Who pays Australia's e-conveyancing network fees, and who caps them

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Kooky

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Every home sale that settles electronically in Australia carries a small charge that few buyers or vendors ever see on its own. It is the fee an electronic lodgment network operator, or ELNO, charges for lodging the documents with the land registry and, in most sales, moving the money. The Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal of New South Wales, known as IPART, puts the fee for a single-title transfer with financial settlement at A$146.30 in New South Wales in 2026-27, including GST, and each side of the sale pays it.

The amount is modest next to duty or commission, but it is charged millions of times a year in a market where IPART gives one operator about 99 per cent of electronic transactions. That is why the fee is capped by rule, why it has been reviewed three times by a pricing regulator since 2019, and why governments spent years trying to make competing networks work together. This guide explains who pays the network fee, the rule that limits it, what the reviews concluded, what interoperability meant and where it stands, and what IPART's draft report of July 2026 proposes from 1 July 2027.

IPART, Draft Report on Electronic Lodgment Network Operator service fees, 3 July 2026.

What the network fee is and who charges it

An ELNO runs the online workspace in which conveyancers, lawyers and lenders prepare a transaction, sign it digitally, settle the funds and lodge the documents. The people and firms that log in are called subscribers. IPART's draft report is plain about where the fee falls first: subscribers pay ELNO service fees. A conveyancer acting for a purchaser pays to lodge the transfer; a bank pays to lodge its mortgage.

The fee is charged per document and per subscriber, not per sale. IPART's table of 2026-27 fees for New South Wales shows how the structure works for the larger operator, Property Exchange Australia, known as PEXA. A mortgage over a single title costs A$54.89, or A$73.04 when it comes with financial settlement. A transfer of a single title costs A$97.24, or A$146.30 with financial settlement. Multiple titles cost more: A$75.90 and A$94.38 for mortgages, A$118.25 and A$167.42 for transfers. All of those figures include GST, and IPART notes that the New South Wales mortgage figures leave out a separate charge of A$1.10, including GST, which it labels the NECDS fee.

Across every transaction type the operator offers, IPART says the fees run from just under A$6 to just under A$170. The second approved operator, Sympli, appears in the report without a price list: IPART says only that it priced at a discount to PEXA when it entered the market.

The network fee is separate from what the land registry charges to register a dealing and from what the state revenue office charges in duty. Those are government charges that pass through the same workspace. The network fee is the operator's own price for the service.

Who pays in a typical sale

IPART sets out what it calls a typical four-party transaction in New South Wales: a vendor with a mortgage to pay off, and a purchaser borrowing to buy. Four subscribers take part, and each is charged.

IPART gives the four amounts but no total. Adding them, as a worked example on IPART's own figures, gives A$146.30 plus A$146.30 plus A$73.04 plus A$54.01, or A$419.65 in network fees for the one sale, before the A$1.10 data charge on the mortgage and before any registry fee or duty.

Who bears that cost in the end is a different question from who is invoiced. The draft report speaks of fees being passed through to customers. IPART's 2023 report on interoperability pricing is more careful: subscribers may recover ELNO service fees from their customers, and whether they do is a business decision. Neither report says that a vendor or a purchaser must be shown the fee as a separate line, and neither sets out how a lender treats its own share. What can be said from the sources is that the two transfer fees are charged to the representatives of the vendor and the purchaser, that the two lender fees are charged to the banks, and that the rules cap what the operator charges the subscriber, not what the subscriber charges its client.

The pricing rule in the Model Operating Requirements

The cap sits in the Model Operating Requirements, the national rule book for operators that the Australian Registrars' National Electronic Conveyancing Council, ARNECC, coordinates and that each state and territory registrar applies. IPART's draft report describes the current rule as section 5.4 of Version 7.2, dated May 2026. This guide relies on IPART's description of that section.

Three obligations come out of it. An operator may charge service fees under its pricing policy. It must publish its prices. And it must not charge more than the published amounts. The published pricing table is therefore a ceiling as well as a notice: a subscriber can check an invoice against it.

