General information, not legal, tax or accounting advice. What you are owed on a closing is set by your commission agreement with your broker, and this page cannot read it — every figure below is one you enter. It also makes no deduction for tax of any kind.
1. Who it is from, and who it goes to
Bill to is usually your brokerage. On a referral it is the other side's brokerage or agent. Whatever you type here is what prints.
2. The closing it is for
These three are what let whoever pays you match the invoice to a file without emailing you back to ask which deal it is. An invoice reading only “services rendered” is the one that sits in a pile.
3. What you are owed
In dollars, to the cent. If the rate covers both sides and you are on one of them, enter only your side's share as the gross.
Your split is the percentage of the gross that reaches you before deductions. Leave it at 100 if you are invoicing the whole amount. A deduction is anything withheld on this invoice — a transaction fee, a franchise fee, a referral paid out. One line is enough for most invoices; add the rest by hand after printing.
4. Invoice number and terms
Any numbering that is unique to you works. Terms set the due date printed on the invoice, counted in calendar days from the issue date.
5. The invoice
Enter a name, who it is billed to, the property and an amount.
How the total is worked out
Four steps, in this order:
- The gross. Either the amount you entered, or the sale price times the rate. A rate of 3% on $400,000 is $12,000.
- Your share. The gross times your split. A 70% split of $12,000 is $8,400.
- Less deductions. Whatever you entered on the deduction line comes off your share, not off the gross. Order matters: a $500 fee taken after a 70% split is $500, but 70% of a $500 fee is $350, and these are different invoices.
- The due date. Issue date plus the term, in calendar days. Due-on-receipt prints the issue date.
Rounding is to the cent, at the end, once — not at each step, which is how a total ends up a penny off the figure the brokerage calculated.
Why the file number and the side are on it
A commission invoice is not a generic bill, and the difference is who reads it. Whoever pays it is reconciling against a closing file, so the invoice has to name that file in the terms their system uses:
- The property address is the human-readable key. It is the one field almost every invoice gets right.
- The MLS or file number is the key their system actually indexes on. Leaving it off is the single most common reason a commission invoice comes back with a question attached.
- The closing date decides which accounting period the payment belongs to, which is why an invoice with no closing date can sit until someone works it out.
- The side of the transaction disambiguates the case where one brokerage is paying on both halves of the same address.
None of this is specific to one state. What you are owed is set by your commission agreement, and what the invoice has to say is set by whoever is reconciling it — neither is a question of where you are licensed.
What this page does not do
- It does not compute tax, or withhold any. No figure here is reduced for income tax, self-employment tax or anything else. What any of this means for your return is a question for whoever prepares it.
- It does not read your commission agreement. The split and the deductions are numbers you type. If you are unsure of yours, the agreement with your broker is the only place that answers it.
- It does not send the invoice or take a payment. You print it or copy the text and send it yourself.
- It keeps none of the invoice. The invoice is built entirely in your browser: what you enter in the tool is not sent anywhere and is not saved, so it keeps working with no connection and reloading the page clears it. The page reports an anonymous count that the tool was used, and nothing you entered goes with it. The optional email form further down is separate: the address you give it is stored and used to send the toolkit and occasional updates, as the consent box there says.
- It is one invoice, not a ledger. There is no record of what you have already billed and no tracking of what has been paid.
Read next
- Commission split calculator : work out the split itself before you invoice for it.
- The federal provision that treats an agent as a non-employee : quoted in full, including the commission condition it turns on.
- Property tax proration calculator : the other number that gets split at a closing.
- All rules explained for agents : the rest of the library.