The Premium Problem: What Rising Auction Fees Mean for Sellers

Christie's moved in September 2026 to 28% on the first $2 million of a hammer price in New York, 22% up to $8 million and 15% above that, bringing it into line with the structure Sotheby's adopted in February. Bonhams follows in October, with a new bottom tier of 30% on the first $35,000, and tapering to 14% above $7.5 million in the US. In the UK, the equivalent rates begin at 30% on the first £25,000 and fall to 14% above £5 million. Phillips revised its schedule earlier in the year, charging 29% on smaller lots, though its Priority Bidding discount allows qualifying buyers who submit a binding written bid at or above the low estimate at least 48 hours before a live auction to take a few points off. The discount does not apply to every category or sale format.

The headline reading is that buying at auction has become more expensive. The more useful reading, for anyone holding a print or edition they may one day sell, is that selling at auction has too.

The buyer's premium is, in name, a charge on the buyer. In practice, it is shared.

As the advisor Josh Baer told Margaret Carrigan for ArtNet, collectors already know their ceiling and will not bid beyond it. An experienced buyer does not think in hammer prices. They think in the total they are prepared to pay, and they work backwards. When the premium rises, the amount they will pay in total does not move. What moves is the hammer they are willing to reach.

That hammer is where the seller's proceeds are calculated. So when the premium goes up and the buyer's ceiling holds, the difference comes out of the consignor's side of the transaction. It is the seller who feels the squeeze, and nowhere more than in the core of the prints market: works selling between roughly $30,000 and $250,000. These lots are large enough for the premium to be a serious sum, yet far too small ever to reach the lower tiers. Under the new Christie's and Sotheby's structure, every dollar of a $100,000 hammer is charged at 28%, adding $28,000 to the buyer's bill. Buyers at this level tend to be experienced and price-aware, so that $28,000 is not added on top of what they would pay. It is taken out of the hammer.

The effect is easiest to see on a single lot. Take a buyer who has decided they will pay no more than £10,000 in total for a particular print. The only variable below is the premium rate.

I have a good deal of sympathy for the auction houses on cost. Having worked as a business manager at Christie's, I know first-hand how expensive it is to run one: global sale rooms, specialist departments, logistics, marketing and guarantees all have to be paid for. The art advisor Todd Levin argues the increases make sense given how thin auction house margins already are, and I would not dispute that.

But the cost of running an auction house is not the collector's problem, and it has become a familiar justification for each new increase. Overheads have grown, yet some of what drives them is less necessary than it once was. Lavish printed catalogues, expensive tours of works ahead of sale and the inefficiencies that come with operating at that scale made more sense before collectors researched, viewed and bid online. Asking sellers to absorb the cost of that model through a lower hammer is a choice, not an inevitability.

Stephanie Armstrong of Beaumont Nathan offers the more interesting view. She suggests the market may be approaching a tipping point, while acknowledging that auctions still offer unmatched access and efficiency. Both halves of that are true. The underlying problem, as she puts it, is that running an art business at scale is expensive. It is the same pressure that is steering collectors towards advisories and other lower-overhead ways to buy and sell.

The fee rises are not a scandal. They are a signal about cost structure, and cost structure is something every seller can choose to take into account.

For sellers of prints and editions, the practical question is no longer only what a work might make. It is what it will return, net, through each route available.

Auction sometimes remains the right answer for some works. Take your chances with a very rare proof, a fresh-to-market impression of a sought-after original, or a work where genuine competition between bidders is likely to justify the cost of a public sale. In those cases the room does what nothing else can. But for a large share of the prints market, where editions trade in well-documented ranges and buyers already know what they will pay, the auction premium is a cost that buys relatively little additional price.

This is where private sale earns its place. When a work is priced correctly against recent auction and private results, it can be placed directly with a buyer who is already looking for it, without a premium wedged between what they pay and what the seller receives. At MyArtBroker we operate on a 0% seller's commission, so the figure agreed is the figure the seller receives.

Private sale is not the right route for every work, and we do not treat it as one. Alongside our private sales service we run Auction Advisory, which advises sellers on when auction is the better option and which house and sale will suit the work best. This matters most at the lower end of the market, where the costs of a private sale can absorb too much of the return, and where the choice of house, sale and fee structure makes a real difference to what the seller keeps. That advice is free. Because we are not tied to a single channel, the recommendation follows the work rather than our own route, and the comparison is always made on net terms.

We would typically suggest asking three questions of any sale: what is the realistic net return through each channel, how likely is the work to sell there, and how exposed does it become if it does not. A work that fails to sell at auction is visible to the market in a way that a private enquiry is not, and that exposure has a cost of its own.

The fee rises of 2026 are unlikely to be the last. Costs at the top of the market are not falling, and buyers have shown they will absorb higher premiums by adjusting their bids rather than walking away. That arrangement works well for the auction houses and tolerably for buyers. It works least well for sellers who choose a channel on headline prices alone.

The response is not to avoid auction. It is to stop treating it as the default. The sellers who do best in the years ahead will be the ones who understand what their work is worth, what each route will cost them, and what they will actually receive.

Market reporting on 2026 buyer's premium changes and the comments from Josh Baer, Todd Levin and Stephanie Armstrong are drawn from reporting by Margaret Carrigan, 24/09/2026.