Two identical houses at identical prices, one in Santa Clara County and one in San Mateo County, do not net the seller the same amount. The difference is not tax rates. It is local custom about who pays which closing cost — and Santa Clara’s custom is the most seller-heavy in the Bay Area.
The allocation, county by county
| County | Escrow fee | Owner’s title policy | Transfer tax |
|---|---|---|---|
| Santa Clara | Seller | Seller | Seller |
| Santa Cruz | Split 50/50 | Disputed — see below | Seller |
| Monterey | Split 50/50 | Seller | Seller |
| San Benito | Seller | Seller | Seller |
| San Mateo | Buyer | Buyer | Seller |
| Alameda, Contra Costa | Buyer | Buyer | Seller |
| Marin, Napa, Sonoma, Solano | Buyer | Buyer | Seller |
| Sacramento, Placer | Split 50/50 | Seller | Seller |
| El Dorado, Nevada | Split 50/50 | Split 50/50 | Seller |
San Francisco is its own case: the buyer customarily pays escrow and title, and the documentary transfer tax is folded into the city’s own transfer tax.
The Santa Cruz owner’s policy is genuinely unsettled
I want to be straight about this one rather than pick the answer that sounds cleaner. Title insurers’ published county sheets generally show the owner’s policy split in Santa Cruz County. Local practice frequently puts it on the seller.
Both are defensible, and I have seen both close. If someone tells you there is one correct answer in Santa Cruz County, they are describing their own habit, not a rule. Budget for the seller-pays version and treat the split as upside.
None of this is law
Every allocation in that table except the transfer tax itself is local custom, and every one of them is negotiable in the purchase contract.
Custom matters because it sets the default expectation, and a buyer’s agent will quote it as though it were fixed. It is not. In a market where a seller has leverage — and in Santa Clara County this August, homes were still closing at 102.9% of list in 25 days — the allocation is a legitimate term to negotiate alongside price. In a slower market it is one of the things a seller concedes to hold price.
Either way, it should be a decision rather than an assumption. On a $2,000,000 Santa Clara sale the escrow line alone is the difference between carrying the whole fee and carrying half of it.
Why the printed sheet may be wrong on the tax
Title companies publish these county guides as a free service and revise them periodically. The customs they record are stable and reliable. The city transfer tax figures in them go stale quickly, because cities change them and the sheets do not get reprinted on that schedule.
That is exactly what happened in this market: San Jose’s Measure E threshold, Mountain View’s Measure G tier and the City of Santa Cruz’s Measure C all postdate the editions circulating now. The cliffs those create are large enough to matter.
And a deliberate omission on my part: I do not publish out-of-area city transfer tax rates on this site. They move constantly — Berkeley’s threshold recalculates annually and Measure W restructures it into three tiers on January 1, 2027 — and a stale number on a page people trust is worse than no number. For a city outside my two counties, ask the city or your escrow officer.
The full closing-cost page prices every city transfer tax and surtax in both counties at eight sale prices, and the calculator puts it into a net.