A tenant opens her renewal letter and finds the rent going up. She could sign, move out or ask for something better, and asking feels awkward. Then she remembers that the flat stood empty for a whole season before she moved in, and that a reliable tenant on a longer lease may be worth more to her landlord than the extra rent.

Knowing how to negotiate comes down to a few habits: learn what each side needs, know the point at which you would walk away, open with a number you can justify, trade rather than give, and ask more than you argue. A 2025 meta-analysis of 90 negotiation studies found that ambitious first offers on average went with better terms for the people who made them, at the price of more deadlocks and more ill feeling across the table.¹ Seven steps cover it:

1. Find the needs behind what each side asks for
2. Know your walk-away point before you talk
3. Put your target and your limits on paper
4. Open with a number you can justify
5. Trade concessions instead of giving them away
6. Ask questions, then listen to the answers
7. Recognize when haggling costs more than it saves

Many everyday deals are not a tug of war over one number

Many everyday negotiations involve more than one thing to settle, so both sides can often get more of what they care about by trading. Roger Fisher and William Ury built their 1981 book Getting to Yes, from the Harvard Negotiation Project, on this idea: focus on the interests behind each side’s position, not on the position itself.²

A position is what someone says they want: “the rent stays the same.” An interest is why they want it: a budget that cannot stretch, or a wish to stay near a child’s school. One of the book’s examples is Israel and Egypt in 1978: both held positions on occupying the Sinai Peninsula, but one side’s interest was security and the other’s was sovereignty, and addressing those interests led to the 1979 peace treaty.²

People often miss this even when the answer would suit everyone. Leigh Thompson and Dennis Hrebec’s 1996 review of 32 experiments documented how often negotiators with compatible interests fail to notice them and settle on an outcome worse for both, which the authors call the lose-lose effect (only its abstract could be checked).³ The Harvard business professor Max Bazerman calls the underlying habit the mythical fixed pie: assuming that whatever one side gains, the other loses.⁴

Myth

Negotiating means one side wins exactly what the other side loses.

Fact

Many deals involve several issues that each side values differently, so a trade can leave both better off than splitting one number.

Take a contractor quoting for a kitchen repair. You care most about finishing before family arrives; the contractor may care most about filling a gap in the schedule or being paid on time. Price is one issue, but so are the start date, the deposit and who buys the materials. Before you argue about any single number, write down every term that could move, because each one is something you can trade.

How to negotiate, step by step

These steps combine Fisher and Ury’s influential method with experiments on offers and concessions. No trial has tested the whole sequence on real deals, so read it as a way to prepare, with no promise of a result.

1. Find the needs behind what each side asks for

Write one line for yourself, “I want this, because of that”, then list two or three reasons the other side might want what it asks for. A landlord asking for more rent may be worried about rising costs, an empty flat or a difficult tenant, and each worry points to a different offer you could make.

2. Know your walk-away point before you talk

Your walk-away point comes from your best alternative to a negotiated agreement, or BATNA, a term from Fisher and Ury’s work: what you will actually do if this deal fails. They suggest strengthening it before you talk: list what you could do without a deal, turn the best ideas into real options, and pick the strongest.⁵ Your alternative then sets your reservation price, the most you would pay as a buyer or the least you would accept as a seller, and where the two sides’ limits overlap lies the zone of possible agreement.⁶

Your alternative is the yardstick for every offer. The Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School describes an “agreement trap”: people accept deals worse than their alternative because the other side hides how bad the deal is, because they have already sunk time into the talks, or because they want to please. The opposite mistake, walking away from a deal that beat your alternative, often comes from treating the talk as win-lose.⁴

1. The seller’s walk-away point: the least they would accept, set by their best option if this deal fails, such as another buyer
2. Your walk-away point: the most you would pay, set the same way by your own best alternative, such as a similar offer elsewhere
3. The zone of possible agreement: where the two limits overlap; any deal here is at least as good as both sides’ alternatives, and the talk decides where in it you land. With no overlap, no deal is the sensible result

Buying a used car shows how it works. If a similar car at another dealer is your realistic fallback, its price, plus the hassle of getting there, is roughly your ceiling. A second quote from another seller or contractor is often the cheapest strength you can buy.

3. Put your target and your limits on paper

A short written plan is enough for most everyday talks: your target, your walk-away point, what you think the other side needs, the questions you want answered, and a fair standard both sides could accept. Getting to Yes calls that last one objective criteria, such as market value or precedent, and ends its chapter on them with a car owner using them with an insurance claims adjuster.²

Holding on to your own target has some experimental support. Adam Galinsky and Thomas Mussweiler ran three experiments, published in 2001, in which the side that opened generally got the better outcome; that edge vanished when the other negotiator thought about their own target, the opener’s bottom line or the opener’s alternatives.⁷ The tasks were short buying and selling exercises, and the complete paper could not be obtained for this guide. The lesson is simple: write your target down before anyone names a number, and look at it again the moment they do.

4. Open with a number you can justify

Whoever names a number first tends to drag the final deal toward it, a pattern known as anchoringanchoring: The tendency for an estimate or decision to be pulled toward a number seen beforehand, even an irrelevant one. It is one of the effects that held up when large teams ran the original experiments again.Full entry in the glossary. The strongest recent evidence comes from a 2025 review that pooled the research on first offers and then ran two new experiments.¹

The study

Moderate evidence

Ninety studies on opening high, pooled in 2025

Opening first, and opening high, went with better terms for the opener. But ambitious openings also went with more talks ending in no deal and with the other side feeling worse about the negotiation. Both the gains and the costs got smaller when several issues were on the table together. In the two new experiments, anger at an ambitious opening explained much of the harm.¹

The practical reading is a trade-off, not a rule to always go first and go high. After the authors corrected for small positive studies being overrepresented, some of the deal-value benefits were no longer clearly different from zero, and almost all the evidence comes from one-off exercises. The paper also notes that a first offer can reveal information the other side can use, which is one reason some practitioners advise never going first.¹

The review’s authors suggest that in simple, one-off deals over a single issue such as price, moving first and ambitiously should pay, while in complex deals or where the relationship matters most, letting the other side open or starting more modestly may be wiser.¹ Whatever you open with, tie it to a reason you can state, such as recent prices for similar flats. A freelancer who explains how a price reflects the value to the client is anchoring with a reason attached.

