A buyer purchasing a $500,000 home in St. George with a $400,000 loan pays roughly $1,891 in title, escrow and recording charges at closing, plus lender fees and prepaid items. The seller on that same transaction pays roughly $2,881 in title and escrow before commission and payoff. Those two figures come from First American Title's published Utah rate schedule and the Washington County Recorder's fee schedule, quoted for Washington County on August 23, 2026, and the calculator below reproduces them to the dollar.

Most closing cost calculators you will find for Utah use a national percentage. They guess. This one uses the actual filed rate table, the actual $45 county recording fee, and the allocation rules in the current Utah Real Estate Purchase Contract, so the number it gives you is the number a title company would quote.

What the calculator is actually using

Every dollar figure above traces to a published document. Here is the source for each line, with the date it was verified.

Are escrow fees split 50/50 in Utah?

No, and this is the single most repeated error on Utah closing cost pages. The current Real Estate Purchase Contract, the state-approved form effective December 4, 2024, says in Section 4.3(a) that "Seller and Buyer shall each pay their respective fees charged by the escrow/closing office for its services in the settlement/closing process," unless the parties agree otherwise in writing. The old 50/50 language is gone from the form.

In practice the two sides are close but not equal. On the First American quote I ran for Washington County on August 23, 2026, the purchase escrow fee was $805 total, allocated $390 to the buyer and $415 to the seller. That is a real split from a real fee schedule, not a convention. If you see a Utah page telling you escrow is halved, it is quoting a contract that has not existed for over a year and a half.

Who pays for title insurance in Utah, the buyer or the seller?

Both, for different policies. Under REPC Section 6.2 the seller pays for and causes to be issued the ALTA Homeowner's Policy of Title Insurance in favor of the buyer. That is the owner's policy, and it is the larger of the two premiums. The buyer separately pays for the lender's policy, which the lender requires and which protects the lender rather than the buyer. That allocation is contractual on the seller side and customary on the buyer side.

On a $500,000 purchase with a $400,000 loan in Washington County, First American's published Utah rates put the owner's policy at $2,466 and the simultaneously issued lender's policy at $1,401, as of August 23, 2026. Premiums are set by liability amount, not by a percentage, and the liability rounds up to the next $10,000 increment. A $505,000 purchase prices at the $510,000 row.

Does Utah have a real estate transfer tax?

No. Washington County's published Recorder and Treasurer fee schedules contain no transfer tax, deed tax, documentary stamp, or any value-based conveyance charge. Recording is a flat fee per document under Utah Code 17-71-407, currently $45, regardless of whether the home sells for $300,000 or $3,000,000. This matters because several national closing cost pages still list "transfer taxes" as a Utah seller cost. They are wrong, and if you budgeted for one you have money you did not know you had.

How are Washington County property taxes prorated at closing?

Utah property taxes run on the calendar year and are billed once. The lien attaches January 1 under Utah Code 59-2-1325(1)(c), the county treasurer mails the notice on or before November 1 under 59-2-1317(7)(a), and the full year is due November 30 under 59-2-1331(1)(a). There are no installments.

That timing creates the thing that confuses people. If you close in June, no bill exists yet for that year. The seller credits the buyer for January 1 through the settlement date, and the buyer pays the entire year's bill when it arrives in November. If you close in December after the bill is paid, it runs the other way and the buyer reimburses the seller for the remainder of the year. The calculator above handles both directions based on your closing date.

How much cash does a buyer actually need at closing in St. George?

Take your down payment, add the title, escrow and recording charges the calculator produces, add your lender's fees, and add prepaid items. Prepaids are the part buyers forget: prepaid interest from the closing date to the end of the month, the first year of homeowners insurance paid up front, and the escrow reserve the lender collects to fund your future tax and insurance bills. Under Regulation X at 12 CFR 1024.17(c)(5), that reserve cushion cannot exceed one sixth of the estimated annual disbursements, which is two months. It is a maximum, not a requirement, and some lenders collect less.

What does it cost to sell a house in St. George?

Brokerage compensation is the largest number by a wide margin, and it is not set by law. It is fully negotiable, and since the August 2024 practice changes the seller's contribution toward the buyer's brokerage is a separate negotiated line that REPC Section 4.3(e) leaves blank by default. If no amount is entered on the contract, the seller has not agreed to compensate the buyer's brokerage at all.

After that, the seller's fixed costs in Washington County are modest and predictable: the owner's title policy, the seller's share of escrow, any HOA charges due on change of ownership, and the property tax proration. A seller at $500,000 pays about $2,881 in title and escrow. Everything else on a seller's settlement statement is either negotiated or is their own loan payoff.

What HOA fees can a St. George seller be charged?

Utah caps two of them. A payoff or resale statement fee cannot exceed $50, under Utah Code 57-8a-106(2)(b) for planned communities and 57-8-6.3(2)(b) for condominiums, and it cannot be charged at all unless the declaration authorizes it. Reinvestment fees are capped by Utah Code 57-1-46(5): for covenants recorded on or after May 6, 2026 the cap is 0.5% of the property's value, or 0.25% if the association is a "low-amenity association," meaning detached single-family homes with no capital-intensive infrastructure to maintain. Covenants recorded between March 2010 and May 5, 2026 remain under the flat 0.5% cap, and large master planned developments of at least 500 acres or 500 units are exempt from the cap entirely.

Who pays these is negotiable. REPC Section 4.3(c) treats transfer fees, community enhancement fees and reinvestment fees together as "change of ownership fees" and gives the parties a checkbox: seller, buyer, split, or other. They are not automatically the seller's problem.

Run your other numbers before you decide

Closing costs are the one-time number. If you are comparing St. George against where you live now, the recurring numbers matter more over any real holding period. I built three other tools on the same standard: a Southern Utah property tax calculator covering all thirteen Washington County tax areas against eleven comparison cities, a Southern Utah income tax calculator that answers the Utah-taxes-Social-Security question with the actual credit math, and a power cost calculator comparing nine electric utilities. For what homes are actually selling for right now, the St. George market summary is updated monthly.

If you want me to run an actual net sheet on a specific property, or you want a real title company quote rather than an estimate, get in touch and I will put it together. I have been selling real estate in Washington County for 13 years and closed 275 transactions, so I have seen most of what shows up on a settlement statement.