Nobody teaches wholesalers what to charge. The number gets picked from a podcast, from what someone made last time, or from whatever is left after the arithmetic, and all three produce a business that either does not support you or does not sell deals.
There is a defensible way to think about it, and it starts by treating your fee as a decision rather than a remainder.
What the Fee Actually Is
Your fee is one line in the arithmetic covered in the guide to disposition, and it is the only line you fully control.
You are being paid for finding a property the buyer would not have found, for controlling it, and for doing the work of getting it to them. That is a real service and it is worth real money, and wholesalers who feel apologetic about charging for it tend to undercharge in ways that damage the business.
It is also not unlimited, because the buyer is doing arithmetic. Your fee comes out of their margin, and past a certain point the deal stops working for them regardless of how much work you did.
So the fee has a floor set by whether the business supports you, and a ceiling set by whether the buyer can still profit. The range between those is where the decision lives.
The Ranges, and What Moves Them
Typical assignment fees in most markets fall between five and fifteen thousand, with a long tail in both directions. That range is wide because several things genuinely move it.
Deal size. The strongest factor. A property with a forty thousand dollar spread supports a larger fee than one with a fifteen thousand spread, and buyers evaluate your fee against their profit rather than in isolation.
How much work you did. A deal you found through your own marketing, negotiated, and brought with clean numbers and access is worth more than one you forwarded from another wholesaler.
Market competition. In a market with many wholesalers chasing the same buyers, fees compress. In one where you are the reliable source, they do not.
The buyer relationship. A first deal with a new buyer usually justifies less than a fifth deal with someone who trusts your numbers, because the trust itself has value and reduces their diligence cost.
Property type. Larger multifamily and commercial deals support larger fees in absolute terms and often smaller ones as a percentage.
The Percentage Frame
More useful than a flat number, because it scales with the deal.
Thinking of your fee as a share of the buyer's projected profit gives you a check that works across deal sizes. If your fee is a small fraction of what they stand to make, it is easy for them to accept. If it approaches half, the deal stops looking like a deal to them.
The failure this catches: a fixed ten thousand dollar fee is reasonable on a property with a fifty thousand spread and absurd on one with an eighteen thousand spread. Wholesalers who charge the same number regardless of deal size lose the small deals and undercharge on the large ones.
It also gives you language for the conversation. Explaining that your fee is a modest share of their projected margin is a much better position than defending a number that appeared from nowhere.
The Case for Charging Less
The argument that gets ignored, and the arithmetic behind it is not close.
A buyer who feels they got a good deal comes back. A buyer who feels squeezed does one deal with you and takes the next call from someone else. Over a year, the difference between a buyer who does one deal and a buyer who does five is far larger than anything you gained by pushing the fee.
Worked through: pushing an extra two thousand on each of four deals with four different one-time buyers earns eight thousand. Leaving that two thousand on the table with one buyer who then does four more deals with you earns considerably more, and it costs less effort per deal because you stop marketing to strangers.
There is a second effect that is harder to quantify and probably larger. A buyer who trusts you starts telling you what they want before you find it, which turns your acquisitions from speculative into targeted. That is worth more than any single fee, and it is only available to wholesalers buyers want to work with, as set out in repeat buyers.
The Case for Charging More
The opposite argument is also real, and undercharging has its own failure mode.
A wholesaler doing two deals a month at three thousand each is working very hard for a modest income, and the business cannot absorb a bad month, fund marketing, or survive a deal falling apart. Chronic undercharging is why many wholesalers quit, and they usually describe it as the market rather than as pricing.
Undercharging also signals something. A fee far below the market invites the question of what is wrong with the deal, and experienced buyers do ask.
The healthy position is a fee that reflects the value of what you brought, adjusted for deal size, with room left for the buyer. Not the maximum extractable number and not an apologetic one.
When the Fee Is Visible
An assignment shows your fee on the closing statement. A double close generally does not, at additional cost. That choice has consequences beyond the money and they are worked through in assignment versus double close.
The practical point for pricing: on a large fee, visibility matters. A buyer seeing a very large assignment fee at the closing table may proceed and will remember, and some will renegotiate on the spot. Wholesalers who intend to charge a large fee usually structure around visibility, and the cost of doing so should be in your arithmetic from the start rather than discovered late.
Sellers see it too on an assignment. A seller who agreed to a price and then sees a large fee at closing may feel misled even where everything was disclosed properly, and that is a reputational cost in a local market where they talk to people.
Fees on the Deals That Are Not Assignments
The reasoning above assumes a standard assignment. Several common situations work differently and wholesalers often apply the wrong frame.
Double closes. Your spread is the difference between two transactions rather than a stated fee, and you carry two sets of closing costs plus the funding charge. Those costs come out of your side, so the same take-home requires a wider spread, per transactional funding.
Co-wholesale deals. The fee splits, usually evenly, and the right way to think about your share is against the work you did rather than the total. Half a fee on a deal you placed in two days is a better hourly outcome than a full fee on one that took three weeks.
Referrals. Passing a lead to another investor for a cut. Much smaller than an assignment fee and appropriately so, since you did none of the work of controlling the property.
Deals you found for a specific buyer. Where a buyer told you exactly what they wanted and you went and found it, the fee can reasonably be higher, because you performed a search rather than distributed a property. Wholesalers rarely charge more for this and should.
Novations and creative structures. Different economics entirely, usually a share of a larger eventual profit rather than a fee at closing, and worth pricing deliberately rather than by analogy to assignments.
How to Handle the Negotiation
Buyers will push on your fee. A few things make that conversation go better.
Know your floor before the call. The number below which you would rather keep the deal and find another buyer. Deciding this under pressure produces bad outcomes.
Defend the deal, not the fee. Their real question is whether the property works at the total price. Move the conversation to the numbers on the property and the fee usually stops being the topic.
Concede for something. If you come down, get faster closing, a larger deposit, or a commitment on the next one. A fee reduced for nothing teaches the buyer to push every time.
Be willing to walk. If your numbers are right, another buyer exists. Wholesalers who cannot walk get pushed on every deal, and buyers can tell which ones those are.
What not to do is inflate your fee expecting to be negotiated down. Experienced buyers read that as a signal your numbers are unreliable generally, and it costs more than it gains. Where the fee sits in the overall arithmetic is in how to price a wholesale deal. The habit worth building, though, is deciding your number before the call rather than during it. Almost every fee a wholesaler regrets was set under pressure by someone who had thought about it longer than they had.