MA Deed Stamps and Transfer Tax When You Sell a House

Massachusetts charges a deed excise — often called deed stamps or transfer tax — of roughly $4.56 per $1,000 of the sale price in most of the state, and by long-standing custom the seller pays it. Your closing attorney typically calculates it, deducts it from your proceeds, and remits it to the Registry of Deeds when the deed is recorded.

The short answer

In most of Massachusetts, the deed excise runs about $4.56 per $1,000 of the sale price — generally stated as $2.28 per $500 of consideration. On a house that sells for $400,000, that is roughly $1,824. By long-standing custom in this state, the seller pays it.

You will not write a separate check for it. The excise is settled at the closing table: your attorney calculates the amount from the price on the deed, deducts it from your proceeds, and sends it to the Registry of Deeds along with the recording fees when the deed is recorded. The evidence of payment appears on the face of the recorded deed, which is why people still call it “deed stamps” even though nobody licks a stamp anymore.

It is one of the few seller costs in Massachusetts that is genuinely predictable. You can calculate it yourself, in advance, from nothing but a sale price.

What the deed excise actually is

Massachusetts taxes the transfer of real property. The tax attaches to the deed itself, and the deed cannot be recorded until the excise is paid. Because a deed that is not recorded does not give the buyer clean, public evidence of ownership, the excise is effectively unavoidable in an arm’s-length sale.

Two things about the mechanism trip people up:

• It is based on the sale price, not on your equity. A seller with a large mortgage payoff and a seller who owns free and clear pay the same excise on the same sale price.
• It is based on consideration, not on assessed value. The town’s assessment is irrelevant to the calculation.

The Registries of Deeds that collect it operate under the Secretary of the Commonwealth; you can find your county’s registry through the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s office. General guidance on the deeds excise is also published at mass.gov.

How the amount is calculated

The rate is applied per $500 increment of consideration, and partial increments are generally rounded up. The arithmetic is simple enough to do on your phone: divide the price by 500, round up, multiply by $2.28.

The figures below are an illustrative example, made up to show how the excise scales with price. They are not market data, an appraisal, or an offer on any house.

Barnstable County and the islands are different

Cape Cod and the islands are the main exceptions to the statewide figure. Barnstable County has historically applied a higher excise rate than the rest of the state, and Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard and a small number of other communities impose separate land bank transfer fees that are typically charged to the buyer rather than the seller. If your property sits in one of those areas, treat the statewide rate as a starting point only and ask the closing attorney for the exact figure before you plan around it.

When little or no excise applies

The excise follows real consideration, so transfers where no real money changes hands usually carry little or none. In general terms, that includes:

1. Deeds between family members for nominal consideration.
2. Deeds into or out of a trust where beneficial ownership does not really change.
3. Confirmatory or corrective deeds fixing an error in an earlier recording.
4. Certain transfers involving government entities.
5. Foreclosure deeds, where the excise is generally the foreclosing lender’s responsibility rather than the former owner’s.

These determinations are fact-specific and the attorney drafting the deed makes the call. Do not restructure a transfer to chase an exemption without legal advice — this article is general information, not tax or legal advice, and a qualified attorney or CPA should review your specific situation.

Where the excise shows up in your paperwork

Massachusetts is an attorney-closing state, which means a licensed attorney conducts the closing and handles the deed and the recording. Practically, that is who does the excise work for you. It appears as a debit to the seller on the settlement statement, next to the payoff, the prorated property taxes, and any recording fees. If you want the wider picture of who pays what, our guide to closing costs in a Massachusetts cash sale walks through the whole sheet, and what an attorney actually does at a Massachusetts closing covers the role in more detail.

One more point worth knowing: for federal purposes, transfer taxes on a home sale are generally treated as a selling expense that reduces the amount realized, rather than as a deduction. For most sellers of a primary residence the federal exclusion of gain — typically up to $250,000 single or $500,000 married filing jointly, when the ownership and use tests are met — means it never becomes a live issue. Our overview of taxes when you sell for cash in Massachusetts goes further, and the IRS publishes its own guidance at irs.gov. Again: general information, not tax advice.

The excise is the same either way — the timing is not

The excise does not care how the buyer is paying. What changes between paths is how long you carry the house before you get to that line item, and how certain the date is.

A listed sale usually means preparing the house, showings and open houses, an inspection followed by repair negotiations, and then a mortgage — which typically adds roughly 45 to 60 days for appraisal and underwriting, with the real possibility that a financed buyer falls through and the clock restarts. For a market-ready house and a seller with time, that path often produces the highest gross price, and it is genuinely the right call for many people.

A cash sale is a shorter list, and you can see the whole of it: an offer, a purchase and sale agreement, title work, an attorney closing, then the deed recorded and funds released. There is no appraisal contingency, no underwriting, and no loan-funding delay to wait on. A cash offer is below full retail, because it reflects the house in as-is condition and the buyer’s costs and risk — the fair comparison is what lands in your pocket on a date you chose, after the excise and payoff come out. How our process works lays out each step, and the paperwork you need to sell in Massachusetts covers what to gather either way.

Sorting out your side of the closing sheet

If you are trying to figure out what you would actually walk away with, the deed excise is the easy part — run the price through the arithmetic above and you have it, within a few dollars, before you talk to anyone. The harder variables are the payoff, the tax proration, and whether the house needs work before a financed buyer will touch it.

New England Home Partners buys houses across Massachusetts in as-is condition, and we are a direct cash buyer rather than a real estate agent or broker. We have purchased 230-plus homes and hold a 5.0-star rating. If it helps to see the excise, the payoff, and the closing date sitting in one set of numbers, you can request a no-obligation cash offer — usually within 24 hours, with closing in as few as 7 days when that suits you — or call New England Home Partners at (508) 286-7942 and we will walk the figures through with you. No pressure either way; even sellers who end up listing tend to find the exercise clarifying.