Closing costs by jurisdiction

The spread across the country on an identical purchase is $19,206, and almost none of it is explained by professional fees. It is statute: a jurisdiction with a marginal bracket topping out above one percent produces a five-figure levy on a $1,000,000 building, while a jurisdiction that charges only a registration tariff produces a number closer to a rounding error. Any national underwriting model that uses one blended closing-cost assumption is therefore wrong in both directions at once — overstating the cash requirement in the cheap jurisdictions and understating it precisely where the deal is tightest.

Two structural traps sit inside this table. The first is municipal: a handful of cities legislate a second levy of their own, which can double the transfer cost inside a single city boundary while the surrounding region is unchanged. The second is federal sale tax, which is not in this table at all because a registered purchaser normally self-assesses it rather than funding it on closing — a treatment worth several percent of price in working capital, and the single most common error on a commercial statement of adjustments.

Every figure here is recomputed from the same bracket tables published on the jurisdiction pages, at the same benchmark price, on the same day. Nothing is averaged, surveyed, or carried over from a prior year. When a jurisdiction amends its schedule, a new versioned row is appended and this table moves — with the effective date shown, so a closing dated before the amendment can still be priced against the rule that was actually in force.