Delaware Statutory Trust Fees in 2026: 90 DSTs Filed With the SEC This Year, and the Median Load Is 7.00%

The 2026 cohort: 90 DSTs, read this month

The table above is the long view — 141 filings across 15 sponsors, some of them years old, and it is downloadable as an eight-row CSV of the fully-sold examples. The question a person actually has is narrower and more urgent: what is being charged right now, on the deals I am being shown this week. So on September 22, 2026 we ran EDGAR's full-text search for every Form D and Form D/A filed in 2026 by an issuer whose name contains "DST" or "Delaware Statutory Trust", pulled the primary_doc.xml of each, and kept one row per issuer at its most recent filing: 90 DSTs with a readable Item 12.

Three things in that table are worth saying out loud.

First, "there is no industry load" is now measured, not asserted. A quarter of the 2026 cohort charges under 5%, and a third charges 8% or more. Those are the same product category, sold in the same year, to the same kind of buyer. The distribution is bimodal-ish around a 5–9% bulk, and the tails are real in both directions.

Second, ten DSTs charged nothing. That is the finding we did not expect and the one that most directly contradicts the number in circulation. A Form D reporting $0 in Item 12 is a deal placed without a selling commission to a broker-dealer — typically sold direct by the sponsor. It does not mean the deal is free: Item 16, acquisition and organisational costs to related persons, is separate and often substantial, and ongoing fees sit outside Form D entirely. It does mean that "every DST carries a 10–15% load" is false on this year's own filings.

Third, the 2026 cohort reproduces the sponsors we already had. NexPoint files at 8.75% in 2026, exactly the figure our 2018–2020 filings showed. Inland files its 2026 Jersey City, Union and Wheaton multifamily DSTs at 7.90%, inside the 7.90%–8.90% band we published in August. When a method built on old filings predicts new ones correctly, that is the closest thing to a control this dataset can have.

The cleanest 2026 total we can defend line by line

Our August example was Cantor Fitzgerald's CF James Multifamily DST from 2024. Here is the 2026 equivalent, chosen the same way — the issuer itself enumerates the components, so the two items can legitimately be added:

• JWCM Vivian, DST — SEC CIK 2087350, most recent Form D/A accession 0002087350-26-000011, filed September 9, 2026
• Total offering $46,170,900; $21,701,157 sold to 65 investors at the date of that filing; minimum $25,000
• Item 12 sales commissions $4,739,697 = 10.27% of the offering
• Item 16 gross proceeds to related persons $3,063,750 = 6.64%
• Combined: $7,803,447 = 16.90% of the offering
• On a $500,000 exchange, roughly $84,500 before a dollar is invested

The addition is legitimate here for the reason it was legitimate for Cantor and not for Passco: the issuer's own clarification field says Item 16 is "an estimate of acquisition fees and offering and organizational expenses that may accrue to one or more Related Persons" — costs accruing to related persons, not costs the depositor absorbs. It also confirms what Item 12 contains: "Sales Commissions include estimates of the maximum amount of Selling Commissions and Dealer Fees that may be paid." Read it as "up to 16.90%", which is what the filing says.

One filing we excluded, and why you should know we did

ESSENTIAL NET LEASE INDUSTRIAL 114 DST (CIK 2117067, Form D filed March 16, 2026) reports $7,276,040 of Item 12 sales commissions against a $12,126,736 offering. That computes to 60.00%, which is not a fee — it is an evident error in the filing, and we excluded it from every figure on this page rather than publish a number we do not believe. We name it because a dataset that silently drops its outliers is a dataset you cannot check. Every other filing we read is in the CSV, including the ten zeros.

Where the industry's number actually comes from

This matters more than the number itself, because the provenance is the story.

The figure in wide circulation is a median load-to-equity of 19.82%, published by Realized1031.com:

"In 2018, the median load-to-equity on a DST was 19.82%, meaning that this percentage of each investment was being allocated towards expenses related to Sponsor compensation, selling commissions, and the establishment of the trust."

Follow the footnote. It reads: "FactRight. Typical Fees and Metrics in DST Offerings. February 7, 2018."

Three things about that chain:

1. The FactRight page is gone. It returns a 404. The figure cannot be checked at its source by anyone, including us.
2. It is 2018 data still being cited in 2026. Our own dataset shows sponsors have moved in that window — ExchangeRight cut its commission by two full percentage points, Capital Square trimmed from 8.50% to 8.40% on most offerings filed since October 2024.
3. Neither party in the chain is disinterested. FactRight is a due-diligence vendor selling reports to the broker-dealers who distribute these products. Realized1031's own disclosure states securities are offered through "Realized Financial, Inc. ('Realized'), a broker/dealer, member FINRA / SIPC" — and the article's argument is that the 19.82% overstates the real cost.

The same page argues the number down, incidentally, which is a fair argument on its own terms:

"…a 19.82% load-on-equity of $45,520,000 would equal a 9.02% load on the syndicated offering price of $100,000,000."

