What Is an Assignment Fee?
Also known as: Wholesale Fee, Assignment Spread
An assignment fee is how a wholesaler gets paid: the spread between the price they have a property under contract for and the higher price the end buyer agrees to pay when the contract is assigned. The wholesaler never takes title.
An assignment fee is the wholesaler's paycheck. It is the spread between the price the wholesaler has a property under contract for and the higher price the end buyer agrees to pay when the wholesaler assigns the contract. The wholesaler never takes title, and the fee is paid at closing.
How wholesalers actually get paid
Think of the assignment fee as the difference between two prices on the same deal. You lock a property under contract at one number. You then transfer, or assign, that contract to a cash buyer at a higher number. The gap between the two is your fee, and you collect it at the closing table. You never buy the property, never carry it, and never resell it. You sold the right to your contract.
Because the fee is just a spread, it is negotiated on every deal rather than fixed. Some wholesalers set a flat dollar amount. Others structure it as a percentage of the spread, commonly cited around 15% to 25%. What you can charge depends on how much room is between your contract price and what a buyer will pay, which is why finding motivated sellers and accurate comps matters so much.
Worked example
Say you put a house under contract for $150,000. You market it to your buyers list and a cash buyer agrees to pay $165,000. You assign your contract to that buyer. The $15,000 gap is your assignment fee, paid at closing. The numbers below are illustrative, not a market quote.
$165,000 − contract price $150,000 = assignment fee $15,000
How it shows on the closing statement
The assignment fee is not hidden inside the sale price. At closing it is itemized as its own line on the settlement statement (a HUD-1 or the newer ALTA settlement form), usually under additional settlement charges. That is what separates a clean, transparent assignment from a quiet markup. Everyone at the table can see the wholesaler's fee broken out as a distinct charge.
Typical assignment fee ranges
Numbers move a lot by market and deal size, so attribution matters more than a single figure. Per the RealEstateBees survey published in October 2025, the national average wholesale assignment fee is about $13,000. State averages run from roughly $5,000 (Arizona) up to about $22,000 (North Carolina and Georgia). At the city level the highest average is St. Louis, MO near $25,000, and the lowest is Sierra Vista, AZ near $5,000.
RealEstateSkills and PropertyLeads report a typical per-deal range closer to $5,000 to $20,000, with around $10,000 cited as a common benchmark. The two source families measure slightly different things, so a fair read is this: treat $10,000 to $13,000 as a defensible typical-deal number and the $5,000 to $22,000-plus band as the realistic spread you will actually see.
Related terms
Bigger assignment fees start upstream, with a steady flow of motivated sellers and accurate comps. That is the part VA Horizon runs for you, so your spreads are not capped by a thin pipeline.
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