Data & research

Data & Research

Original property-cost studies. Every one names its source and data vintage, publishes its full methodology, and says explicitly what it could not verify — because a number without those three things is not evidence.

Studies

Closing Costs by State, 2026July 30, 2026
Average US purchase closing costs are $4,528 — 1.04% of sales price — for title, settlement, recording and transfer taxes. Reconciles why that figure and the CFPB's familiar 2%–5% differ by roughly threefold, reports the verified state extremes from Delaware's 3.06% down to South Dakota's 0.39%, and states plainly which states we could not source.
Data period: calendar year 2025

How we publish data

Named sources, with vintage. Every figure traces to a published source with an edition and a date. We do not recycle numbers whose origin we cannot establish.
Methodology in full. What was measured, what was excluded, how averages were computed, and what the source itself says about its own limits.
Gaps stated, never filled. Where we cannot verify a figure, we say so and leave it out. An estimate looks exactly as authoritative as a sourced number and is not.
Free to cite. Our analysis is published under Creative Commons BY 4.0 — reuse it with attribution and a link.

For how we source and model the numbers behind the calculators themselves, see our data methodology.

Sourced analysis elsewhere on the site

Several guides carry original, sourced datasets of their own:

Home Insurance Cost by State, 2026 — state-level premium averages and the multipliers behind them.
Metro cost guides — project costs across US metros, priced from BLS wage data.
15 vs 30-Year Mortgage — the 15-vs-30 rate spread computed across all 1,823 weeks of the Freddie Mac series.