NAR agreed to pay $418 million and change its rules

The signal

In real estate, the parties in Burnett et al. v. National Association of Realtors, Case No. 19-CV-00332-SRB in the US District Court for the Western District of Missouri, entered into a proposed settlement on 15 March 2024, after an October 2023 jury verdict against NAR. The court-approved notice states NAR agreed to pay $418 million into a settlement fund and to implement practice changes, on top of related settlements the same notice puts at over $980 million in current value across NAR and other defendants. NAR's own settlement FAQ page, updated 5 September 2024, confirms the practice changes took effect 17 August 2024, roughly five months after the agreement and before the case received final court approval.

The evidence

The notice sets out the mechanism directly: NAR agreed to eliminate any requirement that a seller or listing broker offer compensation to a buyer's broker, to prohibit publishing such compensation offers on a multiple listing service, to require a written buyer-broker agreement with a specified compensation amount before a buyer tours a home, and to require disclosure that commissions are negotiable. A second source, the settlement administration site's NAR case page, records that the court granted final approval on 27 November 2024, over eight months after the agreement and more than three months after the practice changes were already in force. That sequence separates three distinct dates that are easy to conflate: the agreement in March, the operative rule change in August, and the court's final sign-off in November.

Timeframe and confidence

This is an editorial reading: the dollar figure, the case number and the practice-change list are drawn directly from a federal court-ordered notice, which is as reliable a primary record as a civil settlement produces. What these documents cannot yet show is the market effect, since whether commission rates or the share of transactions with a written buyer agreement actually moved requires transaction data collected after August 2024, not the settlement terms themselves.

What would change the reading

A measured decline in the average cooperating-broker commission rate across MLSs that adopted the practice changes, compared with MLSs that opted out or settled on different terms, would show the rule change reaching prices rather than only paperwork. Litigation or state-level rule conflicts over the written buyer-agreement requirement would signal implementation friction the notice itself does not anticipate.

• Did a given MLS or brokerage opt into the settlement's practice changes, and on what date did its own local rule change take effect?
• Is a claimed savings figure for buyers or sellers based on transacted commission data, or on the existence of the new disclosure requirement alone?
• How does the gap between agreement, effective date and final approval affect what a market participant could rely on at each stage?

A $418 million figure and a rule change are both firmly on the record; whether the rule change altered how commissions are actually set is a question the settlement documents pose but cannot themselves answer.

Source trail

1. Notice of Proposed Settlement with the National Association of Realtorswww.realestatecommissionlitigation.com · Source publication: not established · Retrieved 2026-09-16

   Court-approved notice stating the $418 million fund, the 15 March 2024 agreement date, case number and practice changes.

2. NAR Settlement FAQswww.nar.realtor · Source publication: 2024-09-05 · Retrieved 2026-09-16

   Confirms the practice changes took effect 17 August 2024.

3. National Association of Realtors (NAR) and HomeServices Settlementswww.realestatecommissionlitigation.com · Source publication: not established · Retrieved 2026-09-16

   Records the court's final approval date of 27 November 2024.

Read across the evidence

• A real-estate rule change moved work upstream of the tour
• US office vacancy climbed to a series record in 2023
• The 30-year mortgage rate hit a multi-year high in 2023

Markets & measurement · All 100 historical records