Referral fee rules mortgage brokers actually need to know.

Ontario's Mortgage Brokerages, Lenders and Administrators Act generally requires a licence to solicit or negotiate mortgages, assess borrowers, or arrange mortgages for compensation. A specific exemption exists for referrals: a person can refer a prospective borrower to a mortgage lender without a licence, provided they do nothing more than pass along the lender's name, address, phone number, fax number, email, or website.

The moment a referral partner goes beyond that — discussing rates, assessing whether a client qualifies, or effectively negotiating on the broker's or lender's behalf — the exemption stops applying, regardless of how the arrangement is labelled. A fee paid for activity that has crossed that line risks compensating unlicensed mortgage brokering, which is a materially different problem than a routine referral payment.

Saskatchewan's FCAA requires a dedicated Referral Disclosure Form whenever a licensee receives referral compensation, and it must be provided no later than when the referral is made — a genuinely different timing trigger from a general mortgage disclosure, which is typically tied to signing rather than the referral itself.

A realtor who simply hands a buyer your card or contact information is almost always operating inside the unlicensed-referral exemption — that's exactly the low-friction activity the exemption is designed to permit. Paying that realtor a modest referral fee for the introduction is generally fine, provided the fee is for the introduction itself, not for anything resembling mortgage advice or negotiation on their part.

The exemptions described in provincial legislation are generally framed around referring a borrower to a lender, which is worth keeping in mind when structuring reciprocal arrangements — a realtor referring a client to a broker isn't automatically covered by the identical language written for the opposite direction. If you're building a formal, ongoing referral-fee program rather than an occasional thank-you payment, it's worth having your Principal Broker or legal counsel confirm the structure specifically, rather than assuming a casual arrangement scales safely.

• →Who was paid, how much, and for what specific activity — described precisely enough to show it was an introduction, not mortgage advice.
• →Whether the fee, or the fact that a referral relationship exists, was disclosed to the client — even where it isn't a formal conflict-of-interest trigger, transparency reduces later disputes.
• →The date the referral was made, which matters directly in Saskatchewan given its referral-triggered disclosure timing.

Each of these provinces regulates referral and compensation arrangements through its general conflict-of-interest and commission disclosure requirements, but we could not independently verify a referral-fee-specific rule comparable to Ontario's licensing exemption or Saskatchewan's dedicated disclosure form for any of the four, in the time available for this piece. Rather than assume those two models transfer directly, confirm the current requirement with BCFSA, RECA, the AMF, or FCNB before structuring a referral-fee arrangement outside Ontario or Saskatchewan.