Your ninth deal pays differently than your tenth

Say you sell two houses at $340,000, both at 3%, both through the same brokerage. The one that closes in April puts $8,160 in your pocket. The one that closes in October puts in $9,950.

Nothing about the two deals differs except the closing date. A $1,790 gap.

And the deal that closed between them, in September, paid a third number that matches neither.

$8,160

Apr 11, $340,000 sale, before the cap

$10,315

Sep 19, $365,000 sale, crosses the cap

$9,950

Oct 17, $340,000 sale, after the cap

What the agent keeps on each deal. The whole year is worked through below.

The book we are going to run

This agent is made up, and so are the deals. The numbers are chosen to look like a real year for a producing agent: thirteen closings, prices from $225,000 to $480,000, mostly at 3%.

The terms are a common capped model. The agent keeps 80% of each commission and the brokerage takes 20%, until the brokerage's share for the year reaches $16,000. After that the agent keeps everything, minus a flat $250 per deal. Those are the headline numbers at eXp Realty, which runs 80/20 against a $16,000 cap. Real Broker runs 85/15 against $12,000. Different numbers, same mechanic.

The brokerage's share has a name worth using: company dollar. It is the only thing the cap counts. It is not a count of deals, and it is not your volume.

The cap year starts on Mar 1, the agent's anniversary with the brokerage. Caps reset on one of two dates, your anniversary or January 1. This one is an anniversary cap, so the table runs from March to February.

The year: $125,075.00 in gross commission, $16,000.00 of company dollar, four post-cap fees of $250.00, and $108,075.00 kept. Every column adds up. Check it.

Deal nine, the one that looks like a mistake

Watch the cap-filled column. After deal eight, $15,365 of the $16,000 is paid, so there is $635 of room left.

Deal nine grosses $10,950. At 20%, it would normally owe $2,190. It owes $635, because that is all the room there is, and the other $1,555 stays with the agent. So deal nine keeps $10,315, which is more than a pre-cap deal of its size ($8,760) and still not the full post-cap figure ($10,700).

That is the whole trick of a cap. You don't cap on a deal. You cap inside one.

If you want to know which of your deals that will be, the free cap calculator takes your average price, rate, split, cap, and post-cap fee, and shows where the line falls. It uses one average deal, so it gives you the shape of the year. A real mix of prices moves the line around, which is what the table above is for.

Now the part that trips up most tracking. Deal nine's $10,315 was set by where the agent stood on Sep 19. Recalculate it in December from December's position, when the cap is full, and a formula will price it as a post-cap deal: $10,700. Deal two would come back at $9,950 instead of $8,160. A spreadsheet that works out every row from the current cap position reprices the whole year each time you open it, and the totals you gave your accountant in April stop reproducing by fall.

We shipped exactly this once. A heading in our own deal list recalculated closed deals from the year's running total and disagreed with the rows printed under it.

So this is how KeyFlow prices a deal now. You enter your cap, your split, your post-cap fee, and your anniversary date once. Each deal is priced at the cap position you are in on its closing date, counting only the deals that closed before it in the same cap year. While a deal is under contract, its Financials tab says which stage it will be priced at and how many deals close ahead of it. When a pending deal is the one that will cross, it tells you: how much goes at your split, and that the rest goes at capped pricing. And once a deal closes, its number is recorded at close and stays put, no matter what closes after it.

Move one closing, and two deals change price

Say deal eight's closing slips four weeks, from Aug 29 to Sep 26. Nothing about the deal changes. Now the Sep 19 deal closes first, and it has room for its full split.

The year comes out identical. Each of those two deals is off by $1,555, though, and if you already told your team or your accountant what the Sep 19 deal paid, that number is now wrong.

The slip that crosses your anniversary is different

Deal thirteen closes Feb 20, nine days before the cap year resets. It keeps $8,750.

Let it slip to Mar 3 and it becomes deal one of a new cap year, back on 80/20. It keeps $7,200. That's $1,550 less.

Here we want to argue with a warning you have probably heard, and one an earlier version of this article made: that an anniversary slip costs you the whole split. If you cap every year, most of that money comes back. You will still pay $16,000 of company dollar next year either way, and this deal simply pays the first $1,800 of it, which lets a later deal next year keep more. Across the two years it is close to a wash. If you don't cap next year, it's a real $1,550.

A separate wrinkle. Deals twelve and thirteen close in January and February, so they sit in this cap year and next year's tax return at the same time. The cap year and the tax year will almost never line up on one page. None of this is tax advice. Take the calendar-year numbers to whoever does your return.

After the cap, the fee has its own schedule

Capping does not mean the brokerage stops charging. The example uses a flat $250 per deal. At eXp that fee drops to $75 once you have paid $5,000 of it in the same anniversary year, and eXp also charges $25 and $60 per deal for transaction review and risk management, which the table leaves out to keep the arithmetic readable. Real Broker's post-cap fee on a sale is $285.

Your own brokerage may do something else entirely. Your independent contractor agreement (ICA) is the document that governs every number here, and it outranks this article and the calculator.

Ask your broker these, in these words

1. "When does my cap year start? My anniversary date, or January 1?"
2. "Which date decides what cap year a deal counts in: closing, or when the commission check is disbursed?"
3. "What counts toward my cap? Just my split, or do admin fees or my team's share count too?"
4. "Does the deal I cap on owe any of the post-cap fee, or only the split that was left?"
5. "After I cap, what do I pay per deal, and does it ever step down?"
6. "If I leave partway through the year, does anything I've paid toward the cap carry over?" At most brokerages the answer is no, since progress toward the old cap almost always resets at the new one.
7. "When I joined, was my first cap prorated?" Some partial-year hires cap on a proration of the months left, which changes which deal straddled that year.

Send those before your next closing, not after. Then put your answers into the cap calculator and look at which deal lands on the line. If that deal is already under contract, you now know what it pays and why, before the settlement statement tells you.

---

Sources: Smart Agent Alliance, eXp Realty commission and fees · Speicher Group, Real Broker commission split, cap, and fees · eXp Realty commission split, cap, and fees (2026) · Paperless Pipeline, real estate commission caps and tiers, explained