You pay €4,166
just to sign.
A hundred euros on top is the only thing protecting the hundred and fifteen thousand itself.
A hundred euros that protect a hundred and fifteen thousand and almost nobody pays them
On a €115,000 deal, the costs of the day at the notary, excluding commission, are about €4,166. Nobody argues about them: local tax, notary fee, registration. They get paid because without them there is no deal.
On the same day the entire €115,000 is exposed, and protecting it costs under €105 under the most expensive published bank tariff, and about €36 under another. In other words, every single euro of fee protects about €1,124, and the whole protection is about 2.4 per cent of the cost of the day and under 3 per cent of the local tax on the same deal.
The numbers look so out of proportion that the first reaction is to look for the catch. The catch exists, but it is not in the price. It lies in three other things: that nobody is obliged to offer you the mechanism, that the wording inside it decides whether it covers your risk at all, and that the protection of the money itself in the bank works on deadlines nobody advertises.
This article is about those three.
The law requires a bank. It does not require blocking.
and the difference is the whole topic
The only mandatory thing in the entire topic is that the payment goes through a bank. Under Article 25(10) of the Notaries and Notarial Activity Act (ЗННД), payments above the threshold (BGN 10,000, that is €5,112.92 at the fixed rate) are made to a special bank account of the notary or to a bank account at a bank chosen by the parties.
The law requires the money to leave a trail. It does not require anyone to hold it until the deal closes.
The two provisions that govern the blocking itself say “may”. Article 25a(1) of the Notaries Act: the amount due under the deal may be transferred or paid into a special bank account in the notary’s name. Article 39(1) of the Bar Act (Закон за адвокатурата): the funds the client provides for the lawyer to spend may be deposited in a bank in a client account.
From this follows the most important practical sentence in the article: nobody will offer it to you by default. The mechanism is not a step in the process but an agreement, and it is made in the preliminary contract (предварителен договор), months before the day at the notary. If it is not written down, it is not owed, and restructuring on the day almost never works. What else is decided in that document is covered in The Preliminary Contract.
Three trustees who look the same from the outside
The mechanism is one: the buyer transfers the price not to the seller but to a third party, who holds it blocked and releases it once expressly listed conditions are met. What differs is who that third party is, and the differences are not cosmetic.
A bank. There is no separate law; everything is in the contract. The product is called an escrow account, a conditional account or a special purpose account.
A notary. A special bank account under Article 25a of the Notaries Act, and the conditions for paying in and for payment orders are set out in a written agreement between the notary and the parties.
A lawyer. A client account under Article 39 of the Bar Act, controlled only by the lawyer. The other party has no rights over it.
From here on, the three diverge along three lines.
First, protection from the trustee’s own creditors. The Bar Act says two things at once: the sums in the client account are not part of the lawyer’s assets and cannot be garnished. The Notaries Act says only the second: enforcement against the funds in the special account is not allowed for the notary’s obligations. And for a bank escrow account held by the buyer or the seller, there is no such provision. It is simply an account of a party to the deal, and that party’s creditors can see it.
Second, who writes the conditions. No law lists what they must be. They are in the agreement or the contract, which means they were written by someone, for someone.
Third, and this is the most uncomfortable: the trustee is nobody’s lawyer. The notary is impartial by law, and under case law has no duty to obtain a certificate of encumbrances (удостоверение за тежести) or to warn about registered mortgages. The consequence is direct: if the agreement does not list the check, the check is not owed. The trustee checks what the document says, not what is reasonable.
The loop the law does not close
and the only thing that breaks it
There is one situation in which a trust account stops being a convenience and becomes a tool with no alternative: selling a property that still has a mortgage on it.
The loop looks like this. The buyer’s bank disburses the loan only if the old mortgage is gone. The old mortgage is removed only with the consent of the seller’s bank. That bank gives consent only after the debt is repaid. And the debt is repaid with exactly the money from the disbursement.
The law does not untangle this loop. The structure does. The amount stays blocked and is split: a tranche to the seller’s bank and the remainder to the seller, against expressly listed documents. The conditions here have one more line than in a clean deal: not only a signed deed, registration and a clean search, but also received consent to delete the mortgage.
