Most of the line items on a closing statement scale with the purchase price — title insurance climbs through its tiers, transfer tax is a percentage, even the escrow fee has a per-$1,000 rate layered on top of its base. One line item in this calculator’s baseline does not move at all: a flat legal fee that appears in exactly four states and is zero everywhere else.
Four states, one flat fee
New York, New Jersey, Georgia, and North Carolina are the four states where this baseline attaches a real estate attorney’s fee to the closing by default — $1,200 on the buyer’s side, $900 on the seller’s side, regardless of whether the home costs $150,000 or $1.5 million. In the other thirteen states this calculator covers, that line item is $0. It is not that closings in those thirteen states never involve a lawyer — a buyer or seller can hire one anywhere — it is that this baseline only assumes one is a standard, priced-in part of the transaction in the four states where attorney involvement in residential closings is the long-standing market convention.
| State | Buyer legal fee | Seller legal fee |
|---|---|---|
| New York | $1,200 | $900 |
| New Jersey | $1,200 | $900 |
| Georgia | $1,200 | $900 |
| North Carolina | $1,200 | $900 |
| All other 13 states | $0 | $0 |
Why it does not scale with price
Title insurance and transfer tax are modeled as rates against the purchase price because the risk and the tax base both grow with the home’s value. An attorney reviewing a contract and running a closing does roughly the same amount of work whether the price is $200,000 or $2,000,000, so this baseline models the fee as flat rather than tying it to price — the opposite logic from almost every other line item in the closing cost breakdown.
The other flat fee: recording
Every state in this baseline also charges a flat recording fee — the cost of filing the deed (and, for the buyer, the mortgage) with the county — and it is modeled the same way in every state: the buyer pays the full flat amount, the seller pays 40% of it. Unlike the legal fee, every state has a recording fee; what varies is just how large the flat number is, and the spread is wide — a 10x difference between the cheapest and most expensive state in this comparison.
| State | Buyer recording fee | Seller recording fee |
|---|---|---|
| Washington | $300 | $120 |
| New York | $250 | $100 |
| Pennsylvania | $250 | $100 |
| California | $225 | $90 |
| Florida | $150 | $60 |
| New Jersey | $120 | $48 |
| Illinois | $110 | $44 |
| Texas | $125 | $50 |
| Virginia | $75 | $30 |
| North Carolina | $64 | $25.60 |
| Nevada | $45 | $18 |
| Georgia | $50 | $20 |
| Tennessee | $40 | $16 |
| Colorado | $40 | $16 |
| Ohio | $34 | $13.60 |
| Arizona | $30 | $12 |
| Michigan | $30 | $12 |
Stacking both fees: where small line items add up
Put the two together and the four attorney states carry the heaviest combined load from these two flat fees alone. A buyer closing in New York pays $1,200 in legal fees plus $250 in recording — $1,450 before title insurance, escrow, or transfer tax even enter the picture — against a buyer in Arizona, who pays $0 in legal fees and $30 in recording. Neither number changes with the price of the home, so on a lower-priced purchase these two flat fees make up a noticeably larger share of total closing costs than they do on an expensive one.
This is why a state-by-state closing cost comparison needs more than just the headline transfer tax or title insurance rate — these smaller flat fees do not track the purchase price, which means their relative weight shifts depending on where a specific deal lands on the price spectrum. On a $150,000 starter home, New York’s $1,450 in flat buyer fees is proportionally much heavier than it is on a $1.5 million purchase in the same state.