Every fee schedule below read firsthand, August 2026

Business broker fees and cost, from commission rates to what brokers charge

Business broker fees in the US are almost always a success fee, a percentage of the sale price paid only when the deal closes. What changes from broker to broker is the shape of that percentage and the floor underneath it. Empire Flippers publishes a blended scale that starts at a $10,000 flat minimum and runs to 15% on the first $700,000. Acquire.com charges 6% to 8% by asking price, plus $25 to $100 a month to keep the listing live. Flippa publishes a 10% success fee below $500,000 that steps down to 5% at $50 million. Traditional M&A advisors quote the Lehman scales. Buyouts charges a $79 to $699 a month listing plan while the listing is live plus 3% to 5% on close.

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Every figure on this page was read from the provider's own pages in July or August 2026. The table below is the version of this comparison we could not find anywhere else, because most articles on business broker fees quote a single industry average and move on. Half the well-known names publish no rate at all. Website Closers says it is 100% success-based and does not print the percentage. Quiet Light, FE International and BizBuySell publish nothing a reader can check. The IBBA, the trade body American business brokers belong to, publishes market research on deal multiples but no standard or recommended commission rate, which we confirmed on its own industry-research page in August 2026. When you see a confident "the average business broker charges X%" claim online, that number is almost never traceable to a primary source.

The number that decides a small sale is not the percentage, it is the floor: a $10,000 minimum commission is 20% of a $50,000 business and 1% of a $1,000,000 one.

Read from each provider directly

Business broker fees and marketplace commission, side by side

Each row came from the provider's own pricing, fee or commission page rather than a roundup article. "Not published" means the provider does not state the figure publicly. That is worth knowing before you book a call: an unpublished rate is a negotiated rate.

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Broker or marketplace	Upfront or listing fee	Success fee on close	Minimum fee	What it sells	Checked
Buyouts	$79, $249 or $699 a month while listed	5%, 4% or 3% by tier	None published	AI SaaS only	Aug 2026
Empire Flippers	None	Blended: 15% to $700k, 8% from $700k to $5M, 2.5% above $5M	$10,000 flat below $66,666.66	Online businesses including SaaS	Aug 2026
Acquire.com	$25 to $100 a month while listed	8% below $250k, 7% from $250k to $1M, 6% above $1M	None published	Startups and SaaS	Aug 2026
Flippa	$29 to $699 under $100,000, $399 to $1,499 brokered above	10% falling to 5% by band	None published	Websites, apps and SaaS	Sep 2026
Website Closers	None, stated as 100% success-based	Not published	Not published	Technology and internet businesses	Aug 2026
Quiet Light	Not published	Not published	Not published	Online businesses including SaaS	Aug 2026
FE International	Not published	Not published	Not published	SaaS, ecommerce and content sites	Aug 2026
BizBuySell	$74.95 to $199.95 a month, six-month term	None, it is an advertising site	None	Main street and online businesses	Sep 2026
BusinessesForSale.com	$199 for one month, $299 for three, $399 for six	None, it is an advertising site	None	Main street and franchise listings	Jul 2026 archive
Rejigg	None for the owner	None for the owner; the buyer owes a Lehman 5-4-3-2-1 fee at close, halved on brokered deals	None published	Main street and software, sold without a broker	Sep 2026
Traditional M&A advisor	Monthly retainer, varies by firm	Straight Lehman 5-4-3-2-1 or Double Lehman 10-8-6-4-2	Usually a floor fee, not standardized	Lower middle market companies	Public standard

Buyouts, Empire Flippers and Acquire.com figures were read from their own pricing and commission pages on 20 August 2026. Flippa figures were read from its pricing page in September 2026 across all ten price bands. BizBuySell prices were read from its listing FAQ on 18 September 2026. Website Closers, Quiet Light and FE International publish no rate we could read. The Lehman scales are public fee conventions, not any named firm's rate card.

Our own arithmetic, applied to the published scales

What the same sale price costs in broker commission

Success fee only, at close. Listing and retainer fees are extra and are shown in the table above. We applied each provider's published scale to the same seven sale prices so the shape of each fee structure is visible instead of hidden inside a percentage.