5. Trade concessions instead of giving them away

A concession works best as part of an exchange. Deepak Malhotra of Harvard Business School advises labelling each concession so the other side sees what it cost you, naming what you want in return, making concessions conditional when trust is low (“if you can do this, I can do that”), and not abandoning your opening demands too quickly.⁸

The best trades give away what you value less for what you value more.⁴ Take a deadline at work: your manager wants a report by Friday. Instead of agreeing or refusing, you could offer Friday if another project moves to the following week, or a short first version by Friday and the full report after.

Speed matters too. In experiments published in 2002, Galinsky and colleagues found that negotiators whose first offers were accepted at once were less satisfied than negotiators whose offers were not accepted straight away, even when their outcome was the same or better; this guide relied on the abstract.⁹ An instant yes can leave the other side wondering what they left behind.

6. Ask questions, then listen to the answers

Questions reveal the interests that make trades possible. The Program on Negotiation, drawing partly on the Georgia State University professor Edward Miles, recommends open questions that start with what, how or why, and follow-ups such as “Tell me more”, a pause, a summary of what you heard, or “Are there other issues we haven’t addressed yet?” It warns against pairing an open question with a closed one, because people tend to answer only the closed one.¹⁰

Listening is the other half. Getting to Yes names listening only to rebut as a common communication failure.² The habits in our guide to active listening, such as summarizing before you reply, apply directly. In a rent talk, “What matters most to you in a tenant?” can reveal that the landlord values a longer lease or someone who handles small repairs.

7. Recognize when haggling costs more than it saves

Negotiating is not always worth it. In six studies published in 2020, Einav Hart and Maurice Schweitzer found that negotiating a wage for a task could harm how well people then did the work, compared with not negotiating, and that a sense of conflict in the relationship explained the drop; only the abstract was checked.¹¹ Their example is a homeowner who haggles with a landscaper and may win better terms but a less motivated landscaper.

The Program on Negotiation’s account of that research adds that counterparts who seemed friendly and interested reduced the harm, and that in fields such as law and consulting, no-negotiation policies are common.¹² Feelings also carry forward: Jared Curhan and colleagues found in 2006 that how people felt about a negotiation predicted their later decisions about negotiating better than the deal’s economic outcome did.¹³

One-off dealYou will depend on them laterClear market priceNo clear price

Clear market price, One-off deal: Bargain firmlya used car, a market stall

Clear market price, You will depend on them later: Ask, but gentlya regular contractor or landlord

No clear price, One-off deal: Research, then aska one-off repair quote

No clear price, You will depend on them later: Talk terms, not only pricea long service contract, a manager

Skip or soften the haggling when your alternative already beats anything they could offer, when the gain is small next to the time and goodwill it costs, or when a price is set by policy. Then ask about the terms around the price instead: timing, scope, delivery or payment.

WiserHours

Prep list for any deal

• Write what I want and why, and guess why they want what they ask for
• Name my best alternative if this deal fails
• Set my walk-away point and my target
• Find one fair standard, such as recent market prices
• Plan my first figure and the reason for it
• List what I could give that costs me little
• Write three open questions

Find this checklist online:
https://wiserhours.com/negotiation/how-to-negotiate/#checklist-how-to-negotiate-before

Haggling norms change from place to place

Whether haggling is expected, polite or insulting depends on where you are and what you are buying. Wikipedia’s overview of bargaining notes that in North America, Australia and Europe it is mostly limited to expensive or one-of-a-kind items such as cars, homes and antiques, and to informal settings such as flea markets, while in other regions it may be normal even for small purchases. It adds that many cultures take offense when the other side starts bargaining too soon.¹⁴ The Program on Negotiation, for example, describes business deals in China as depending heavily on the relationship between the parties, which can make talks take longer than Western negotiators expect.¹⁵

These are broad patterns, and they vary within countries too. The research has a similar blind spot: most studies in the 2025 first-offer review used Western samples.¹ If you are unsure, watch what others do, ask a local, or ask the seller whether the price is fixed.

Tested findings versus trusted advice

Read each row as a tendency across many negotiators, not a forecast for your next deal.

The first-offer review is the firmest evidence here, and even it rests on short exercises. Nobody has tested a whole negotiation method on everyday deals like rent or car prices, so the steps above support habits rather than predict results. Treat the first-offer advice as the best-tested part, and the rest as expert advice to try and adjust to what you see.

Where this series goes next

Pay has its own guides: the one on asking your manager for a raise deals with pay reviews, and job-offer negotiation will be covered in the job-search section. For disagreements with no price involved, see settling a dispute with a coworker.

Later guides in this section will go deeper on preparing, offers and counteroffers, rent, cars and bills, workload at work, freelance rates, hardball tactics, trust and fairness, and negotiating across cultures or by email.

The bottom line

Before any negotiation, know what you will do if it fails, because that sets the point where you walk away. Then look for the issues each side values differently, open with a number you can justify, and give only in exchange. Push hardest on price where the deal is one-off and the market is clear, and ease off where you will depend on the other person afterward.