Rent vs. Buy Calculator
Compare the total cost of renting versus buying a home, and see when buying breaks even.
Renting
Default: 3%, a common long-run average for U.S. rent growth.
Buying — purchase
Default: 10%. PMI, often required below 20% down, isn't modeled here.
Default: 3% of purchase price — typical origination, appraisal, and title fees.
Buying — ongoing costs
Default: 1.1%, close to the U.S. average effective property tax rate.
Default: about 0.35% of home price/year if left blank, a common estimate.
Default: $0. Enter your building or neighborhood's fee if it has one.
Default: 1.5% of home value annually, a common rule of thumb for upkeep and repairs.
Buying — when you sell
Default: 3% annually, roughly in line with long-run historical home price growth.
Default: 6% of sale price, covering typical agent commissions.
Time horizon
How this works
Renting and buying aren't directly comparable at a glance, since a rent payment is pure cost while a mortgage payment is partly cost (interest, taxes, insurance) and partly saving (principal, which becomes home equity). This calculator strips out that noise by tracking the true net cost of each path over the years you actually plan to stay.
For renting, that's simply your rent payments added up, increasing each year by your expected rent growth rate. For buying, it's the purchase price, closing costs, mortgage interest, property tax, insurance, HOA fees, and maintenance, minus what you'd walk away with if you sold at the end of the period: the home's appreciated value, minus what you still owe the bank and minus selling costs like agent commissions. Principal payments don't appear as a cost at all in this framing, since that money comes back to you as equity rather than being spent.
The "break-even year" is the point where buying's higher upfront costs (down payment, closing costs) have been offset enough by rising rent and home appreciation that owning becomes the cheaper option going forward. Sell before that point and renting would likely have cost you less; stay past it and buying usually wins.
This calculator can't account for everything, though. It doesn't factor in the opportunity cost of investing your down payment elsewhere instead, tax deductions on mortgage interest, or lifestyle factors like the flexibility to move for a job that renting offers and owning doesn't. It also assumes steady, average appreciation and rent growth rather than the market timing risk of buying right before a downturn or renting through a period of unusually fast rent increases. Treat the result as a financial starting point for the decision, not the whole picture — where you want to live and how long you realistically expect to stay matter just as much as the math.