Artist Resale Right: Who Pays the Artist When a Work Resells

On 9 September 2026 Bonhams announced that it would begin paying artists a share of their own resale prices, voluntarily, out of its own commission. The programme, The Deans' Choice with Bonhams, launches in November 2026 and makes Bonhams the first auction house in the United States to build an artist resale right into how it sells. The timing is pointed: the same house raises its buyer's premium to 30 percent on the first 25,000 pounds of hammer on 1 October 2026. For a collector who buys in New York and consigns in Paris, the announcement reopens a question that no lot page answers. When a work resells, what does the artist actually receive, and who is legally obliged to pay it? The answer changes completely depending on which side of which border the hammer falls.

Key points:

• Under Directive 2001/84/EC the European Union operates a compulsory artist resale right: the sale price is divided into five portions taxed from 4 percent down to 0.25 percent, and the total royalty on any single sale is capped at 12,500 euros.
• The United Kingdom calls the artist resale right the Artist's Resale Right and switched its thresholds from euros to pounds on 1 April 2024. The right now applies from 1,000 pounds, with the royalty capped at 12,500 pounds, and it is exempt of VAT.
• The United States has no federal artist resale right. The Ninth Circuit held the California Resale Royalties Act pre-empted by the Copyright Act on 6 July 2018, leaving only works resold between 1 January 1977 and 1 January 1978 eligible.
• In France, the Cour de cassation ruled on 9 November 2018 that the levy may be charged to the buyer rather than the seller, provided the conditions of sale say so. Read the catalogue, not the convention.
• Bonhams' elective artist resale right asks consignors for a minimum of 1 percent of hammer or 500 dollars, whichever is greater, and the house matches that rate from its own buyer's premium.

Bonhams puts a price on the artist resale right

The mechanism is narrower than the headlines suggest, and more interesting for it. What Bonhams has built is an artist resale right by contract rather than by statute. Bonhams describes The Deans' Choice as an elective sale royalty, a bilateral opt-in: consignors choose to participate when they consign an eligible work, and artists participate by registering with the house directly. Royalty payments on eligible works go straight to the artist rather than through a collecting society. A participating consignor commits a minimum of 1 percent of the hammer price or 500 dollars, whichever is greater, and Bonhams then matches the consignor's elected percentage rate out of its own buyer's premium.

That last clause is what separates this from a charitable gesture. The house is not merely administering someone else's money; it is giving up revenue it had already priced into the sale. Bonhams has published no projection of what the programme will cost it, and its chief executive Seth Johnson was direct about why. Speaking to The Art Newspaper, Johnson said the house was not approaching the initiative in terms of cost modelling at all: "the reality is that we want this to cost us because that is a visible measure of success for this initiative, which is the whole point of doing it." In the accompanying press statement he placed it in a longer frame: "For centuries the saleroom has been where value is recognized. The Deans' Choice with Bonhams extends that recognition to the artists themselves, not as a gesture, but as a working part of how we sell."

The programme was conceived with The Dean Collection, founded by Kasseem Dean and Alicia Dean, collectors who have argued for years that visual artists should earn from resale the way musicians earn from a recording. Kasseem Dean had been describing a Dean Choice model for an auction house since 2019. Andrew Huber, Bonhams' United States head of 20th and 21st Century Art, framed the seller's side of it: the programme "gives sellers a meaningful way to recognize an artist's continuing role in the value of their body of work." The first sale to carry it is Bonhams' 20th and 21st Century Art auction in New York in November 2026, and the Deans' own touring collection, Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys, opens its fifth leg at Newfields in Indianapolis on 19 September 2026.

For a collector, the practical significance is not the percentage. It is that an artist resale right has entered American auction infrastructure by contract, in a jurisdiction where four decades of legislative effort produced nothing.

