someone else’s paperwork. Same money, different feeling.
So we have that conversation before we show any houses. Not in the car. Not on the porch while the lockbox is beeping at us. Before. And we require all buyers to have a signed buyer representation agreement before we show them any homes, no exceptions (well, the one exception Texas allows is a short 14-day non-representation showing agreement, but that’s a look, not a relationship).
Why the listing agent is half the problem
Here’s the part buyers don’t see. When listing agents don’t explain to their sellers that they should expect to pay the buyer’s agent something, they’re going to get everybody in trouble later. The seller thinks the buyer side is “not my problem anymore,” the buyer thinks the seller is covering it like always, and the gap shows up right when everybody is trying to write an offer.
Jocko Willink’s whole point in Extreme Ownership is that you own everything in your world. A listing agent who skips that conversation with the seller is not owning their world, they’re mailing the problem to the buyer’s agent.
And you can’t fix this by reading the listing. We pulled every Travis, Williamson, and Hays County home listed for sale since January 2024 out of our own MLS data feed and read the public remarks, which is the description buyers see on listing sites. Our feed carries no buyer-agent compensation field at all, so the remarks are the one public spot in the listing where a seller’s offer could show up, which makes them a proxy, not the full picture.
| Listing period | Listings with public remarks | Remarks naming buyer’s agent pay | Remarks offering money toward the buyer | Share offering money toward the buyer |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 1 to Aug 16, 2024 (before the NAR changes) | 17,051 | 8 | 387 | 2.3% |
| Aug 17 to Dec 31, 2024 | 6,791 | 1 | 196 | 2.9% |
| All of 2025 | 32,778 | 0 | 865 | 2.6% |
| Jan 1 to Sep 30, 2026 (Texas law in effect) | 37,375 | 1 | 1,099 | 2.9% |
Source: Neuhaus Realty Group analysis of MLS listings (VOW data feed) for Travis, Williamson, and Hays counties, residential for-sale listings with public remarks, by list date, January 1, 2024 through September 30, 2026. “Naming buyer’s agent pay” = remarks that advertise pay to the buyer’s agent or broker, every match read by hand. “Money toward the buyer” = remarks that mention a concession, seller credit, closing cost help, or a rate buydown, including lender-paid incentives. Our data keeps the most recent remarks on each listing, so a credit added late in a listing’s life still counts.
Ten listings out of 93,995 named buyer’s agent pay in their remarks across almost three years. Eight of those were before August 17, 2024. In 2026, it’s one out of 37,375. That makes sense, because before August 2024 the buyer-side offer lived in its own MLS field that agents could see, and NAR’s policy changes required MLSs to eliminate all broker compensation fields (NAR). The field went away. It didn’t move to the remarks.
Remarks offering money toward the buyer went from 2.3% before the NAR changes to 2.9% in 2026, so a few more sellers are advertising help. Just not many.
The bigger number is the other one. In 2026, 97.1% of those listings say nothing in public about putting money toward the buyer at all. Here’s how that splits by county.
| County (2026 listings, Jan 1 to Sep 30) | Listings with public remarks | Remarks naming buyer’s agent pay | Share offering money toward the buyer | Share saying nothing about money toward the buyer |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hays | 5,230 | 0 | 3.5% | 96.5% |
| Travis | 19,482 | 0 | 2.5% | 97.5% |
| Williamson | 12,663 | 1 | 3.3% | 96.7% |
So the seller’s willingness to help with your agent’s fee is basically invisible until somebody asks. That’s why the listing agent conversation matters so much. If the seller was told up front to expect it, your offer is a normal negotiation. If they weren’t, it’s a surprise, and surprises are where deals die.
What you actually owe, and when
Ok, here’s the money part. It’s two documents working together.
The buyer agreement says what your broker gets paid, or how it’s figured. TREC doesn’t write that form. Its own contracts page says it does not promulgate listing or buyer representation agreements (TREC), so the agreement you sign is usually a Texas REALTORS form or your broker’s own. Read it for the rate, the term, and whether there’s a protection period after it ends. If anything in it asks for money before you buy a house, that should be a conversation you have out loud, not a surprise in the fine print.
The sales contract is where it actually gets settled. In the current TREC One to Four Family Residential Contract, form 20-19 (effective July 1, 2026), Paragraph 12B is titled Brokerage Compensation. It says brokerage compensation is not set by law and is fully negotiable, that each party pays their own broker under separate written agreements, and it has a checkbox where the seller agrees to pay a dollar amount or a percentage of the sales price toward the compensation the buyer owes the buyer’s broker. There’s a matching box for the buyer to contribute toward the seller’s broker. And Paragraph 12A(1)(b), the general seller contribution to buyer expenses, specifically excludes brokerage compensation, so the two buckets stay separate.
One sentence in 12B is worth reading twice. The contributions are applied to, and do not change, each party’s obligation under their own agreement. In plain English, if your agreement says your broker gets a certain amount and the seller agrees to cover part of it, the seller’s part comes off your side and the rest is still yours unless we negotiate it some other way.
Lets do the math on a made-up example, just to keep it simple. Say your agreement says 2.5% and you’re buying a $500,000 house, so $12,500. The seller checks 12B(1) for 2%, which is $10,000. The gap is $2,500. We can ask for more, push the price, or you cover it. But here’s the key part. You see that $2,500 in the contract before you sign it, and if you don’t like it, you don’t sign. No big deal right.
That’s the whole reason I tell buyers they won’t owe us anything unless they agree to buy a house. The contract shows them what they’re responsible for paying and what the seller may be responsible for paying, and they have to agree to that contract before they actually owe us any money. The Texas Real Estate Commission rewrote this part of the contract in January 2025 and again in 20-19 (the January 3, 2025 update first added a specific seller contribution to the buyer’s brokerage fee, then 20-19 gave it its own section, 12B), so if you read a blog post from 2024 about “who pays,” it’s probably describing a form that doesn’t exist anymore.
How I actually run it
Nothing fancy. Before we show a buyer any house, we have the compensation conversation. Then they sign the buyer representation agreement. Then we go look at houses. I’ve been selling homes here since 2009, and I’d argue the worst place to find out who pays the buyer’s agent is the closing table, and the second worst is the night you’re writing an offer.
I’m a broker, not a lawyer, and I’ll be the first to say TREC paragraph numbers are not my idea of fun reading (and I have read a lot of them). So I keep the explanation short. You owe nothing unless you agree to buy a house, and you’ll see every number before you agree.
If you’re already looking, you can search homes for sale across Austin and the surrounding counties. And if you want the seller side of this story, I wrote that up in what sellers need to know about the new commission rules. For the broader legal picture there’s our Texas real estate law guide.
Frequently Asked Questions
Lets talk before you look at a single house
So, do I have to sign a buyer agreement in Texas? Yes. Do I owe anything for signing it? Not with us, not until you agree to buy a house. If you’re about to start shopping, the best ten minutes you’ll spend is the one where somebody walks you through the agreement and the contract side by side, before anybody unlocks a door. That’s the conversation I have with every buyer, and I’m happy to have it with you. Reach out to Ed Neuhaus and lets grab a coffee. Be safe, be good, and be nice to people.
