Real estate & rental
Real Estate Rent vs Buy Calculator
How long you need to stay before buying beats renting, counting the costs people forget.
Result
An arithmetic tool, not financial or legal advice. Lending criteria, tax treatment and tenancy law all vary by state and change regularly. Confirm anything that affects a decision with a lender, an accountant or an attorney. The result swings enormously on two guesses nobody can make reliably: appreciation and rent inflation. It also ignores what the down payment would have earned if invested instead, which in a strong market can exceed the housing gain. Run it with appreciation at zero to see the honest floor.
Get a Free Business AuditQuestions
About this calculator
Why does buying take years to win?
Transaction costs. Between purchase costs and 6% to 8% selling costs, a house has to appreciate several percent just to break even on the round trip.
What about the money not spent on a down payment?
A real omission here. Invested elsewhere it earns a return, and a thorough comparison includes that opportunity cost. Treat this as a housing-cost comparison rather than a full investment analysis.
The formula
net cost of buying = payments and costs paid, less the equity recovered after selling costs
Put this calculator on your site
Free to embed. Paste this where you want it to appear. It stays up to date automatically because it loads from BDEVY.
Please keep the attribution line. It is the only thing we ask in return.
Keep going
Related calculators
Real Estate Home Affordability Calculator
What price a lender is likely to approve, based on income, debts and the ratios they actually use..
Open calculatorReal Estate Home Appreciation Calculator
What a home may be worth in future at a given growth rate, and what that is in real terms..
Open calculatorEstimating is the easy part
The jobs you never hear about cost more than the ones you mis-measure. BDEVY builds the marketing, systems and automation that bring them in.