Why the argument began with a shove in 1973

The case for an artist resale right is usually told through a single incident. In 1973, after a New York sale at which the taxi tycoon Robert C. Scull resold a Robert Rauschenberg painting for 85,000 dollars having acquired it for 900 dollars, Rauschenberg confronted Scull physically. Accounts differ on the violence: The Art Newspaper describes a shove, while Artnet News, reporting the 2018 Ninth Circuit decision, calls the episode a "now-apocryphal tale" in which Rauschenberg punched the collector. The disputed detail matters less than the sequel. Rauschenberg went on to campaign for California to adopt a resale royalty, and the state did.

The principle itself is far older than that afternoon. France recognised droit de suite, the right of an artist to a percentage of the price on each subsequent professional resale of an original work, in 1920. Other civil law jurisdictions followed. Since 1948 the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works has acknowledged that artists hold an "inalienable right to an interest in any sale of the work subsequent to the first transfer by the author". The recognition is real but not binding, which is precisely why the map is so uneven: the United States acceded to Berne in 1989 and has still not adopted the right.

What the 1973 story captures is the asymmetry that the artist resale right exists to address. An artist sells once, at the price the primary market will bear at that moment. Every subsequent transaction happens without them, which is the defining asymmetry of the primary vs secondary art market. Whether that asymmetry is an injustice or simply how property works is the argument, and it has not been settled in a century. The dealer Franck Prazan, founder of the Paris gallery Applicat Prazan, supports the levy but on conditional grounds: "It is a resource for families to keep promoting the artist. It makes sense as long as the levy goes towards compiling catalogues raisonnés, for instance."

What European law already gives the artist, band by band

Inside the European Union the artist resale right is not optional and not new. Directive 2001/84/EC, in force since 13 October 2001 and required to be law in member states by 1 January 2006, established a compulsory right for authors of original works of art on any resale involving an art market professional, whether an auction house, a gallery or a dealer.

The scope is broader than paintings. The directive covers pictures, collages, paintings, drawings, engravings, prints, lithographs, sculptures, tapestries, ceramics, glassware and photographs, including copies made in limited numbers that professional usage treats as original works, which is what brings signed and numbered editions inside it. Original manuscripts of writers and composers sit outside.

Four structural rules govern the artist resale right arithmetic. The sale price is divided into five portions, with the royalty rate ranging from 4 percent on the lowest portion down to 0.25 percent on the highest. The total royalty on any single sale may not exceed 12,500 euros. Each member state must set a minimum sale price below which the right does not apply, and that threshold may not exceed 3,000 euros. Protection runs for 70 years after the author's death, the term set by Directive 2006/116/EC, so the right routinely outlives the artist by two generations and is payable to heirs and estates. It is one of the few charges that begins rather than ends with an estate, and it sits alongside the other shifts that follow what happens to art prices when an artist dies.

Two exceptions are worth knowing. Member states may disapply the right where the seller acquired the work directly from the author less than three years before the resale and the resale price does not exceed 10,000 euros, the provision generally called the bought as stock exception. Separately, for three years after a resale, anyone entitled to a royalty may demand from any art market professional whatever information is needed to secure payment, which is why houses retain sale records against retrospective claims.

Luxembourg, where this house is based, was required to have the directive in national law by 1 January 2006 like every other member state, with its own minimum sale price fixed by national regulation inside the ceiling the directive imposes. The operative point for a cross-border consignment is that artist resale right thresholds are national while the cap and the rate structure are harmonised, so the question of whether a levy is triggered at all is answered by the country of the sale, not by the country of the collector.

The United Kingdom: how the artist resale right works in pounds

The United Kingdom calls it the Artist's Resale Right, or ARR, introduced in 2006 under the European directive and extended to artists' heirs in 2012. It survived departure from the European Union intact, and on 1 April 2024 it changed currency. The Design Right, Artist's Resale Right and Copyright (Amendment) Regulations 2023 redenominated the entire scale from euros into pounds.