Two numbers show how far from exotic this scenario is. In Varna, in the first quarter of 2026, 1,117 of 2,433 deals, or about 46 per cent, came with a contractual mortgage. And the window from signing to a clean registry record for the property is 2 to 6 weeks. The mechanism almost nobody uses is needed by almost half of all deals. How exactly the mortgage moves in such a deal is covered in Selling a Property with a Mortgage.
This is also where the most common mistake is made when the conditions are written. An escrow that pays against a “signed notarial deed” (нотариален акт) is paid protection against nothing. The interval that hurts is between signing and registration, and for a property with a mortgage, until the consent to delete it has been received. If a creditor of the seller registers an attachment (възбрана) on the property in that interval, the buyer has paid, and their right collides with an earlier registered encumbrance.
And if the bank fails while the money is inside
This is the question almost nobody asks, and the answer is “yes, it is guaranteed, but”.
The general rule is €100,000 per person per bank, regardless of the number and size of the accounts. The principle is “one depositor in one bank”, meaning all accounts of one person at the same bank are added together. A buyer with €115,000 blocked and another €30,000 in savings at the same bank has €145,000 and a guarantee for €100,000.
There is a second rule that far fewer people know about. Deposits of individuals arising from residential property transactions are additionally guaranteed up to €125,000 for a period of three months from the moment the amount reaches the account, and this money is not counted towards the hundred thousand. In other words, the protection sits on top, not inside. An example from the Bulgarian Deposit Insurance Fund (Фонд за гарантиране на влоговете в банките) itself: a depositor with a €10,000 deposit and €150,000 received from the sale of a home a month earlier gets their €10,000 and an additional €125,000.
Notice which way this provision looks. It covers a deposit arising as a result of the deal, which means rather the money of the seller after it. Whether the buyer’s blocked money before the deal falls under the same provision, the law does not say explicitly.
There is also a third provision, which answers the obvious question “whose money is it if the account is in the notary’s name”. When the account holder has no exclusive right to the funds, the right to receive payment belongs to the person for whose benefit the deposit was made, if that person is identified or can be identified. The guarantee follows the money, not the name on the account. Neither notaries nor lawyers are among the excluded depositors.
And it is exactly the best protected structure that waits the longest
The standard payout period from the Fund is seven working days. It can, however, be extended, and the law lists exactly when. Two of the cases are precisely ours: when there is a deposit for the benefit of a third party, and when the amount is part of a temporarily high balance in the account. In both cases the extension is up to three months.
Read plainly: the two structures that protect the buyer and the seller best, the trustee account and the additional guarantee for money from a property deal, are expressly taken out of the seven day period.
There is one more place where time is lost, and it lies outside the deposit guarantee law. The seven working days run from the act of the competent authority, not from the day the money stops being accessible. The gap between the two is clearest in the only real precedent in Bulgaria. Corporate Commercial Bank (Корпоративна търговска банка) was placed under special supervision on 20 June 2014. Its licence was revoked on 6 November 2014. Payouts began on 4 December 2014. From the closing of its doors to the first payment, about five and a half months passed.
This is not an argument against the trust account. It is an argument against the idea that if the money is guaranteed, it is also accessible. A deal whose money is frozen for three months is, during that time, either collapsed or in limbo, while the penalties under the preliminary contract keep running.
What it really costs and why the price is rarely the reason
A range of roughly €50 to €250 circulates in the industry, usually without a breakdown. Under the published tariffs for 2026, the picture is more specific and more varied.
At one of the major players, a notary’s special account under Article 25a of the Notaries Act is free of charge to open and maintain, and the same applies to a lawyer’s client account. A trust account for individuals buying a property at the same bank is opened for €35.79, with no maintenance fee. At another bank an escrow account for individuals costs 0.10 per cent of the amount, minimum €51.13 and maximum €102.26, and servicing is “as per contract”. At a third, the conditional account is entirely “by negotiation”.
Three things come out of this list at once.
The bank fee on the notary route is zero, but that does not mean the route is free. The cost there is not a bank fee but a fee under Article 22 of the Notaries Act, which is negotiated: the checked version of the Tariff of Notarial Fees (Тарифа за нотариалните такси) has no item for administering a special account. On this route there is no state-set price.
The difference between the two published bank prices is close to threefold, and it depends not on the deal but on which bank is on the other side.
