Rent vs Buy Calculator
Compare renting and investing your buy-side cash with purchasing a primary home and either selling later or holding longer term.
This tool is for straightforward rent-versus-buy decisions about a place you plan to live in yourself. If future rental income is part of the plan, the House Hacking Calculator is a better fit.
Inputs
Calculated monthly mortgage payment (P&I)
$0
Computed from purchase price, down payment, rate, and loan term.
Estimated year-1 total owner monthly cost
$0
Mortgage payment + property tax + HOA + repairs, before tax effects.
Calculated cash needed to buy
$0
Down payment + buyer closing costs.
Calculated initial stock amount in rent path
$0
Cash kept invested instead of used to buy.
Property
Living Assumptions
Growth Assumptions
Ownership Costs
Taxes
Defaults are set to generic U.S. assumptions rather than one specific city or personal scenario.
If you know your market, update the mortgage rate, property tax, HOA, rent, and appreciation assumptions before relying on the result.
The buy-if-sold path now also estimates home-sale capital gains tax, including an optional 250k/500k primary-home exclusion assumption.
Hover over the small ? icons for explanations of less obvious inputs.
Break-even sale year
—
Best sale year for buying
—
Advantage at year 15
—
Buy minus rent
Hold-forever advantage at horizon
—
No selling costs applied in this view.
Year-1 monthly cost gap
—
Buy monthly cost minus rent monthly cost.
Net ending position by sale year
These lines assume you evaluate both paths in that year, relative to the same starting cash you could have used to buy. A negative value means that path is below that starting-cash baseline by that year, not that your actual account balance is below zero. The buy path includes selling costs and any modeled home-sale capital gains tax in this chart.
Buying advantage by sale year
Above zero means buying is ahead if you sell in that year. Below zero means renting is ahead.
Selected checkpoints
| Year | Rent path | Buy path if sold | Buy − rent |
|---|
“Hold forever” is shown separately in the summary card and means comparing both paths at the selected horizon without forcing a sale of the home.
How to read the outputs
- Rent path means you keep the would-be down payment and closing costs invested, pay rent over time, and let the remaining cash compound in the market.
- Buy path if sold includes down payment, closing costs, mortgage payments, property tax, HOA, repairs, homeowner tax savings, selling costs, and any modeled home-sale capital gains tax in the selected year.
- Primary-home sale exclusion is a user-controlled assumption in this model. If enabled, it uses a 250k exclusion for single filers or 500k for married filing jointly.
- Both lines are shown relative to the same starting cash opportunity. So a negative value means that path has fallen below that starting baseline after rent, ownership costs, or selling friction.
- The most important visual signal is the gap between the two lines. That gap shows which path is ahead by that year. A line can be negative on its own and still be the better option if it sits above the other one.
- Break-even sale year is the first year where buying comes out ahead if you sell in that year.
- Best sale year is the year where the buy-minus-rent gap is largest under the current assumptions.
- Hold-forever advantage removes selling costs and compares both paths at the final horizon, which is useful if you might keep the property indefinitely.
- Use this tool directionally. Small changes to appreciation, rent growth, stock returns, mortgage rate, and tax assumptions can change the result a lot.
Year-1 monthly cash flow breakdown
| Line item | Rent path | Buy path |
|---|
This is a sanity-check view for the first year only. It helps explain why the model prefers renting or buying before long-term appreciation and sale-year effects kick in.