Since that date the right applies when the sale price reaches or exceeds 1,000 pounds, and the total royalty on a single sale is capped at 12,500 pounds. For sales before 1 April 2024 the threshold was 1,000 euros and the cap 12,500 euros. The Intellectual Property Office publishes the sliding scale, which is cumulative in the way income tax is cumulative rather than a single rate applied to the whole price:

The Intellectual Property Office works the arithmetic itself on a 200,000 pound sale. The first 50,000 pounds attracts 4 percent, or 2,000 pounds. The remaining 150,000 pounds attracts 3 percent, or 4,500 pounds. Total royalty: 6,500 pounds, which is 3.25 percent of the price rather than the 4 percent a reader skimming the top band would assume. The cumulative structure means the effective rate falls as the price rises, and the 12,500 pound cap is reached at a hammer price of exactly 2 million pounds, beyond which the levy is a rounding error on the transaction.

Three further details of the artist resale right carry real money. ARR is exempt of VAT, so the royalty does not itself attract tax. The right is administered by collecting societies, the Design and Artists Copyright Society (DACS) and the Artists' Collecting Society (ACS), and individual artists cannot demand payment directly from the art market professionals involved in a sale, which is why a consignor deals with a society rather than an artist. And the exemptions are narrower than collectors expect: the bought as stock exception applies where a work was bought directly from the artist less than three years earlier and resells for 10,000 pounds or less, while genuinely private sales conducted without any art market professional, and sales to public non-profit museums, attract nothing at all.

Reciprocity has also widened. The United Kingdom retains mutual arrangements with European Economic Area states under the Trade and Cooperation Agreement, and free trade agreements brought Australia into reciprocity on 31 March 2024 and New Zealand on 1 December 2024. A British artist now earns on qualifying resales in Sydney, and an Australian artist earns in London.

Who actually pays, and why France changed the answer

Here the durable question of the artist resale right sharpens, because the directive is deliberately permissive. It states that the royalty is normally payable by the seller, then allows member states to legislate that an art market professional other than the seller is solely responsible, or that responsibility is shared with the seller. That single sentence is the origin of a decade of litigation.

France had made the seller solely liable when it created droit de suite in 1920, and extended the levy beyond auction houses to dealers and galleries in 2007. Then in 2009 Christie's asked buyers at its Paris sale of the Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé collection to pay the levy instead. The Syndicat National des Antiquaires, a federation of French antiques dealers, sued, arguing that shifting the charge to buyers amounted to unfair competition. A Paris court ruled for the syndicate in December 2012. In March 2017 the Court of Appeal of Versailles held that the clause in Christie's France's general conditions of sale transferring the cost from seller to buyer infringed French law. Christie's appealed.

On 9 November 2018 the Cour de cassation overturned Versailles and agreed with Christie's France. The buyer, private or professional, may be charged the levy in an individual sale. The house remains ultimately responsible for paying the collecting society, but it is now entitled to ask the buyer for the money, on one condition: the conditions of sale must contain such a clause.

The consequence for a collector is concrete and widely missed. In France, whether you owe an artist resale right royalty as a buyer is not a matter of law but a matter of the catalogue you did not read. Two houses selling comparable works in the same week may allocate the charge differently, and nothing on the lot page flags it. Franck Prazan, whose gallery paid over 200,000 euros in droit de suite to the French collecting society ADAGP in 2018 alone, described the market effect bluntly: auction houses "have never supported the resell charge as an expense and have contractualised droit de suite", with the result that a dealer buying at auction "will have to pay twice, upon buying and upon resale". Sotheby's France, at the time of the ruling, confirmed it was still charging the seller and reserved its position.

The lesson generalises beyond France. The artist resale right is a seller-side cost by default across the European Union and the United Kingdom, something to model into net proceeds rather than into a bidding ceiling. But default is not the same as certainty, and the only reliable way to know which side of a given transaction carries it is to read the conditions of sale for that sale, in that country, that season.

The American gap, and why California's attempt failed

The United States is the significant exception among major markets, and the gap is the product of a decision rather than an oversight.