Access is limited, not just the price. One bank offers escrow to individuals only if it finances the purchase itself. The other offers a conditional account only for deals between individuals. For a specific deal the product is often simply not available, whether or not you are willing to pay for it.
So why do most deals go ahead without it
Six reasons, and none of them is “because it is expensive”.
Nobody requires it. What is mandatory is that the payment goes through a bank, not that it is blocked. Both provisions on the blocking itself say “may”.
The seller reads it as distrust. Waiting for the money is perceived as the treatment of a suspect, not as a procedure. This is the human, not the legal, part of the resistance, and it is real.
The price is not published. “By negotiation”, “as per contract”, “minimum by negotiation”. A product whose price you have to ask about is not bought on a mass scale.
The product is often not available for the specific combination of parties and financing.
It is agreed in the preliminary contract, not on the day. In other words, it is decided at a time when nobody is thinking about the day yet.
There is no price list on the notary route. The absence of a state price is a barrier in itself.
That is why the topic does not end with “ask for escrow”. Who the trustee is, which of the three protections you get, against which document the money is released, and whether that day covers your specific situation with a mortgage are four separate decisions, each made months before the signing, and each made to work by the wording, not by the mechanism. What the day at the notary itself looks like is covered in The Notarial Deal.
Frequently asked questions
Is a trust account mandatory in a property deal?
No. What is mandatory is only that the payment goes through a bank: under Article 25(10) of the Notaries and Notarial Activity Act, payments above the threshold of BGN 10,000, that is €5,112.92 at the fixed rate, are made to a special bank account of the notary or to a bank account at a bank chosen by the parties. The law, however, does not require anyone to block the money until the deal closes. Both Article 25a(1) of the Notaries and Notarial Activity Act and Article 39(1) of the Bar Act are worded with “may”. That is why the mechanism does not happen by itself but is agreed in the preliminary contract.
Who can act as trustee, and is there a difference between them?
There are three usual options: a bank, a notary with a special account under Article 25a of the Notaries and Notarial Activity Act, and a lawyer with a client account under Article 39 of the Bar Act. The difference is not cosmetic. Under the Bar Act, the sums in the client account are not part of the lawyer’s assets and cannot be garnished. Under the Notaries and Notarial Activity Act, enforcement against the funds in the special account is not allowed, but only for the notary’s obligations. For a bank escrow account held by the buyer or the seller there is no such provision, meaning it remains an account of a party to the deal.
Is the money guaranteed if the bank fails while the amount is blocked?
Yes, but with two caveats. The general guarantee is €100,000 per person per bank, with all accounts of that person at the same bank added together. Separately, deposits of individuals arising from residential property transactions are additionally guaranteed up to €125,000 for a period of three months and are not counted towards the hundred thousand. When the account is held by a trustee, the right to receive payment belongs to the person for whose benefit the deposit was made, if that person is identified. The caveat is in the timing: for a deposit for the benefit of a third party and for a temporarily high balance, the standard seven working days can be extended to three months.
How much does a trust account cost?
Under the published tariffs for 2026, a notary’s special account and a lawyer’s client account may carry no bank fee, an escrow account for individuals buying a property is opened for about €35.79 at one bank, and at another it costs 0.10 per cent of the amount with a minimum of €51.13 and a maximum of €102.26. At a third, the price is entirely by negotiation. On the notary route the bank fee may be zero, but the fee under Article 22 of the Notaries and Notarial Activity Act remains, and it is negotiated, because the checked version of the Tariff of Notarial Fees has no item for such a service. Apart from the price there is access: the product is often limited to deals financed by the same bank, or only to deals between individuals.
Paying on signing?
Check against which document.
Open the preliminary contract and find one line: against what the money is released. If it says “signed notarial deed”, the protection ends before registration. If the property has a mortgage, the second line is missing too: received consent to delete the mortgage.
Send us the preliminary contract and the property’s registry record. We come back to you with the moment the condition is written for, the window left uncovered, and which of the three structures is available for your deal at all. If the case needs a lawyer, we will tell you that too, instead of glossing over it.
This material is general information as of December 2026. It is not legal, banking or investment advice and does not recommend a bank. Tariffs should be checked in the current document of the relevant bank.
Comments
No comments yet, be the first.