"No Completion, No Fee": The Half-Promise

Roughly one in four agreed property sales now collapses before completion. The profession has built a reassuring slogan around that reality, and then written the small print so that the slogan protects the firm at least as much as it protects the client. It is time someone in the profession said so plainly.

There are few phrases in conveyancing marketing as soothing as "no completion, no fee." It promises the buyer or seller that the most frightening risk in the whole process, paying out thousands of pounds for a transaction that falls apart through no fault of their own, has been taken off the table. It is printed on websites, repeated by call centres, and offered as the headline reason to instruct one firm over another.

It is also, on close inspection, one of the least transparent pricing models the profession operates. Not because firms are doing anything unlawful, but because the promise is often far narrower than the words suggest, and the gap between what clients hear and what they actually owe sits precisely where the regulatory framework expects disclosure to be clearest.

This is not a fringe complaint about a handful of bad operators. It concerns one of the most visible consumer-facing pricing models in residential conveyancing, applied to a market in which failure is not the exception but a structural feature.

The Scale of the Risk

Start with the numbers, because they are the foundation of the whole argument.

According to data from TwentyEA, reported by PropertyWire, the national fall-through rate in the first quarter of 2026 stood at 23.7 per cent, down marginally from 24 per cent. Roughly one agreed sale in four does not reach completion. Some analyses put the figure considerably higher. Connells reported that 37 per cent of agreed sales did not complete in 2025, with leasehold transactions failing at 43 per cent against 36 per cent for freehold. Whichever figure one accepts, the conclusion is the same. A buyer or seller instructing a conveyancer in 2026 faces a very real, quantifiable probability that their transaction will collapse.

The financial damage is equally well documented. Rightmove's analysis, as reported, attributed close to £392 million in lost estate agency revenue in England in 2024 to failed transactions, while drawing a distinction between sales that fail and never return to the market and those that collapse but later complete. One industry analysis put the total cost of failed transactions to the wider economy at around £8.6 billion in 2024, with the average loss to an individual buyer estimated at approximately £2,727 in an earlier year, a figure that will only have risen with inflation and the lengthening of transaction times.

Those transactions are failing later than they used to. Industry data shows that the average time from offer to exchange has now passed one hundred days, and that late-stage fall-throughs are rising. The later the collapse, the more money has already been spent on searches and legal work before the deal dies, and the larger the bill that has already been run up.

This is the risk that "no completion, no fee" purports to neutralise. Understanding what it actually neutralises is where the problem begins.

The Incomplete Picture 

In many "no completion, no fee" arrangements, the promise applies only to the conveyancer's own professional fee, the charge for the legal work. It does not usually absorb the third-party payments already incurred along the way, such as search fees, Land Registry fees, managing agent charges, or other disbursements. That distinction may be technically accurate in the retainer, but it is not always made with the same prominence as the marketing promise. The result is a predictable gap between what the consumer thinks has been protected and what remains payable if the transaction collapses.

Those sums are neither trivial nor refundable. Searches commonly run to several hundred pounds, with Land Registry and bankruptcy searches adding further charges. A buyer who has paid for searches and then watches the chain break above them, an outcome entirely outside their control, will find that the comforting promise does less than expected at the very moment it is needed. The legal fee is waived. The disbursements are not. A survey, although usually arranged outside the conveyancer's retainer, is another sunk cost the consumer may lose when the transaction fails, and it adds to the overall loss even though it sits beyond the firm's own pricing.

It does not stop there. Many such arrangements require a non-refundable deposit at the outset, money the client never sees again regardless of how the matter ends. Some firms build in fee triggers, so that once contracts are drafted, or once a particular stage is reached, a charge crystallises whether or not the transaction completes. And some arrangements tie the client to the same firm for any future attempt, removing the freedom to take their business elsewhere after a disappointing experience.

The point is not that any single one of these terms is improper. A firm is entitled to recover money it has genuinely paid out on a client's behalf, and disbursements are real costs. The point is that the slogan and the substance can pull in opposite directions. Many clients are likely to hear "if it fails, I pay nothing." The contract may say "if it fails, you pay everything except our profit margin." Those are not the same statement, and the distance between them is filled by terms the consumer may never read closely and was never invited to weigh.

The Contract 

There is a well-worn truth in this area that the profession knows and the public does not. The marketing on the website does not override the terms and conditions the client signed. When a transaction collapses and a client queries the bill, the answer they receive is too often a reference to a clause in the engagement letter, not the headline that persuaded them to instruct in the first place.

This is a familiar pattern in any market where a simple promise is used to win business and a complex document is used to define liability. The simple promise does the selling. The complex document does the protecting. The consumer experiences the first and is bound by the second.

For a profession that holds itself out as the guardian of clients' interests in their largest financial transaction, that ought to be uncomfortable. The whole justification for instructing a regulated professional rather than navigating the process alone is that the professional protects the client from precisely this kind of gap between appearance and reality. When pricing exploits that gap, the justification weakens.

The Regulatory Framework 

Here is the part the profession cannot easily wave away. The regulatory framework already points firmly in the direction of the disclosure that is so often missing.