California passed the Resale Royalties Act in 1977, the only law of its kind in the country. It granted artists 5 percent of the resale price in defined circumstances, and applied to works sold in California or by a California resident. In 2011 the artists Chuck Close and Laddie John Dill, together with the Sam Francis Foundation, brought a class action against Sotheby's, Christie's and eBay to collect under it. Seven years later, on 6 July 2018, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit held the statute pre-empted by the federal Copyright Act of 1976, on the reasoning that it did not add a right alongside federal copyright but reshaped the distribution right and the first sale doctrine that federal law had already settled.

The ruling did not quite erase the law; it reduced it to a one-year fossil. Only works resold between 1 January 1977 and 1 January 1978, the window before the 1976 Act took effect, remain eligible. Claims after 1 January 1978 were expressly pre-empted. Judge Jay S. Bybee put it precisely: "Our decision today means that the CRRA had a short effective life." Dill's response to the San Francisco Chronicle was shorter: "I'm not surprised, but I'm disappointed."

Congress has considered adopting droit de suite since the 1970s and has never passed it. Resale royalties now operate for visual artists in more than 90 countries, which leaves the largest auction market in the world as the one major jurisdiction with no artist resale right at all, a place where an artist whose work resells for millions receives, as a matter of law, nothing. That vacuum is the space The Deans' Choice is built to occupy, and it explains why a voluntary scheme is the only kind available there.

Nine things to establish before you buy or consign

The artist resale right rewards preparation and punishes assumption. These are the checks worth running on any transaction of consequence.

1. Establish the country of the sale, not your own. The threshold, the currency and the allocation of liability follow the jurisdiction where the sale takes place. A Luxembourg collector consigning in London is inside the pound-denominated scale.
2. Confirm whether the work is still in copyright. Protection runs for the artist's lifetime plus 70 years. A work by an artist who died in 1950 carries no royalty; a work by an artist who died in 1970 still does until 2040.
3. Read the conditions of sale for the allocation clause. Since November 2018 a French sale may lawfully charge the buyer. Do not assume the seller bears it, and do not assume the house has kept last season's wording.
4. Model the artist resale right against net proceeds, not against your bid. As a consignor in the European Union or the United Kingdom, the levy reduces what you receive. Add it to the seller's commission to see the real spread between hammer and settlement.
5. Apply the bands cumulatively. A 200,000 pound sale attracts 6,500 pounds, not 8,000. Treating the top rate as a flat rate overstates the charge on anything above the first band.
6. Check whether the cap is in play. At 12,500 euros or pounds, the royalty stops growing. Above roughly 2 million, the levy is immaterial to the economics of the sale.
7. Test the bought as stock exception. If you bought directly from the artist less than three years ago and are reselling at or below 10,000 pounds or euros, the right may not apply at all.
8. Identify the collecting society. DACS or ACS in the United Kingdom, ADAGP among others in France. Artists cannot bill you directly, and payment discharged to the wrong party is not discharged.
9. Ask the house to state the treatment in writing before you sign. The obligation is confirmed per sale, per jurisdiction, per season. A verbal assurance from a specialist is not a settlement statement.

Two worked cases show how far apart the outcomes sit. A work hammered at 30,000 euros in a Paris sale falls entirely inside the first band, so the royalty is 4 percent, or 1,200 euros, payable by the seller unless the catalogue moves it to the buyer. The same work hammered at 30,000 dollars in New York carries no royalty whatsoever, unless the consignor has elected into a voluntary programme, in which case the minimum contribution would be 500 dollars from the seller with the house matching that rate. Identical object, identical price, and a difference of 1,200 euros in where the money lands.

What an elective royalty is not

Restraint is warranted here, because the announcement has been read more expansively than the mechanism supports. A voluntary artist resale right is not a statutory one, and the difference is not cosmetic.

An elective artist resale right creates no legal right. An artist registered with Bonhams has no claim against a consignor who declines to opt in, no claim against any other auction house, and no statutory floor. It binds nobody beyond the house that wrote it, and it depends entirely on the willingness of sellers to surrender proceeds they are under no obligation to surrender. Describing November 2026 as the moment the United States acquired an artist resale right would be wrong.