The second part of the rule limits how the table may change. Under section 5.4.3, as IPART quotes it, each individual fee may rise once a year, by a percentage not exceeding the increase in the Consumer Price Index for the March quarter compared with the March quarter a year earlier. IPART adds that from 1 July 2019 to 30 June 2027 the increases take effect on 1 July. The cap applies fee by fee. An operator cannot hold one fee steady and raise another by more than inflation.

A worked example shows the arithmetic. Assume a fee of A$100.00 and assume the index rose 3 per cent between one March quarter and the next. The highest fee the rule would allow from the following 1 July is A$103.00. The 3 per cent is an assumption chosen for the sum, not a published inflation figure.

Changes of another kind go through the registrar. Under section 5.4.4, IPART says, an operator may seek the registrar's approval for changes to its pricing tables, and that approval may not be unreasonably withheld. New South Wales adds a layer of its own. According to IPART, the state's conditions of approval cap increases at the index minus a factor set by the Registrar General, and that factor has been zero since 2018-19, so the state rule has given the same result as the national one.

Enforcement follows the usual division of labour in this field. IPART's report says state and territory registrars approve operators and monitor and enforce their compliance, while ARNECC coordinates the model rules.

Where the starting prices came from

An inflation cap only limits growth. The level it starts from was settled in 2019, in IPART's first review, which looked at the pricing framework for electronic conveyancing in New South Wales.

The NSW Office of the Registrar General reported the outcome in a news item dated 6 December 2019. IPART's final report, published in November 2019, found that PEXA's prices at the time were reasonable as maximum prices for all operators. The 2026 draft report recalls the detail: the 2019 review recommended maximum prices for every ELNO equal to PEXA's then-current prices, indexed by the Consumer Price Index, for two years from 1 July 2020, with a further review after two years.

The result was a ceiling drawn around one operator's existing price list and then moved up with inflation. IPART's 2026 draft is candid about the side effect. Because individual fees have only been allowed to rise by the index since February 2019, the report says, the structure of prices has been locked in.

A market with one dominant network

The reason a pricing regulator is involved at all is the shape of the market. IPART's draft report gives PEXA 99 per cent of eConveyancing in 2024-25 and 90 per cent of all conveyancing, paper and electronic together. The operator completed 3.95 million transactions that year, according to the report, against about 33,900 for Sympli. On those two figures, Sympli handled a little under 1 per cent of the combined total, which is consistent with the share IPART states.

Volumes have grown. IPART puts the market at about 800,000 transactions in 2017-18 and says PEXA's transactions grew by about 26 per cent a year, or 393 per cent, between then and 2024-25. Its media release of 3 July 2026 notes that eConveyancing is now mandatory for most property transactions.

The report also records how thin the competitive field has become. The ASX sold its 49 per cent stake in Sympli to ATI, the owner of InfoTrack, for a nominal amount, and a prospective third operator, Lextech, withdrew its application in May 2025. IPART's media release says it found little evidence that Sympli competes meaningfully with PEXA. Those are the regulator's findings on market structure. They are not a judgement on the quality of either service, and this guide makes none.

What interoperability means

In a network sale today, every party has to be in the same workspace. IPART's 2023 report states the limit in one sentence: currently, all parties must use the same ELNO. A second operator can only win a transaction if every subscriber in it, including the lenders on both sides, agrees to use that operator.

Interoperability was the proposed way around this. IPART defines it as multiple ELNOs being able to represent different subscribers in one property transaction. Each subscriber would stay on the network it had chosen, and the networks would exchange data behind the scenes. The 2023 report describes the roles. One operator, the Responsible ELNO, completes lodgment and financial settlement. The other operators in the transaction are Participating ELNOs.

That design raised a pricing question of its own: should one network pay another for doing the lodging? IPART's final report of 9 June 2023 answered with two regulated fees and one principle.

