The FARE Act and broker fees: who pays now in NYC

New York City's FARE Act (Fairness in Apartment Rental Expenses) changed the default expectation for rental broker fees. The headline shift: when the landlord hires the broker, the landlord is generally the one who pays the fee — the cost can't simply be passed to the tenant by default.

For a brokerage, that turns a previously informal detail into something you want recorded, consistently, on every deal you close.

The statutory default

The cleanest way to think about it: the broker fee is landlord-paid unless something specific changes that. A tenant-paid or split arrangement isn't impossible, but it's the exception, and it generally needs a written agreement and a clear paper trail rather than a handshake.

That means three things are worth capturing at close:

• Who paid the fee — landlord, tenant, or split by written agreement.
• An explicit acknowledgment when the answer is anything other than landlord-paid.
• A timestamp and the person who recorded it, so the record is defensible later.

Why record it on the deal, not in your memory

Fee disputes and compliance questions surface months after a lease is signed, long after the details have faded. If the fee posture lives only in an email thread or someone's recollection, you're reconstructing it under pressure.

Recording it as a structured field on the closed deal gives you two things:

1. A compliance report you can actually run. "Show me every non-landlord-paid deal this year" should be one query — those are precisely the ones that needed a written agreement.
2. A guardrail at finalize time. Setting anything other than landlord-paid should require the extra acknowledgment, not slip through silently. The default should match the law.

What this looks like in practice

In Urbero, the fee payer is a required field when a deal is finalized. The statutory presumption — landlord-paid — is the default, and choosing tenant-paid or split is gated behind an explicit FARE Act acknowledgment and a brokerage-admin check, which writes an audit entry. The analytics view then surfaces the share of landlord- vs. tenant-paid deals and flags every non-landlord-paid close for review.

It's a small field with outsized value: it keeps your default aligned with the law and turns a year of closings into a report instead of a scramble.

Pair it with Good Cause Eviction tracking and you've covered two of the biggest 2026 compliance shifts NYC brokers are navigating. Talk to us about how your team records this today.

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This post is general information, not legal advice. The FARE Act's requirements are detailed and fact-specific — confirm your brokerage's obligations with counsel.