What it does create is a working precedent inside auction infrastructure, which is a different and possibly more durable thing than a bill that never leaves committee. It also constitutes a genuine test with a measurable result: either consignors participate at scale or they do not. Bonhams has said plainly that it hopes other houses and secondary market businesses adopt similar measures, and Johnson framed the motive in terms of demand rather than altruism, noting that collectors "are increasingly attentive to collecting in a way that reflects their values". For the model to become a market standard rather than a single house's initiative, three things would have to follow: meaningful consignor uptake in the November sale and the sales after it, adoption by at least one competing house, and a durable accounting treatment that survives a downturn.

The last condition deserves scepticism, because the fee context cuts against it. The royalty Bonhams matches comes out of a buyer's premium that rose weeks before the programme launched. From 1 October 2026 Bonhams charges 30 percent on the first 25,000 pounds of hammer, 28 percent from 25,001 to 500,000 pounds, 25 percent to 1 million, 21 percent to 5 million and 14 percent above that, its first revision since 2023. Christie's moved to 28 percent up to 1.5 million pounds or 2 million dollars on 1 September 2026, matching Sotheby's, which had raised its own rates from 13 February 2026. Across all three, the increases land hardest at the lower end of the market, which is where most collections are actually assembled and where buying art under 50,000 dollars is the norm rather than the exception. A house can raise the premium by two points and return one to artists and still finish ahead.

None of which makes the initiative empty. It does mean the honest reading is that the artist resale right is being extended in the United States by commercial discretion, funded by buyers, at a moment when buyers are paying more. Whether that is a foundation or a season will be visible in the 2027 sales, not in the press release. The market context is at least supportive: the Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report 2026, the tenth edition, authored by Dr Clare McAndrew of Arts Economics, records global art sales returning to growth in 2025, up 4 percent to an estimated 59.6 billion dollars, with public auction sales up 9 percent to 20.7 billion dollars.

FAQ: the artist resale right in practice

Does the buyer or the seller pay the artist resale right?

By default the seller. Directive 2001/84/EC states the royalty is normally payable by the seller, while permitting member states to make another art market professional solely responsible or to share the obligation. France is the significant exception in practice: since the Cour de cassation ruling of 9 November 2018, a house may charge the buyer provided the conditions of sale contain a clause to that effect. Always read the conditions of sale for the specific auction.

How much is the royalty on a work sold for 200,000 pounds?

6,500 pounds, on the United Kingdom scale in force since 1 April 2024. The bands are cumulative: the first 50,000 pounds attracts 4 percent, or 2,000 pounds, and the remaining 150,000 pounds attracts 3 percent, or 4,500 pounds. That is an effective rate of 3.25 percent, not the 4 percent headline rate. The total royalty on any single sale is capped at 12,500 pounds.

Do artists get paid when their art is resold in the United States?

Not as a matter of law. There is no federal artist resale right, and the Ninth Circuit held the California Resale Royalties Act pre-empted by the Copyright Act on 6 July 2018, leaving only works resold between 1 January 1977 and 1 January 1978 eligible. From November 2026, Bonhams operates a voluntary elective royalty in the United States, but participation is at the consignor's discretion and confers no enforceable right.

Does the artist resale right apply to prints and editions?

Yes, in the European Union, where the directive covers engravings, prints and lithographs alongside unique works, including copies made in limited numbers that professional usage treats as original works. Signed and numbered editions therefore fall inside it, subject to the national price threshold. The same logic applies in the United Kingdom, where the right covers original works of art resold through an auctioneer, dealer or gallery above 1,000 pounds.

How long does the right last after an artist dies?

Seventy years from the end of the year of death, the copyright term harmonised by Directive 2006/116/EC, with the royalty payable to heirs and estates. The United Kingdom extended ARR to artists' heirs in 2012. In practical terms, a large part of the twentieth century canon still generates royalties, and a consignor cannot infer from an artist's death that the levy has lapsed.

Is the artist resale right subject to VAT?