• A Responsible ELNO fee of at most A$0.75, excluding GST, per represented subscriber, for 2023-24. In a transaction with four subscribers, IPART calculated that the responsible operator would receive A$2.25.
• A default Responsible ELNO surcharge of at most A$6.20, excluding GST, per transaction. IPART built it from capital costs of about A$7.7 million, annual costs of about A$1.5 million, a five-year asset life and a pre-tax return of 8 per cent.
• The principle: subscribers should not pay more for an interoperable transaction than for a single-network one.

IPART also recommended that no common user charge be payable to PEXA, that the costs of setting up interoperability be recovered through ordinary service fees from all subscribers, and that both fees be indexed from 2024-25. The fees were written to apply from 1 July 2023. They were designed for transactions that, as the next section shows, are not being rolled out.

The reviews, and where the reform stands

The NSW Office of the Registrar General keeps a public list of the studies behind the reform. Read in order, it shows a run of reviews that backed interoperability or found competition lacking, followed by a halt.

The competition regulator's contribution came early. According to the Registrar General's summary, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's Report on E-conveyancing Market Reform, dated December 2019, found interoperability the preferred approach over the alternative of a regulated monopoly, and listed the benefits of competition as innovation, price pressure and responsiveness to stakeholder concerns. IPART's 2023 report adds that the ACCC warned that new entrants might struggle to sustain a presence, and called for a robust negotiating framework and enforcement regime between operators.

The list holds more. A NSW directions paper is dated February 2019. A review of the intergovernmental agreement by the consultancy Dench McClean Carlson followed in December 2019. A cost-benefit analysis by the consultancy CIE is dated September 2020. A Senate Economics References Committee inquiry was referred on 12 February 2025; the Registrar General's page lists it under November 2025 without summarising its findings.

Then came ARNECC's own two reports of December 2025. As the Registrar General's page summarises them, the Functional Requirements Review found a viable pathway to interoperability but described it as complex. The Cost Benefit Analysis found that three of seven options would deliver net benefits, with the direct-connect model preferred.

The decision that followed is recorded in IPART's draft report: in March 2026 ARNECC decided not to proceed with mandated interoperability at this time and to strengthen the existing regulatory framework, and ministers endorsed that course, conditional on Commonwealth support. The New South Wales page, last modified on 13 July 2026, uses a shorter word. The interoperability reform, it says, has been paused. The office adds that the progress report tabled in the NSW Parliament on 25 June 2026, its fourth, will be the last unless the reform resumes.

The two wordings are compatible, and neither says the reform has been abandoned. Both describe a stop without a restart date.

The 2026 draft: regulate one operator

With interoperability off the table for now, the price question returned in a sharper form. IPART's current review began on 1 July 2025 at the request of the NSW Government, acting for the jurisdictions represented on ARNECC. Its terms of reference ask whether ELNO service fees should be regulated at all, by what method or at what level, and how they should be adjusted and reviewed afterwards. A call for submissions went out on 19 August 2025, a stakeholder workshop was held on 17 March 2026 and a methodology paper followed on 31 March 2026. The draft report was released on 3 July 2026.

Its media release notes that the interoperability reforms are not proceeding at this time and that it found little evidence of meaningful competition between the two operators. The draft recommendations then depart from the 2019 approach in several ways.

• Transaction fees should stay regulated, but only for PEXA. Sympli and any new entrant would be free to set their own.
• Regulation should also reach PEXA's additional services that are closely tied to network transactions and not effectively open to competition.
• Fees should be the same across the country, so that a subscriber pays the same wherever the land is.
• Prices should be built from PEXA's own costs, using what regulators call a building block method.
• Prices should be set for four years, 2027-28 to 2030-31, with a review beginning in 2029-30 in time for new prices on 1 July 2031.
• The rule should keep setting individual fees, not a weighted average cap that would let the operator rebalance between them.

Some related charges are treated separately. Mobile signing and digital certificates would be regulated as charges of their own; IPART cites a one-year mobile signing certificate at A$119.68 from 1 July 2026. Optional products for subscribers would not be price-regulated, though their prices would have to be published.

