The closing costs of a cash sale are the documented residue this series has referenced throughout, and this report itemizes them in one place: the real estate excise tax, graduated from 1.1 percent on residential sales and paid by the seller under state rules (Washington Department of Revenue, 2025), computed on the price under the state's calculation rules (Washington State Department of Revenue, 2026); the title company's charges, the search, the owner's policy share as the contract allocates it, and the escrow or settlement fee for conducting the closing; the recording charges for the deed and any lien releases; the payoff related lines where a mortgage or other liens are retired, per diem interest to the closing date and any servicer fees the instruments carry; and the prorations, property taxes and any association amounts settled between the parties to the closing date. On the study's ordinary older home at about 763,000 dollars (Frontier Capitals, 2026), the seller's total of these items characteristically falls inside the documented 1 to 2 percent band this set uses for seller closing costs beyond commission, roughly 7,600 to 15,300 dollars, dominated by the excise. What the cash statement does not contain defines it as much as what it does: no commission, 45,000 to 54,000 dollars on a 900,000 dollar comparison figure (National Association of Realtors, 2025); no lender driven charges of any kind, since no loan exists in the structure; no inspection, appraisal, or repair credit lines; and no marketing costs trailing in from a listing. The seller who wants the figure before the round can have the title company draft a preliminary statement from the file, payoff included, and negotiate with the closing's whole cost already inside the net line.
The fee question's sibling, whether there are fees when selling to a cash buyer, follows this report and separates legitimate closing charges from charges that should never appear. The cash structure's overall mechanics, within which these costs sit, are in how selling a house for cash works. This report's province is the statement itself, line by line, with the two audit instruments the series prescribes, the state closing cost comparison (Bankrate, 2025) and the seller closing cost research (Freddie Mac via Bankrate, 2026), applied to each family of charges.
Key Findings
- The cash seller's closing costs are the excise, title and escrow charges, recording, payoff lines, and prorations, characteristically 1 to 2 percent of the price in total.
- The excise dominates the residue: graduated from 1.1 percent residential, seller paid, computed under state rules (Washington State Department of Revenue, 2026).
- No commission, lender charge, appraisal, inspection, or repair credit line exists anywhere in the cash statement.
- Every line is auditable in advance: the title company can draft a preliminary statement from the file before the round.
- Liens and taxes are settled through the statement's payoff and proration lines, not added to the cost total as surprises.
Which lines make up the residue, and how is each checked?
The excise first, because it is the largest and the least negotiable: a state tax on the transaction, graduated by price under the state's rules, beginning at 1.1 percent for residential sales at the band relevant to most of this stock and rising through the documented tiers on higher prices, collected at the recording and shown on the statement as the seller's line. The seller checks it by arithmetic alone, price against the published rules, and any statement whose excise does not reconcile to the rules is a statement to be corrected before signing, since this is the one figure in the closing that admits no professional discretion. Title and escrow charges follow: the search that produced the commitment, the policy premiums as the contract allocates them between the parties, and the settlement fee for the company's conduct of the closing, all of them checkable against the state comparison data (Bankrate, 2025) and against the company's own published schedule, which a seller may request at engagement rather than at the table. Recording charges are the county's, small, fixed by the instruments filed, the deed and the releases the payoff lines generate, and verifiable in the county's fee schedule through the recorder's published materials (King County Recorder, 2026).
Payoff lines are the seller's debts being settled, not costs of the sale in the strict sense, and the report insists on the distinction because sellers routinely misread a statement heavy with payoffs as an expensive closing: the mortgage's certified figure, per diem interest to the closing date, any other lien satisfactions, and the tax prorations all pass through the statement because the closing is the settlement of the whole position, and their size reflects the seller's balance sheet rather than the structure's price. The cash structure's economy is visible precisely here, in what surrounds the payoffs: on the retail statement the same payoffs sit beneath a commission of 5 to 6 percent (National Association of Realtors, 2025), lender influenced charges the financed buyer passes through where contracts allow, and credit lines negotiated out of the seller's equity, while on the cash statement the seller's true transaction cost is the residue this report itemizes and nothing else. Parcel and tax data (King County Assessor, 2026) in the file let the seller predict the proration lines to the dollar before the draft arrives.
How do the cash closing costs compare with the listed route's, in figures?
On a single worked comparison at the set's 900,000 dollar reference price, the listed route's seller burden assembles as follows from this set's documented ledger: commission at 5 to 6 percent, 45,000 to 54,000 dollars; seller closing costs at 1 to 2 percent, 9,000 to 18,000 dollars, the same residue family the cash seller pays; repair credits and concessions in the documented 10,000 to 25,000 dollar range on this stock; and carrying of 18,000 to 36,000 dollars across the three to six month season, a cost the statement never shows because it is paid monthly rather than at the table, which is exactly why sellers undercount it. The total economic burden beyond the residue thus runs from roughly 73,000 to 133,000 dollars on the listed route against zero on the cash route, whose seller pays the residue and the prorations and keeps the rest. September market data (Redfin, 2026) on the ZIP code's outcomes describe the grosses those burdens fall on, and rate data (Freddie Mac, 2026) at 7.28 percent explain the financed season's length in the current era, which is the carrying line's multiplier.