In the United Kingdom, no. The Intellectual Property Office states that ARR is exempt of VAT. VAT treatment of the underlying sale is a separate question and turns on the margin scheme, the status of the parties and whether the transaction is business to business or business to consumer, which is confirmed per sale rather than assumed from the catalogue.

How LLB Auction handles the artist resale right on a consignment

Fee structures are where an auction house's priorities become legible, and ours are stated before a lot opens rather than discovered at settlement.

Disclosed fees, flat. A buyer's premium of 20 percent and a seller's commission of 10 percent, published upfront, with no hidden costs. Where the majors now tier the premium so that the smallest lots carry the highest rate, up to 30 percent on the first 25,000 pounds at one house from 1 October 2026, our rate does not change with the size of the lot. Typical lots run from 800 to 50,000 euros, which is precisely the band where a tiered premium costs a collector most.

Verified before it is offered. Curated intake rejects roughly 40 percent of submissions. Every lot that clears carries per-lot due diligence on certificates, ownership history and conservation records, and a three-page professional condition report. Establishing whether a work is still in copyright, and therefore whether an artist resale right royalty arises on resale, is part of the same documentary discipline.

Stated per sale, in writing. Droit de suite treatment, VAT treatment and export requirements are confirmed for each sale and each jurisdiction rather than carried over from the last catalogue. We operate timed online sales of 7 to 14 days from Luxembourg across the European Union, the United Kingdom and beyond, with four auctions committed in 2026 and two in 2027, so the question of which country's threshold applies is one we answer before you ask it.

If you are weighing a consignment and want the royalty, commission and VAT position modelled against your net proceeds before you commit, request a valuation and we will set it out in writing. Ask your questions. We have answers.

Conclusion

The map is the finding. Three of the world's largest art markets answer the same question in three incompatible ways: the European Union compels an artist resale right on a harmonised five-band scale capped at 12,500 euros, the United Kingdom does the same in pounds from a 1,000 pound threshold, and the United States compels nothing at all. Within the European Union, France has made the allocation of the charge a matter of contract rather than statute, so the clause in a catalogue can move real money between buyer and seller. None of this is visible on a lot page, and none of it is constant from one season to the next. It belongs with the other disciplines of reading the art market without mistaking price for value.

Bonhams' elective royalty is worth watching precisely because it is not law. It is a house choosing to price a principle, funded from a premium that rose a month earlier, and its survival will be decided by consignors rather than legislators. For a collector, the practical discipline is unchanged by the news and only made more urgent by it: establish the jurisdiction, confirm the copyright position, read the allocation clause, and model the artist resale right into net proceeds before the hammer rather than after the invoice.

Also worth reading:

• Primary or secondary: the two markets every collector straddles
• What happens to art prices when an artist dies
• Buying art under 50,000 dollars: the accessible online segment
• Reading the art market without mistaking price for value
• Single-owner collection sales: what a collector is really paying for

Sources:

• Resale right for the benefit of the author of an original work of art, Directive 2001/84/EC : EUR-Lex, European Union, 2001
• Artist's Resale Right guidance : Intellectual Property Office, gov.uk, updated 2024
• Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys launch resale royalty initiative with Bonhams : The Art Newspaper, Carlie Porterfield, 2026
• Bonhams announces The Deans' Choice with Bonhams : Bonhams, 2026
• Christie's France wins the artist resale royalty battle : The Art Newspaper, Gareth Harris, 2018
• A US court rules that artists aren't entitled to royalties for artworks resold at auction : Artnet News, Eileen Kinsella, 2018
• Sotheby's hikes buyer's premiums as auction houses test new fee structures : The Art Newspaper, Carlie Porterfield, 2026
• Christie's and Bonhams quietly hike buyers' fees : ARTnews, Brian Boucher, 2026
• The Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report 2026 : Arts Economics, Dr Clare McAndrew, 2026
• U.K. pushes to standardize auction data and more industry intel : Artnet News, Jo Lawson-Tancred, 2026