Roughly one contract in fifteen
In the National Association of REALTORS August 2026 REALTORS Confidence Index survey, 7% of contracts were terminated over the previous three months. Call it one in fifteen. In the same survey, 14% of contracts had delayed settlements, which is closer to one in seven, and 6% of contracts were delayed specifically over appraisal issues. Contracts typically closed in 30 days.
Those are the current figures and the survey month has to travel with them, because this is a monthly series and the readings move. The August 2026 survey went to a random sample of 75,000 REALTORS plus 3,924 respondents from the previous three surveys who had provided email addresses. There were 1,718 respondents, the survey ran from August 31 to September 3, 2026, and 872 of those respondents had a client in the last month. Among those with a client, the maximum margin of error for proportion estimates is 3% at the 95% confidence level.
One thing to be precise about: this is agents reporting the share of their contracts in the past three months that were terminated. It is not a transaction-level count drawn from records, and it is not a count of buyers as distinct from sellers. It is the best national series that exists on the question, and it is a survey.
Seven percent is not a rise, and it would be wrong to read it as one
The 7% reading sits against 6% one month earlier and 6% a year earlier. One point, on a survey whose stated maximum margin of error among respondents with a client is 3 points, is not a change. Anyone describing this as deals falling apart at an increasing rate is reading noise as signal.
The delay figure is slightly more interesting and still not dramatic: 14% in August 2026, against 12% a month earlier and 14% a year earlier. The appraisal-delay share was 6%, flat against both comparisons. Median days to close held at 30 across all three readings.
What the series actually shows, over the comparisons published with it, is stability. Termination runs in the mid-to-high single digits. Late settlement runs around one in seven. Both have been doing that. If you are trying to work out whether the market has turned against sellers or buyers in a way that affects your own negotiation, this is not the series that will tell you - and that is a more useful conclusion than a manufactured trend.
What the 7 percent does not separate
This is the most important limitation on the number and the one you will not see stated anywhere else. The 7% blends two completely different events.
A buyer who exercises an option period, a termination right under an inspection contingency, or a statutory disclosure right is terminating. So is a buyer who simply stops performing, forfeits their deposit and walks away. The first bought a right and used it; the second defaulted. For the person reading this, those are not the same thing at all - one costs an option fee, the other can cost the earnest money and more - and no published series separates them.
So the honest reading of 7% is: one contract in fifteen ends before closing, for all reasons, by all routes, including sellers terminating, financing collapsing, appraisals missing, and buyers using rights they paid for. It is not "7% of buyers get cold feet."
One related figure from the same survey puts the contingency question in context: 20% of buyers waived the inspection contingency in August 2026, up from 16% a month earlier and 18% a year earlier. One buyer in five is entering these transactions without the right most commonly used to exit after a report lands.
Why nobody can tell you why deals die
The question everyone actually wants answered is what share of terminations are caused by inspection findings. There is no current answer to that, and the reason is that NAR stopped publishing the breakdown. The Confidence Index still reports the termination rate every month. It no longer reports a breakdown by reason.
The last time NAR published one, as far as the primary source goes, was from its February 2015 survey, written up in the association's Economists' Outlook that April. In that survey, home inspection issues accounted for 29% of reported contract terminations, financing problems for 25%, and appraisal issues for 8%.
That figure is eleven years old and this page is not going to pretend otherwise. It predates the current rate environment, the current inventory picture, the growth in contingency waivers, and the commission-practice changes that reshaped how these transactions are papered. It should not be quoted as a current share, and the construction "29% of deals fall apart over inspections" is not supportable from it. What it is good for is order of magnitude and nothing more: the last time anybody measured, inspection issues were the largest single named reason, slightly ahead of financing.
If you want the arithmetic, do it yourself with both numbers in view and the gap between their dates attached. In 2015 terms, inspection issues as roughly three in ten of a termination rate in the single digits put inspection-driven terminations at a small share of all contracts. Whether that still holds is unknown, and anyone who tells you otherwise is extrapolating from a survey taken eleven years ago.
This is the largest gap in the published record on the subject, and it sits exactly where the demand is.
The delay number is the one that should worry you more
Buyers fixate on termination and under-read the delay figure, which is twice as large. Fourteen percent of contracts settled late in the August 2026 Confidence Index, with 6% delayed over appraisal issues.
Delay is the shape most post-inspection trouble actually takes. A repair that has to be completed before closing, a specialist evaluation that has to be arranged, an escrow holdback that has to be papered, a credit that underwriting has to re-approve after the amendment changes the numbers - none of those kill the deal and all of them move the date. If you have a rate lock, a moving date or a lease ending, a delay has a cost even when the transaction succeeds.
The practical consequence for your negotiation is that the instrument you choose has a timeline attached. Asking for money that fits your loan program's cap generally does not move the closing date. Asking for work to be completed before closing generally does, and the more specialized the work the further it moves. That trade-off is worth pricing before you choose, and it is covered in negotiating after a home inspection.
What it costs to be one of the 7 percent
Walking away inside a contractual right generally costs you what you paid for the right. Walking away outside one is a default, and the exposure is larger than most buyers think.
The Texas promulgated contract, TREC No. 20-19, puts it in Paragraph 15: if the buyer fails to comply, the seller may "(a) enforce specific performance, seek such other relief as may be provided by law, or both, or (b) terminate this contract and receive the earnest money as liquidated damages." Note the order. Specific performance is listed first, for both parties. The widespread belief that a seller's only remedy is to keep the deposit is wrong on the face of the form.
State practice varies substantially on the ceiling. California's standard-form residential purchase agreement caps what a seller may retain as liquidated damages at 3% of the purchase price where the property is a dwelling of no more than four units and the buyer intended to occupy one of them - a cap that tracks California statutory law on liquidated damages in residential purchases. The copy consulted for this page is a 2021 revision of the form obtained from a third-party host, since the association's forms are member-restricted, so treat the 3% as the California standard-form cap and verify the current paragraph reference before relying on it.
The contrast is the point. A Texas buyer who defaults is exposed to the earnest money plus the possibility of specific performance. A California owner-occupier buyer's exposure under the standard form is capped at a stated percentage of the price. Neither describes your contract, which is the document that governs. Both tell you that "lose the deposit" is an incomplete account of the downside.
What the numbers are good for
Three uses, and then the limits.
- Calibrating your own expectations. Termination is uncommon but not rare, and late settlement is roughly twice as common. Both of those are useful baselines against which to judge how alarming your own situation is.
- Reading the seller's position. A seller who has sold before knows that most contracts close. Your threat to walk is credible in proportion to the specific rights you hold, not in proportion to how common walking away is.
- Resisting invented statistics. If a figure about why deals fail does not come with a survey month, it is either from the 2015 breakdown without the date attached or it is from nowhere.
And plainly, the things the record does not contain: how often buyers specifically, as opposed to either party, terminate; how many terminations were exercises of a paid-for right versus defaults; what share of terminations today are attributable to inspection findings; and how often a buyer who threatened to terminate got what they asked for instead. Four questions readers ask constantly, and four answers that do not exist in any published source. Saying so is more useful than filling the gap with a plausible number.