The comparison has one honest subtlety, which is that the residue itself is marginally smaller in the cash structure for a reason beyond the missing lines: the excise and most title charges scale with the price and with the instruments filed, and a cash closing files fewer instruments, no deed of trust for a new loan, no lender's policy complexities on the seller's side of the ledger, so the fixed charges shrink slightly with the structure's simplicity. The seller closing research (Freddie Mac via Bankrate, 2026) supplies the national frame for the residue's components, and the study sample supplies the local one. Nothing in the comparison requires the cash price to equal the listed gross for the conclusion to hold at the net line, which is where this series has always instructed sellers to conduct it: the residue is small, fixed, and auditable, the stack is large, negotiated, and season dependent, and the statement is the document that proves which one a given route actually charged.
The residue's smallness is also what makes the discipline of comparing multiple cash offers tractable: with the statement's lines known and nearly constant across buyers, the bids' differences reduce to the price and the possession terms, and the seller compares two numbers instead of two narratives.
When should the seller obtain the figures, and who can charge what?
At the file's assembly, from the title company the seller intends to use, in the form of a preliminary settlement statement built from the actual file: price assumption, certified payoff, tax position, association position where one exists. The preliminary statement converts the closing from a revelation into a term of the negotiation, since the seller compares bids on the net of a known residue and can spot, in the final statement, any line that was not in the draft. The seller should also settle, in the contract, the allocation questions the statement will otherwise decide by custom: which party carries the owner's policy premium, whether any charge is being shared, and the treatment of the earnest money's application, all small figures that belong in ink because the table is a poor negotiating venue. As to who can charge what, the rule of the documented structure is that charges flow from the transaction's own machinery, the state, the county, the title company, the lien holders being satisfied, and from no one else: no party to a legitimate cash closing bills the seller for the privilege of buying his house, and the following report in this sequence is devoted to that boundary, its legitimate exceptions, and the demands that mark a buyer as one to decline.
The excise's computation (Washington Department of Revenue, 2025) and the recording's completion (King County Recorder, 2026) close the machinery's account. The seller who has run the preliminary statement, audited the lines against the published comparisons, and fixed the allocations in the contract arrives at the closing with nothing left to learn, which is the state this series calls a professional seller, and which costs him one engagement made a fortnight earlier than custom suggests. The cash closing's costs, in the end, are the price of the settlement machinery itself, and the machinery, unlike the marketing and the lending it replaces, charges for work the seller can watch it do.
What do sellers keep when a Redmond sale stays off market?
The off market cash seller keeps the statement short and entirely his own: no brokerage accounting passes through it, no marketing invoices trail the closing, and every line on the page is one the seller's own preliminary draft predicted.
The calendar is kept at 7 to 21 days, which is also a cost line in disguise, since each avoided month is carrying never billed. The commission is kept in full, 45,000 to 54,000 dollars on a 900,000 dollar sale, the single largest avoided charge in the comparison. The seller closing costs are the one benefit this report itemizes rather than claims: the residue is paid, honestly, at 1 to 2 percent, and what is kept is everything the other structure would have added around it, the credits of 10,000 to 25,000 dollars and the season's 18,000 to 36,000 dollars of carrying, neither of which appears on any cash statement.
Reproduced here is the disclosure for this series, printed in full, exactly as the series prints it. Frontier Capitals sources off market homes to builders as a wholesaler; it is not a title company, an escrow holder, or a tax adviser, and it charges sellers no closing related fee of the kinds this report itemizes. Its economics sit on the buyer side of the transactions it sources, under the verification standard repeated across this series, and a seller's statement in any transaction it touches should reconcile line for line with the preliminary draft practice described here.
Methodology and limitations
The evidence behind this report is the Redmond study sample of 36 older homes in 98052, 13 acquired by builders, together with the market and official sources below. The cost bands are the set's documented ledger figures, and the excise is stated at its documented residential starting rate with its graduated structure noted rather than tiered out for every price.
Individual statements vary with the contract's allocations, the liens being satisfied, and the title company's schedule for the specific file, and the preliminary draft from the engaged company governs the specific case. Tax treatment of any line for a specific seller is a question for the seller's own adviser. Within those limits the documented conclusion stands: the closing costs of a Redmond cash sale are the excise, the title and escrow charges, recording, payoff settlement lines, and prorations, totaling characteristically 1 to 2 percent, with no commission or lender driven charge anywhere in the statement.