The SRA Transparency Rules, in force since December 2018, require SRA-regulated firms offering residential conveyancing to publish cost information, the likely disbursements and their costs, the treatment of VAT, what is included in the price, and, importantly, what a client might reasonably expect to be included but is not. The accompanying guidance is clear that this information must be prominent, clear, understandable, and easy to find. Equivalent transparency expectations also apply in the licensed conveyancer market, where firms regulated by the Council for Licensed Conveyancers are subject to their own transparency requirements.

Read that framework against the "no completion, no fee" model. A consumer reasonably expects that a promise of "no fee if it does not complete" includes the searches, because those are among the very costs the promise appears designed to protect against. The transparency obligations are built around exactly that kind of reasonable expectation, and around making the position clear and prominent rather than buried. The rules do not say, in so many words, that abortive costs must be displayed beside the slogan. But the direction of travel is unmistakable, and the abortive position is too often relegated to terms and conditions rather than presented where the promise is made.

The enforcement record tells its own story about where regulatory attention has gone. Since May 2023 the SRA has issued 439 official warnings and 36 fixed penalty fines for transparency failures, driven by rolling sweeps of firms' websites. That is meaningful, but it polices whether the required information exists somewhere on a website. It does less to police whether a reassuring three-word promise is being allowed to do work that the small print immediately undoes. Compliance to the letter is not the same as honesty in substance, and the distinction matters most precisely in the scenario the consumer most fears.

Who Benefits

Follow the incentive. "No completion, no fee" is offered most enthusiastically by high-volume, low-margin conveyancing operations, the model under which a single failed transaction is absorbed across a large book of work. For such a firm, the slogan is a powerful acquisition tool. It removes the consumer's single greatest hesitation at the point of instruction, and the disbursement carve-out helps ensure that the firm's actual cash outlay is recovered regardless of outcome.

The consumer, by contrast, is the least informed and most pressured participant in the transaction, making a decision about a service they will use once or twice in a lifetime, in an emotional state, under time pressure, comparing firms largely on price and on exactly the kind of reassuring promise this model trades on. The information asymmetry is profound, and the model benefits from that asymmetry.

This is not a conspiracy. It is ordinary commercial behaviour responding to ordinary commercial incentives. But ordinary commercial behaviour is precisely what professional regulation is supposed to temper in a market where the customer cannot realistically protect themselves.

The Counterargument

In fairness, the model is not worthless. A genuine "no completion, no fee" arrangement does transfer real risk away from the consumer. The professional fee on a collapsed purchase can run to several hundred pounds or more, and a client who pays only the disbursements is unquestionably better off than one billed in full for abortive legal work. For a buyer in a fragile chain who knows the odds of failure are real, the protection is not illusory, and firms offering it are responding to a legitimate consumer anxiety.

The objection is not to the existence of the model. It is to the way it is sometimes sold. A promise that protects the client from part of the risk, while being marketed as though it protects them from all of it, is not full transparency. It is selective disclosure dressed as reassurance. The profession cannot simultaneously claim the credit for offering protection and decline the responsibility of stating clearly what that protection excludes.

Honest Pricing

The remedy is not complicated, and it requires no change to the law, only a change in practice.

A firm offering "no completion, no fee" should state, with the same prominence as the promise itself and not several pages into an engagement letter, exactly what the client will owe if the transaction fails: the searches, the Land Registry and other third-party charges already incurred, any non-refundable deposit, and any fee triggered before completion. The realistic abortive cost should be quoted as a figure or a range, in the same place and the same typeface as the headline, so that the consumer compares like with like. Where a deposit is non-refundable, that word should appear next to the amount. Where the client is tied to the firm for a second attempt, that condition should be disclosed before instruction, not discovered after a failed one.

None of this weakens the commercial offer of a firm that is genuinely competitive. It simply prevents the slogan from doing more work than the substance can support. A firm confident in the value it provides should have nothing to fear from stating plainly what a failed transaction costs, because the honest answer is itself a competitive advantage over rivals who would rather the client did not ask.

Ticking Time Bomb

The fall-through rate is not going to fall meaningfully on current trends. The market is slower, transactions are more fragile, and collapses are happening later and at greater cost. That means the number of consumers who instruct a firm on the strength of a reassuring promise, and then receive a bill they did not expect when the deal dies, is rising, not falling. Every one of those clients is a complaint waiting to happen, a poor review waiting to be written, and a small dent in the public trust the profession can ill afford to lose.

The conveyancing profession can respond to this in one of two ways. It can carry on selling a half-promise as a whole one and hope that consumers continue not to read the small print. Or it can decide that a profession which exists to protect clients in their largest transaction should price that protection honestly, state plainly what failure costs, and let firms compete on the truth rather than on the gap between the slogan and the contract.

One of those responses protects margins in the short term. The other protects the profession's standing in the long term. The public, which now stands a one in four chance of paying for a transaction that never completes, has every reason to start asking which firms are being straight with them.

This article is intended to provoke discussion and does not constitute legal or financial advice. The views expressed are deliberately challenging and do not necessarily reflect settled policy positions. If you would like to discuss conveyancing pricing, abortive transaction costs, or compliance with the SRA Transparency Rules, please get in touch.