Ask what a Canadian business broker or M&A advisor charges and the honest first answer is that nobody publishes a standard figure — not a regulator, not an industry association, not any source available in this environment. What is published is the shape of the fee, which is a more useful thing to understand than a number that does not exist.
Key takeaways
A business broker and an M&A advisor are not the same service wearing a different name, and their fee structures reflect that. Treadstonelaw.ca’s comparison of the two describes a broker’s fee as “primarily a success fee on closing,” suited to “smaller, ‘main street’ style businesses” sold through “standardized listing and marketing.” An advisor’s fee, by contrast, is described as “success fee, sometimes alongside a retainer, especially on longer mandates” — reflecting the more customized, often competitive process an advisor runs for “larger or more complex transactions” involving structures like earn-outs or rollover equity.
On the commission question specifically, treadstonelaw.ca’s guidance for Ontario sellers does not hedge: “there is no single ‘standard’ rate you should expect to see quoted, and any figure you hear from a friend’s past sale or an online forum may have little to do with what applies to your business.” Its recommendation follows directly from that: “treat every number a broker proposes as a starting point for negotiation rather than a standard rate,” and have the fee terms reviewed by a lawyer before signing. That advice generalizes past brokers specifically — nothing in the Canadian source material available anywhere states a typical percentage for any type of intermediary, and a number repeated informally enough to sound standard is not the same thing as one that is.
Most Ontario business brokers, per the same source, “work primarily on a success-fee (commission) model — a fee calculated as a percentage of the final sale price, paid mainly when the sale actually closes.” Some charge a retainer at the start of the engagement, “sometimes credited against the eventual success fee, sometimes not, depending entirely on how the agreement is written” — which is precisely the kind of clause a lawyer should confirm before signing, since “depending entirely on how the agreement is written” means the outcome is not implied by the label “retainer” on its own. A longer, more complex M&A mandate is more likely to carry a retainer alongside the success fee simply because the advisor is committing real time to a curated outreach process before any fee is guaranteed to materialize.
A different model exists alongside brokers and advisors. Deavo, a Canadian business-for-sale marketplace, states plainly on its own pricing page that it runs “100% free in v1 — no listing fees, no buyer fees, no success fees, no paywalls anywhere,” and describes itself, in its own words, as “a listings platform — not a broker… we never represent either party or take a success fee.” That is a genuinely different value proposition, not a cheaper version of the same one: a marketplace connects buyers and sellers and gets out of the way, where a broker or advisor also runs the marketing, screening and negotiation. The free option removes a fee at the cost of removing the service the fee would otherwise have paid for.
Don’t confuse this with a financing fee
A sale-process fee — broker or advisor commission — is a different thing entirely from a lending fee on the buyer’s side of the same deal. The CSBFP’s own registration fee is 2% of the total loan amount, charged to the borrower and financeable as part of the loan itself. One is what the seller pays to have the business sold; the other is what the buyer pays to have the acquisition financed under a federal loan-guarantee programme. They land on opposite sides of the same closing table and neither substitutes for the other.
It is worth separating this question from a related one that comes up often in the same conversation: what a private equity fund itself charges its own investors, rather than what an intermediary charges a seller for running a single transaction. Those are unrelated fee structures answering unrelated questions, and neither Canadian source material available here publishes a figure for the fund-level version either — no standard management fee, no standard carried-interest percentage, no benchmark hurdle rate appears anywhere in the Canadian record, for the same reason no standard sale-commission percentage does: nobody is required to publish one, and the terms that exist are privately negotiated case by case. A seller pricing out a broker or advisor engagement is answering a narrower, more concrete question than “what does private equity normally charge,” and the two should not be conflated.
The mechanism that matters more than the rate itself is what the engagement letter says about a buyer the seller already knew before signing — whether that buyer is carved out of the fee, and for how long after the engagement ends. See selling without an intermediary for what happens when a seller who has already signed a listing agreement finds a buyer independently, and choosing between a broad auction and a quiet approach for how the fee model tends to line up with how widely the process runs.
Not necessarily — a pure success-fee arrangement can carry a higher percentage precisely because the intermediary is bearing all the risk of the deal not closing, where a retainer shares some of that risk with the seller upfront. The total cost depends on the specific numbers in a specific agreement, which is exactly why no general rate answers the question.
Treadstonelaw.ca’s own guidance treats any quoted figure as a starting point for negotiation, not a fixed rate, which implies the answer is generally yes. What matters more than winning a lower headline number is understanding the full shape of the agreement — retainer terms, carve-outs for known buyers, and what happens if the engagement ends without a sale.
It replaces the listing and buyer-matching function, not the marketing, screening, negotiation and process-management work an active broker or advisor performs. A seller weighing the two is really choosing between doing more of that work themselves and paying a success fee to have someone else do it.
A short call can help you read a proposed engagement letter before it becomes a binding commission agreement.
Canadian small-business transaction data is not published anywhere, so most valuations in this country quote an American benchmark. The Deavo–Treadstone Acquisition Index is a daily record of Canadian listings built to replace that: asking-price distributions by province and city are published now, and days on market, departure rates and asking-to-sale spreads follow as the series lengthens. Leave an email and we will tell you as each measure lands.
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