Conclusion
The closing costs when selling a house for cash in Redmond are the settlement machinery's own charges and nothing else's: the graduated excise the state collects, the title and escrow fees for the search and the closing's conduct, the recording of the deed and the releases, the satisfaction of the seller's own liens through the payoff lines, and the prorations that settle taxes and association amounts to the day. They total the documented 1 to 2 percent, they can be drafted and audited before the round, and they are surrounded by absences, commission, lender charges, credits, and carrying, that constitute the cash structure's economy. Sellers who want a preliminary statement worked against the study sample can call 401-219-4207 or email [email protected] for a confidential review. If every line can be known in advance, why do sellers agree to learn them at the table?
Frequently Asked Questions
Who pays the excise tax in a cash sale, and can it be negotiated?
The seller pays it under the state rules this set documents (Washington Department of Revenue, 2025), and as a tax it is not itself negotiable; what parties occasionally negotiate is the economic burden, a price adjusted in consideration of the statement's whole shape, which is a price discussion rather than a tax discussion and belongs in the round rather than at the table. The seller's protection is arithmetic: the excise reconciles to the published graduated rules (Washington State Department of Revenue, 2026) on the actual price, and a preliminary statement lets him verify the figure before any document is signed, so the tax arrives as a known line in the net computation rather than as the closing's surprise guest.
Are title and escrow charges the same for cash and financed sales?
The seller side charges are substantially the same family, the search, the policy allocation as contracted, and the settlement fee, with the cash closing marginally lighter because it files fewer instruments and supports no lender's policy machinery on the buyer's side. The differences that matter are not in these lines but around them, the commission and credit lines the financed statement carries and the cash statement does not. Sellers comparing title companies should compare the full preliminary statements on their own file rather than headline fees, since the allocation customs and the schedule's small print move the seller's total more than any single quoted charge.
Does the seller pay the buyer's closing costs in a cash sale?
Not under the documented structure: each party carries its own side, the buyer his funding and acquisition charges, the seller the residue this report itemizes, and any departure from that division is a negotiated term that should appear in the contract and in the preliminary statement, priced consciously, rather than surfacing as a table custom. Cash buyers of the documented segment do not ask sellers to fund their side, since their economics are computed on the parcel and their closing machinery is their own overhead. A bid that arrives with the seller funding buyer side charges is a lower bid wearing a costume, and the net line exposes it in one subtraction.
What are prorations, and why do they appear on the seller's side?
Prorations settle amounts that straddle the closing date: property taxes paid or owed to the day of transfer, association dues, and similar periodic charges, credited or debited so each party bears the cost of its own period of ownership. They are not fees and not profit to anyone; they are the arithmetic of a mid period transfer, and their figures are predictable from the county's tax position (King County Assessor, 2026) and the association's statement where one exists. Sellers sometimes misread a debit proration as a closing cost overcharge; the preliminary draft, which shows the same lines a fortnight early, is the cure, since a proration understood in advance reads as fairness and the same figure discovered at the table reads as a grievance.
Can closing costs be deducted from the price instead of paid at the table?
They already are, mechanically: the settlement statement nets every charge against the price and pays the seller the remainder, so no seller writes separate checks for the residue lines at a normal closing. The distinction that matters is between the statement's netting, which is universal, and a price reduction demanded in the residue's name, which is a negotiation: a buyer who asks the seller to cut the price by an amount labeled closing costs, while the statement also charges them, is collecting twice, and the preliminary statement is again the instrument that makes the double collection visible. Sellers should negotiate on the net the draft shows and let the labels fall where they may.
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Sources
- Frontier Capitals, 2026. 189 neighborhood builder acquisition sample: 36 homes sampled in 98052, 13 acquired by builders, average older home price 34.7 percent of new build. Market data.
- Bankrate, 2025. Average closing costs by state. Market data.
- Freddie Mac via Bankrate, 2026. Closing costs for sellers. Industry report.
- Washington State Department of Revenue, 2026. Real estate excise tax rates and calculation rules. Official record.
- Washington Department of Revenue, 2025. Real estate excise tax: graduated rates from 1.1% on residential sales, seller-paid. Government data.
- National Association of Realtors, 2025. Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers: typical seller commission 5 to 6%; seasonal selling patterns; share of sellers transacting without an agent. Industry report.
- King County Recorder, 2026. Recorded deeds and transaction records, Redmond WA. Official record.
- King County Assessor, 2026. Parcel records, land vs. improvement assessments for the 98052 area. Official record.
- Redfin, 2026. September 2026 housing market data: 25.1% of homes sold above list price, 98.6% average sale-to-list ratio. Market data.
- Freddie Mac, 2026. Primary Mortgage Market Survey: 30-year fixed rate 7.28% for the week ending October 1, 2026. Market data.