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Sale price	Buyouts 3% to 5%	Acquire.com	Empire Flippers	Flippa 10% to 5%	Lehman: straight / double
$50,000	$1,500 to $2,500	$4,000 at 8%	$10,000 flat, 20% of the sale	$5,000 at 10%	$2,500 / $5,000
$100,000	$3,000 to $5,000	$8,000 at 8%	$15,000 at 15%	$10,000 at 10%	$5,000 / $10,000
$250,000	$7,500 to $12,500	$17,500 at 7%	$37,500 at 15%	$25,000 at 10%	$12,500 / $25,000
$500,000	$15,000 to $25,000	$35,000 at 7%	$75,000 at 15%	$45,000 at 9%	$25,000 / $50,000
$1,000,000	$30,000 to $50,000	$60,000 to $70,000	$129,000 (their worked example)	$80,000 at 8%	$50,000 / $100,000
$2,000,000	$60,000 to $100,000	$120,000 at 6%	$209,000	$160,000 at 8%	$90,000 / $180,000
$5,000,000	$150,000 to $250,000	$300,000 at 6%	$449,000 (their worked example)	$350,000 at 7%	$150,000 / $300,000

Our math, from each provider's published scale, August 2026. The two Empire Flippers figures marked "their worked example" are theirs, printed on their own commission calculator page. Acquire.com's 7% band ends and its 6% band begins at $1M, which is why that cell shows a range. Flippa's success fee is set by the band the whole price falls in: 10% below $500,000, 9% to $999,999, 8% from $1M and 7% from $5M, read September 2026. Its upfront fee is excluded here as for every provider. Lehman scales are applied per tranche of $1,000,000. Valuation and fee content here is educational and is not a quoted price for any specific deal.

Side by side

What a seller pays on Buyouts, Empire Flippers and Acquire.com

A fair look at what each does well. Both are useful. Here is where they differ.

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Feature	Buyouts	Empire Flippers	Acquire.com
Fee model	Monthly listing plan while live plus a success fee on close	Nothing to list, blended commission on close	Monthly listing fee plus a closing fee
Success fee	5%, 4% or 3% depending on listing tier	15% on the first $700,000, tapering above it	8%, 7% or 6% by asking price
Minimum commission	No floor, the percentage applies as stated	$10,000 flat below $66,666.66	No floor published
Cost at a $100,000 sale	$3,000 to $5,000 plus the listing fee	$15,000	$8,000 plus $25 a month
Cost at a $1,000,000 sale	$30,000 to $50,000 plus the listing fee	$129,000 by their own worked example	$60,000 to $70,000 plus $100 a month
Exclusivity	No exclusivity period required to list	Two-month exclusivity on their listing agreement	Not published as a fixed term
Escrow at close	Escrow-backed closes built in	Migration and payment handled by their team	Escrow included at no extra charge
Who the fee buys work from	Metric verification, listing build and a vetted buyer pool	A full brokered process with an assigned team	A self-serve marketplace with optional advisory

Comparison reflects general, publicly understood positioning. Capabilities change, so check each marketplace for the latest. Trademarks belong to their owners.

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The floor decides small deals, not the percentage

Sellers compare headline percentages and then get surprised at close. Empire Flippers charges a $10,000 flat commission on anything below $66,666.66. On a $50,000 sale that is 20% of the price, and on a $30,000 sale it would be a third of it. That is our arithmetic on their published scale, not a criticism of it: floors exist because a brokered process costs roughly the same to run whether the business sells for $40,000 or $400,000. It is simply the reason small software businesses rarely appear on curated broker sites.

Nobody publishes an industry standard rate

The IBBA is the trade body most American business brokers belong to. Its industry-research resource center publishes the Market Pulse survey on deal activity and multiples, and no standard, recommended or surveyed commission rate, which we checked in August 2026. Neither does the SBA. So when an article states that business brokers charge a specific average percentage, ask where the number came from. The figures on this page are all traceable to a provider that printed them, or to the public Lehman conventions.

A listing fee and a success fee price different risks

A monthly or one-time listing fee is the venue charging you for attention before it knows whether you will sell. A pure success fee moves that risk onto the broker, and the percentage is higher because of it. Acquire.com does both at a low rate. Empire Flippers does success only at a high rate. Buyouts sits between them with a monthly listing plan you stop when it sells and a 3% to 5% close. None of those is automatically cheaper: the crossover depends entirely on your sale price, which is what the worked table above shows.

Keep reading on the parts of a deal this page touches: Baton Market fees, a 6% success fee plus a retainer, how to sell a business without a broker, and what it really saves, what a website broker charges an online business, broker by broker, where to list a business for sale, with every listing fee and success fee side by side, what a broker fee costs you after tax, what a buy side advisor charges to do it for you, how the Lehman formula prices a larger deal, who actually pays the broker, what a marketplace charges instead, broker or marketplace, and when each one wins.

Good questions

Business broker fees, answered

It depends on the broker and on the sale price, and there is no published industry standard. Among providers that print a rate in August 2026: Empire Flippers charges a blended commission of 15% on the first $700,000 with a $10,000 flat minimum, Flippa charges 10% below $500,000 falling to 5% at $50M, Acquire.com charges 6% to 8% by asking price, and Buyouts charges 3% to 5% plus a monthly listing plan of $79, $249 or $699 that you stop when the business sells. Several well-known brokers publish nothing at all.

