Gov. Maura Healey said she plans to sign the fiscal year 2026 state budget “in the coming days,” and will leave intact a provision that requires residential brokers’ fees to be covered by the party that enlists those services.

The first-term Democrat’s announcement virtually guarantees that Massachusetts will soon mandate licensed brokers or salespeople to only contract with a prospective tenant to find a rental property or a landlord to find a tenant. The fee will fall on whoever enlists the broker.

Healey said renters are “being forced to shell out upwards of $10,000 before they can even move into an apartment.”

“I’m grateful that the Legislature agreed that the person who hires the broker should be responsible for paying them,” Healey said in a statement Wednesday afternoon. “This is one of just many ways that our administration is working every day to lower the high cost of living in Massachusetts.”

The governor has backed reforms to brokers’ fees since the start of the year, when she announced ahead of her yearly State of the Commonwealth address that she would try to “eliminate” renter-paid brokers’ fees in her budget plan for fiscal year 2026.

The House and Senate followed suit, though the two chambers settled on slightly different reforms.

House Democratic leadership — which originally did not back banning brokers’ fees when it surfaced in a multi-billion housing bill last year — wanted to bar real estate brokers from charging a commission or other fee to a tenant or prospective tenant for finding an apartment to rent if the tenant did not initiate contact with the broker.

Under the House plan, real estate brokers could only have charged fees if the tenant or prospective tenant initiated contact, received a disclosure from the broker, and agreed to all terms and conditions of the fee disclosure in writing.

But Senate Democrats instead backed language from Healey, which shifted the burden of the fees onto whoever enlisted the service of a broker. The language from Healey and the Senate survived closed-door negotiations and ultimately made it back to the governor’s desk this week.

Senate President Karen Spilka said the reforms “will put money back in renters’ pockets starting Aug. 1.”

“I’m proud to see this Senate-led initiative signed into law, as we work to lower costs and expand opportunities for residents. At the start of this session, I said we would deliver on shifting the burden of broker’s fees, and through our partnership with the House under Speaker Mariano and the administration under Gov. Healey, we got it done,” the Ashland Democrat said in a statement.

House Speaker Ron Mariano said the “extraordinarily high cost of housing” is one of the most pressing challenges facing Massachusetts.

“Renters in Massachusetts should not be forced to pay thousands of dollars in fees for a service that they themselves never contracted in the first place,” the Quincy Democrat said.