Commission split calculator: the closing that crosses your cap

The order the deductions come in

Two people can agree on every figure and still reach different answers, because the deductions are order-dependent. This is the order the page uses.

1. Referral fee, off the top. A referring broker is paid out of the gross, before you and your brokerage divide anything. Subtracting it after the split instead would charge you the whole fee rather than your share of it — on a 25% referral and a 70/30 split, that one reordering costs the agent 30% of the referral.
2. Franchise fee, next. Where a franchise or royalty charge applies, this page takes it off what the referral left, then splits the remainder. Some plans instead figure the franchise fee on the full gross, which on a referred closing is a larger number — if yours does, raise the percentage you enter so the dollar figure matches (on a 25% referral, a 6% fee on the gross is 8% of what is left). Whether the fee also uses up cap room is the checkbox above; it is charged on every closing either way. All of this is your plan's wording rather than a general rule, so read it against your agreement.
3. The split, bounded by what is left of your cap. What remains is divided at your split percentage, except that your brokerage's share stops once the cap is reached — which can happen partway through this closing. See below.
4. Per-transaction fees, last. A transaction fee or a per-deal E&O charge comes out of your side after the split, so you bear all of it rather than your share.

The closing that crosses the cap

A cap is a ceiling on what your brokerage keeps from you across the year, not a switch that flips cleanly between two transactions. One closing in the year usually straddles it: part of that commission is divided at your split, and the part that would have pushed your brokerage past the ceiling is yours in full. The result panel says so when the numbers you entered produce that case, and says something different when the cap was already met before this closing started.

What this does not try to know

Commission plans differ in the details, and the page does not guess at yours. It ships no brokerage's split, cap, franchise fee or desk fee: every number above is a round placeholder you replace with your own. Where a plan stacks something this page has no field for — a mentoring split on early transactions, a team split taken before the brokerage split, a tiered rate that moves with volume, or a separate annual ceiling on the franchise fee itself — the page cannot place it for you. The franchise-fee ceiling is the one with no workaround here: once you have reached it, enter 0 in the franchise fee field for the closings that follow. A deduction taken before the brokerage split has to be folded into the figures you enter above, not into the per-transaction fee: that field is subtracted after the split, so putting a pre-split deduction there would charge you all of it rather than your share.