No sign-up neededBuilt on our 20-year county study
Rent or buy calculator
See what owning costs compared with renting.
Example: Gwinnett County, GA
- Renting, a month
- $2,360
- Owning, a month
- $3,213
Payment breakdown
Every number is filled in. Change any of them.
Who's ahead after each year
Owning builds equity. Renting frees up cash to invest. The lines show which ends up with more.
Buying pulls ahead:
This assumes the renter invests the cash a buyer would put in, and every month's savings, and leaves them invested. The buyer has the home's value, less what they owe and the costs of selling. Stocks swing a lot from year to year. Taxes are left out: stock gains are taxed, while most home sale gains up to $250,000 ($500,000 for a couple) are not. The loan's rate stays the same for 30 years. Refinancing later at a lower rate could favor owning.
The numbers behind the chart
| Year | If you buy | If you rent and invest |
|---|
Where today sits in the area's history
The loan payment on a typical home for each $1 of typical rent, each year from 2005 to 2025. It assumes 20% down.
Enter a place above to see its record.
The numbers behind the chart
| Year | Average rate | Loan payment for each $1 of rent |
|---|
Where the starting numbers come from
- Home value
- The median home value in the address's census tract, or in the ZIP code or city you pick, from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey, 2020 to 2024. When there is no figure, we use the county's, then the state's.
- Rent
- PriceDNA's typical rent for a 3-bedroom home in the tract, the same rent our other analyses use. For a ZIP code, city or county, the middle of its tracts'. Three bedrooms, because the typical owned home has three.
- Property tax
- The typical tax bill for owners in the tract, ZIP code or city, as a share of home value, applied to the price.
- Home insurance
- The middle yearly cost for owners with a mortgage in the tract, ZIP code or city, else the county.
- Flood and wind
- For an address, we check whether it sits in a FEMA flood zone. We flag wind in areas a state wind pool covers, where standard policies often leave out wind.
- Rate
- The rate starts at the CFPB's Average Prime Offer Rate for fixed loans of the term you choose, for the latest week. That average includes typical lender fees, so we take off 0.32 points, its 2025 gap above the interest rate on purchase loans. The record below uses each year's average rate on home purchase loans from FHFA's National Mortgage Database (2025: 6.3%).
- Upkeep
- 2% of the home's value a year, set aside for repairs and replacements, within Fannie Mae's rule of thumb of 1% to 4%.
- Closing costs
- $6,684, the middle total loan costs on a home purchase loan in 2023, from the CFPB. The state transfer tax is shown on its own line. Local transfer taxes are not included.
- Mortgage insurance
- Conventional loans below 20% down: $50 a month for every $100,000 borrowed, the middle of the $30 to $70 that Freddie Mac says to expect. FHA loans: HUD's premiums from Mortgagee Letter 2023-05. That is 1.75% of the loan up front, plus 0.15% to 0.75% a year, by loan size, down payment and term. FHA loans above the county's 2026 FHA limit are not shown.
- Who's ahead
- Each rate is an average over up to 30 years. Home values come from FHFA's price index for the county, or its metro area or state, 1995 to 2025. Rent comes from the BLS rent index for the metro area or region. Investment returns come from NYU's Aswath Damodaran, 1996 to 2025. Selling costs are agent fees of 5.5%, from Clever Real Estate's 2026 survey, plus the state's transfer tax.
- The record
- The same method as our study: 20% down, a 30-year loan at each year's average rate, and value and rent averaged with the survey years on either side. There is no 2020 point.
Projections use past averages: the years ahead grow today's numbers at average rates from up to 30 years. Real prices, rents and returns will move differently.