That is a real distinction — load on equity is a different denominator from load on the offering — and it is the sort of thing that ought to be stated whenever the number is quoted, and usually is not.

And the industry's own statistics are not public. Mountain Dell Consulting, the main data source for the securitized 1031 market, says it shares data "at industry conferences and by monthly subscription." Its footer discloses that it "is an affiliate of Orchard Securities, LLC, Member FINRA/SIPC." The canonical numbers for this market are produced by a broker-dealer affiliate and sold behind a paywall.

None of this is an accusation of dishonesty. It is a reason to go to the filings, which is what the rest of this page is.

The method, stated plainly so you can check it

Every DST offering sold under Regulation D files a Form D with the SEC, and it is public. Two fields matter:

• Item 12 — Sales Commissions. Selling commissions plus dealer and placement agent fees. Inland's own clarification: "Sales Commissions include estimates of the maximum amount of Selling Commissions, Dealer Fees and Placement Agent Fees that may be paid."
• Item 16 — Use of Proceeds. The gross proceeds used "for payments to any of the persons required to be named as executive officers, directors or promoters" — sponsor-side acquisition fees, organization and offering expenses, managing broker-dealer fees.

Three methodological traps, all of which we hit and had to fix:

1. The denominator will lie to you on a partially-sold filing. totalAmountSold is a point-in-time figure while salesCommissions is the maximum for the entire offering. Divide one by the other early in a raise and you get nonsense — one JLLX filing computes to 1,157% that way. Every headline figure here comes from a filing where the amount sold equals the total offering amount, or is explicitly divided by the total offering amount and labelled as such.

2. You cannot always add Item 12 and Item 16. Whether the two are additive depends on who bears the Item 16 costs, and the issuer says so in a clarification field. Cantor's enumerates distinct items that accrue to related persons, so addition is legitimate. Passco's does not. Its Parker DST filing discloses $8,289,075 under Item 16, and then states: "Passco Parker Depositor, LLC was responsible for paying certain fees and costs of approximately $7,509,075." Adding the full Item 16 there would overstate the investor's load by roughly fourteen percentage points. Moody's filings carry the same pattern.

3. These are maxima, not settled amounts. Nearly every filing flags isEstimate: true. Read every percentage on this page as "up to."

What the filings show

The spread is the finding. A 5.00% selling commission and an 11.20% one are both current market practice, and the difference is not deal quality — it is sponsor policy. Between Cantor's 5.00% and CAI's 11.20% there is more than six percentage points of your exchange proceeds, decided before you ever see the deal.

And Form D only captures the front end. Ongoing and back-end costs sit outside it entirely:

• JLL Income Property Trust discloses an ongoing fee of "0.25% of the total, gross equity offering at the time of syndication, payable by the DSTs" per year.
• Ares Real Estate Income Trust's FY2025 10-K discloses a dealer manager fee of "up to 1.5% of gross equity proceeds" plus a commission of "up to 5.0% of gross equity proceeds raised through the private placements" plus a further advisor fee of "up to 1.5% of the total equity amount" — 8.0% upfront — and then "up to 0.85% of the equity investment or net asset value thereof per year for Class T, Class S, and Class D OP Units", and an origination fee "equal to up to 1.0% of the original principal amount of its DST Program Loan."

So the lifetime cost of any DST is higher than every percentage on this page. These are the upfront numbers only.

What the regulator said about exactly this, in 2005

FINRA's predecessor issued guidance on the tenant-in-common structures that preceded DSTs — NASD Notice to Members 05-18, March 2005. It contains no percentage, which is itself worth knowing if someone cites it as though it does. What it contains is the reasoning:

"As fees charged in connection with a TIC exchange increase, the money saved as a consequence of tax deferral will be offset. Accordingly, members should consider the effect of fees on each TIC exchange."

And, more pointedly:

"In making a suitability determination in connection with a recommendation to a customer to purchase a TIC interest, a member must also consider whether the fees and expenses associated with TIC transactions outweigh the potential tax benefits to the customer. TICs structured with high up-front fees and expenses paid to the sponsor and/or salespersons of the selling broker-dealers raise particular concerns about the ability to make a suitable recommendation."

That is the whole consumer point in a regulator's words, twenty-one years ago: a tax deferral is only worth having if the cost of obtaining it is smaller than the tax deferred. At a 17.13% load, a lot of exchanges fail that test.

The notice also flags two things that still apply:

"TIC interests are illiquid securities. NASD is not aware of any secondary market for TIC interests."

"Because of the favorable tax treatment, investors often elect to invest the entire proceeds from the sale of an investment property in a TIC exchange. Concentration of an investor's assets in a single asset class, however, is not suitable for many investors."

We looked for a FINRA notice addressing DSTs specifically and did not find one. Stated precisely: not found, which is not the same as does not exist.

