What it costs to sell a house in Alberta, line by line

Brokerage commission is the largest cost of selling a house in Alberta, and it is the only one that goes away if you sell without a listing. Every other line on the closing statement arrives the same way whichever route you take.

Almost everything written about this subject is written by a brokerage, so almost everything written about this subject is about commission. That is one line. This page is the rest of them, with the published numbers where published numbers exist, and with the deadlines attached, because on two of these lines the deadline costs more than the fee.

Commission is not set by anyone, and it is the only line you can remove

There is no standard rate of real estate commission in Alberta. Brokerages set their own, sellers negotiate it, and whatever you agree to goes into the written service agreement you sign before the sign goes in the lawn. That is why quoted percentages vary so widely between Calgary brokerage blogs. A percentage on one of those pages is that brokerage's pricing, not a rule about your house.

Two things about commission matter before you compare it to anything else.

It comes out of the sale proceeds at closing rather than arriving as a bill, so it never feels like money leaving your account. And it carries GST, because what the brokerage sells you is a service. The house usually does not carry GST: the Canada Revenue Agency treats the sale of a previously occupied residential complex by someone other than a builder as an exempt supply under Schedule V, Part I. Selling it is a separate supply from the thing being sold. Have your accountant confirm the treatment of each invoice in your own file rather than assuming the exemption covers the whole transaction.

Commission is also the only item on this page that a different way of selling removes outright. Everything below arrives whether or not a brokerage is involved.

Your lawyer's invoice is really two invoices

A conveyancing quote is a fee plus disbursements, and sellers routinely compare one firm's fee against another firm's total.

The fee is what the firm charges for the work. Disbursements are money the firm pays out for you and passes through at cost, and on a sale the largest of those are Alberta Land Titles registrations. Those are published and they changed this month. The Land Titles and Surveys common document fee schedule, in force from October 01, 2026, charges $25 for a discharge or any other document resulting in a change or amendment of registered ownership or parcel description, $40 for a caveat, and $50 plus $5 for every $5,000 of value of land for a Transfer of Land.

The Transfer of Land registration is normally the buyer's cost, and it is the one quoted at sellers by mistake because it is the biggest number on the schedule. Your side of the registry is the discharge of your mortgage, plus the discharge of anything else sitting on your title. An old caveat nobody remembered, a builder's lien, a writ of enforcement: each is its own registration and its own line on the invoice.

Pull a copy of your title before you list. It costs a few dollars and it is the cheapest way to learn what is registered against you while there is still time to deal with it rather than three days before possession.

The mortgage payout is not the same number as your balance

Your lender's payout statement is the balance, plus a prepayment penalty, plus a discharge administration fee. On a fixed rate mortgage the penalty is routinely far larger than sellers expect, because it is calculated on an interest rate differential rather than on three months of interest.

How that penalty and three other deductions turn an offer into money that actually reaches your account is set out in our guide to what cash home buyers pay in Calgary, so there is no sense repeating the arithmetic here. The thing to do today is ask your lender for a written payout statement with a specific date on it. The figure moves with the closing date, and a quote good for the end of the month is not a quote good for the fifteenth.

If it is a condo, Alberta caps what the corporation can charge you

A buyer's condominium document condition means somebody has to get a package of documents out of the corporation or its manager. On most Calgary deals that somebody is the seller, and this is the corner of the subject that the commission articles leave out entirely.

The Condominium Property Regulation sets maximums a corporation may charge, and they are modest:

• up to $200 for an estoppel certificate, plus up to $100 more where it is produced within three days
• up to $100 for a consolidated information statement, plus up to $50 more on the same rush basis
• up to $10 for a document, or $0.25 per page for a hard copy running past 40 pages

The corporation has 10 days to respond to a written request. That deadline is the real cost here, not the fee. A seven day condition period and a ten day document deadline do not fit inside one another, and the way out is to order the package before the house is listed rather than after an offer lands. Alberta publishes a plain language summary of these rights in its condominium documents guide, and the fee and timing rules are in the regulation itself, so check the current wording with your own lawyer before relying on a figure.

There is a second reason to order your own estoppel certificate early. It tells you whether the corporation believes you owe it money. That is not a thing to discover while a buyer's lawyer is reading it.

The property tax line can go either way, and Calgary attaches a deadline to it

Property tax is an adjustment rather than a cost. If you have paid ahead of the calendar, the buyer reimburses you for the part of the year they will own. If you have not, you owe them. Either way it lands on your lawyer's statement of adjustments.

The part with a date on it is the City of Calgary's Tax Instalment Payment Plan. TIPP does not stop itself when title changes hands. The City's page on selling or buying a property says to cancel TIPP for the property you sold before the 22nd of the month, through the TIPP cancellation request form, and that if you miss the cancellation deadline your next payment will still be withdrawn. Cancelling also makes the unpaid balance of the year's taxes due immediately, which is precisely what the adjustment on your statement is there to settle.

So the order matters. Ask your lawyer what the adjustment assumes about your TIPP account, then cancel on the City's schedule rather than on yours. Getting those two out of sequence is how a seller ends up paying a month of tax on a house that belongs to somebody else.

Some costs are set by the condition of the house, not by how you sell it

The standard Alberta residential purchase contract obliges a seller to deliver a Real Property Report with evidence of municipal compliance unless the parties agree otherwise, and that obligation survives the words "as is". The surveying and compliance side of it, including what the City of Calgary wants to see on the drawing, is covered in our guide to selling a house as is in Alberta.

Repairs follow the same logic. Money spent on a roof or a furnace before a listing is not really a cost of selling. It is the cost of selling at the price the listing assumes, paid in cash now against a higher number later. For a house with real damage that bet is often the wrong one, and it is worth pricing it as a bet rather than as a necessity.

What the as-is route actually removes, and what it does not

We buy houses directly, so it is only fair to be exact about which of these lines we make disappear.

Removed: brokerage commission and the GST charged on it, the money spent preparing and repairing a house for showings, and the carrying cost of the months a listing can run. Not removed: your own lawyer, the discharge registration, the lender's prepayment penalty, the condo package, the property tax adjustment. What we pay and how the number is worked out is written out rather than implied, and our four steps say what happens in which order.

Compare the two properly. Take a listed sale's likely price, subtract every line on this page, and set that against an as-is offer net of the lines that survive, on the same possession date. A gross price against a net price is not a comparison, and it is the comparison most sellers are shown.

When selling as is is the wrong answer for you

If your house is in good shape, it would show well, and nothing is forcing a date on you, a listing will usually leave you with more than any as-is offer, ours included. The costs on this page are real, but they are not large enough to outweigh what an open market does to the price of a house that people enjoy walking through.

The as-is route earns its keep when the gap closes from the other direction. A house that will not survive a lender's inspection. A condo whose documents will send a financed buyer away. A payout date you cannot move. A property you are carrying while you also pay for somewhere else to live. As Matthew puts it: "If your house is in good to great condition and you're not in a hurry, listing with a Realtor may be a better option, and I'll tell you so to your face."

Whichever way you go, do two things this week. Pull your title, and ask your lender for a dated payout statement. Those two pieces of paper turn most of this page from a guess into a number, and between them they cost almost nothing.