The draft transfer fees for 2027-28

The headline of the draft is a cut to one family of fees. IPART's media release says transfer fees are the operator's highest and do not appear to be aligned with the costs of providing transfers. The draft would reset four of them for 2027-28 and let every other regulated fee rise by the index from its 2026-27 level.

Taken back to the four-party sale, the two transfers would cost A$92.71 each, or A$185.42 together, in place of A$292.60. That is A$107.18 less in transfer fees for the one sale, split evenly between the vendor's side and the purchaser's. This is a worked example on IPART's draft figures. It leaves the lenders' two fees aside, because those would move with an inflation figure that does not yet exist.

IPART also considered a slower path, with transfer fees falling by between 11.2 and 18.3 per cent in each year instead of all at once. From 2028-29 to 2030-31, the draft would let regulated fees rise each year by the index. Its media release sums up the rest of the price list in a phrase: most other fees would stay the same in real terms.

How the building block sums work

A building block method adds up what an efficient service should cost, including a return on the money invested, and divides the total by the expected number of transactions. IPART's draft decisions fill in each term for the four years.

Demand comes first. IPART forecasts 4.24 million billable transactions in 2027-28, then 4.21 million, 4.16 million and 4.15 million. Operating expenditure is set at A$164.2 million, A$165.3 million, A$165.4 million and A$166.1 million, in 2026-27 dollars, which adds up to A$661.0 million across the period. Capital expenditure is A$35.9 million, A$36.9 million, A$38.0 million and A$39.1 million, or A$149.9 million in all. IPART applied a productivity factor of 1.7 per cent a year to controllable costs.

The capital already sunk into the network is valued through an initial asset base of A$367.6 million at 1 July 2027, and the allowed return is a post-tax real rate of 6.5 per cent. Together the blocks give a notional revenue requirement of between A$271.5 million and A$274.4 million a year, in 2026-27 dollars, with a net present value of A$923 million over the four years.

Two design choices matter to subscribers. There would be no adjustments in the middle of the period for cost changes: the charges the operator itself pays to registries, revenue offices and the data standard are folded into the cost base. And IPART floats, for the review after this one, a two-way adjustment for demand. It would work after the event, apply when transaction revenue lands 5 per cent above or below forecast in present-value terms, and exclude revenue lost because the operator's market share changed.

What remained open in October 2026

The draft set its own calendar: a public hearing on 21 July 2026, written submissions by Friday 14 August 2026, and a final report to the NSW Government, on ARNECC's behalf, by 30 September 2026. The review had been extended by three months from its original twelve. Registrars outside New South Wales drew attention to it too; the South Australian Registrar-General's office circulated the dates in a customer bulletin on 6 July 2026.

IPART's review page, opened again on 10 October 2026, listed no final report, and the pages read for this guide did not show whether one had been delivered to the government by that date or how governments would respond. Every 2027-28 figure in this guide is therefore a draft figure, and a final report may change it. Several other points stay open. The draft summary read here does not state whether the 2027-28 transfer figures include GST, although the range of reductions IPART quotes matches the GST-inclusive New South Wales fees. The current fees quoted are New South Wales fees; the tables for other states were not read. The second operator's prices were not set out. And the ACCC's 2019 report is described here as the Registrar General and IPART summarise it.

For a vendor or a purchaser, the practical position until 30 June 2027 is the one the published tables give: a network fee on each transfer, capped by an inflation rule, charged to the representative. For subscribers, the question the reviews leave behind is larger than one price list. The reviews from 2019 onward backed competition between connected networks. With that reform paused, the draft before governments would do it by counting one operator's costs.

The cap of 2019 froze a price list in place. The draft of 2026 asks what the service costs to run.

Kooky, from Shaka

Kooky edits Agents Estate and builds Shaka, the payment router he made for real estate professionals. One payment comes in, and every agent, agency and party in the deal receives their signed share on closing date.

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