The arithmetic that should decide it

The comparison is not "load versus zero." It is load versus the tax you would otherwise pay now, adjusted for the fact that a 1031 defers rather than forgives.

On a $500,000 exchange:

• At Cantor's disclosed 17.13%, roughly $85,600 goes to commissions and related persons before a dollar is invested.
• At a 5.00% selling commission with a lighter sponsor structure, that front-end number can be a third of it.
• Whatever your deferred federal and state capital gains plus depreciation recapture would have been is the figure on the other side of the scale.

If your deferred tax is $90,000 and the load is $85,600, the exchange has bought you very little, and it has bought it in exchange for an illiquid asset with no secondary market. If your deferred tax is $250,000 and you can find a 5% deal, the arithmetic looks entirely different.

The lesson from the dataset is that the sponsor's fee schedule moves this calculation more than almost anything else about the property, and it is knowable in advance from a public filing before you commit. That is not the order in which most people are shown these deals.

One adjacent enforcement case, described precisely

We looked for FINRA or SEC enforcement specifically about DST load disclosure and did not find a case we could verify. Two structural reasons worth recording, because they mean nobody can honestly claim a clean search here: FINRA's Disciplinary Actions Online has no full-text search — its only fields are Case ID, firm, individual, date and document type, so you cannot query it for "Delaware Statutory Trust" at all. And SEC.gov's litigation pages silently ignore search parameters and return the default list, which makes an empty-looking result meaningless.

The one adjacent action we could verify from a primary record is SANDLAPPER Securities, LLC (CRD 137906), from FINRA's own BrokerCheck firm report: initiated by FINRA on 01/10/2017, case 20140418608, principal product type "Direct Investment(s) – DPP & LP Interest(s)", resolved 06/23/2020 with expulsion, upheld on appeal.

Described precisely: the product was saltwater disposal well interests, not DST real estate. It is relevant by analogy — a §1031-marketed private placement, expelled over undisclosed markups — and not as a DST case. We mention it because Sandlapper appears as a named selling-group member in Inland's National Multifamily Portfolio III DST Form D, which is a verifiable fact about who sells this product, not an allegation about Inland.

Related reading

The advisor-compensation question runs directly into this one: see what a financial advisor actually costs a real estate investor, where the same dynamic appears in non-traded REIT share classes. For the exchange mechanics themselves, 1031 exchanges and real estate crowdfunding. For the sponsors above that also run NAV REITs, the redemption status tracker and the ExchangeRight Essential Income REIT review. And for the general problem of illiquidity in this corner of the market, real estate crowdfunding liquidity.

Methodology

We queried SEC EDGAR full-text search for DST offerings, then downloaded and machine-parsed the primary_doc.xml of 141 Form D filings across 15 sponsors, extracting Item 12 (sales commissions), Item 16 (gross proceeds to related persons), total offering amount, amount sold, and the issuer's own clarification text for each. Percentages are computed against the total offering amount, and headline figures use filings where the amount sold equals the total offering amount so the ratio is unambiguous. The CF James, ExchangeRight Portfolio 57 and Passco Parker filings quoted here were re-verified individually against the raw XML on EDGAR rather than taken from any intermediate summary.

Form D amounts carry an isEstimate flag and are maxima — read every figure as "up to." Form D captures upfront compensation only; ongoing servicing fees and disposition fees are disclosed elsewhere, and the two registered-fund examples above are quoted from 10-K filings.

The 2026 pass, stated so it can be repeated. On September 22, 2026 we queried EDGAR full-text search for "Delaware Statutory Trust" restricted to form type D, dated January 1 to September 22, 2026, which returned 337 filings. We downloaded each one's primary_doc.xml and parsed totalOfferingAmount, totalAmountSold, minimumInvestmentAccepted, totalNumberAlreadyInvested, Item 12 salesCommissions and Item 16 grossProceedsUsed — the last two are nested one level deep, inside a <dollarAmount> element, which is the mistake to avoid if you repeat this. Those 337 filings resolve to 147 distinct issuers; keeping only those whose name contains "DST" or "Delaware Statutory Trust" leaves 98, of which 91 disclose a readable Item 12. We removed one (ESSENTIAL NET LEASE INDUSTRIAL 114 DST, at an implausible 60.00%, named above) leaving the 90 in the CSV. Percentages are Item 12 divided by total offering amount, not by amount sold, because Item 12 is a whole-offering maximum; dividing by a partially-sold amount is the trap described above. Every figure carries isEstimate: true.

These numbers expire. Capital Square moved from 8.50% to 8.40% on most offerings filed since October 2024 and ExchangeRight has cut its commission twice since 2018. Any figure here should be re-derived from current filings before it is relied on.

Last updated: September 22, 2026. Not tax or investment advice — a 1031 exchange has strict deadlines and real consequences, and the arithmetic above is a framework, not a recommendation.