For small business sales, published rates cluster between 8% and 15% of the sale price, and traditional M&A advisors above roughly $1,000,000 use the Lehman scales, which produce a blended rate of about 3% to 5% at that level. Be careful with averages quoted online: the IBBA publishes no standard commission rate, so most "typical" figures are not traceable to a primary source.

The seller pays it, in essentially every standard engagement. The broker is retained by the seller, the fee is a percentage of the sale price, and it comes out of the seller's proceeds at closing, usually through escrow. Buyers pay indirectly, because the fee is priced into the asking price. Buy-side representation, where a buyer retains and pays their own advisor, is a separate arrangement with its own fee.

Some do and some do not, and it is one of the clearest dividing lines in the market. Empire Flippers and Website Closers state that they charge nothing upfront and are paid only on a completed sale. Flippa and Acquire.com charge upfront or listing fees, $29 to $1,499 by price band and $25 to $100 a month respectively. Traditional M&A advisors on larger deals commonly charge a monthly retainer that is credited against the success fee.

A floor the broker collects regardless of how small the sale is. Empire Flippers publishes a $10,000 flat commission on any sale below $66,666.66. Many traditional advisors set a floor between $10,000 and $50,000 without publishing it. Always ask for the minimum in dollars before you sign, because on a small business it can quietly become the highest effective percentage you will pay.

Published rates in August 2026 run from 3% to 15% depending on the venue and the sale price, and the percentage almost always falls as the price rises. Marketplaces charge less because you do most of the work. Full-service brokers charge more because they run the process, screen buyers and manage the close. Below roughly $100,000 the minimum fee usually matters more than the percentage.

A tiered scale applied per million dollars of sale price. Straight Lehman is 5% of the first $1M, 4% of the second, 3% of the third, 2% of the fourth and 1% of everything above, written 5-4-3-2-1. Double Lehman doubles each tier to 10-8-6-4-2. On a $5,000,000 sale that is $150,000 against $300,000 by our arithmetic. These are public conventions, not any single firm's rate card.

Usually yes, and the negotiable parts are rarely the headline percentage. The clauses worth pushing on are the minimum fee, the length of the exclusivity period, the tail clause that keeps the broker owed a fee after the agreement ends, whether the retainer is credited against the success fee, and whether the percentage is calculated on enterprise value or on total consideration including earnouts and assumed debt.

For a US seller, broker commissions on a business sale are generally treated as a selling expense that reduces the amount realized on the sale, rather than as a current business deduction, which lowers the taxable gain. The exact treatment depends on whether the deal is an asset sale or a stock sale and on how the purchase price is allocated. Talk to a CPA about your specific structure before you file.

It depends on whether the price uplift beats the commission. A broker earns their fee when they widen the buyer pool, run competitive tension and get the deal through diligence without it collapsing. Empire Flippers publishes an average of 95% of list price achieved across sales on its Scoreboard, read August 2026. Against a 15% commission, that only pays if you would otherwise have sold materially lower or not at all.

Take the success fee, add the listing or retainer fee, then add the costs nobody quotes: legal review of the purchase agreement, accounting help to produce clean financials, and escrow. On a $250,000 SaaS sale the commission alone ranges from $7,500 on Buyouts to $37,500 on Empire Flippers. Budget several thousand dollars on top for legal and accounting regardless of venue.

A provision that keeps the broker owed their commission if you sell to a buyer they introduced, for a set period after the agreement expires. Tails of 12 to 24 months are common. It exists to stop a seller from ending the engagement and closing directly with an introduced buyer. Ask for the tail to be limited to a named, written list of introduced buyers rather than applying to any sale.

On sales under roughly $100,000 the effective rate is usually set by the minimum fee rather than the percentage. Empire Flippers' $10,000 floor works out at 20% of a $50,000 sale by our arithmetic. Self-serve marketplaces are cheaper at this size: Flippa's 10% is $5,000 on the same sale and Acquire.com's 8% is $4,000, though you run the process yourself.

Generally yes on the percentage, and the difference is the work you take on. A marketplace lists the business and gives you tools; you answer buyer questions, run your own diligence responses and manage the close. A broker does that for you. Acquire.com's own pricing page claims business brokers charge 10% to 15% against its 6% to 8%, which matches what the brokers who publish rates actually charge.

A monthly listing plan of $79, $249 or $699 a month depending on tier, billed only while the listing is live, plus a success fee of 5%, 4% or 3% respectively when a deal closes. Browsing is free; buyer membership for full access runs $99 to $899 a month. There is no free participation tier. Listings, metrics and deals shown on the site are illustrative product UI rather than completed transactions.

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Listing figures are published by their sellers and self-reported · valuation content is educational, not a guaranteed sale price or return · trademarks belong to their owners