Rent to Mortgage Calculator

Running the payment formula backwards

Every other mortgage calculator on this site takes a loan amount and a rate and solves for the payment. This one does the opposite: it takes the payment — your rent — and the same rate, and solves for the loan amount that payment would service. The formula is the present value of an annuity: loan = rent × [(1+r)ⁿ − 1] / [r(1+r)ⁿ], where r is your monthly rate and n is the number of months in your chosen term.

Once that loan amount is found, the calculator divides it by (1 − your down payment percentage, expressed as a fraction) to back into a total home price — the idea being that the loan plus the down payment together equal the price. Your down payment in dollars is then that price times your down payment percentage. A verification step re-runs the standard forward amortization formula on the resulting loan amount and confirms it produces your original rent figure back, as a sanity check on the algebra rather than a separate estimate.

A worked example at this week's rate

The Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey put the 30-year fixed average at 6.71% for the week ending September 3, 2026. Suppose your rent is $2,000 a month and you plan a 30-year loan with 20% down.

Drop the down payment to 10% on the same rent and rate, and the supportable loan amount doesn't change — it's still whatever $2,000/month services at 6.71% over 30 years — but the equivalent home price falls to $344,028, because a smaller down payment means the same loan represents a larger share of a smaller total price. That is a mechanical result of the division, not a judgment about which down payment is realistic for you.

The second, more conservative number the calculator also gives you

Alongside the headline equivalent home price, this calculator produces a second figure — maxAffordableWithTaxInsurance — built on a different assumption: that only 75% of your rent budget would actually go toward principal and interest on a mortgage, with the remaining 25% reserved for property taxes and homeowners insurance.

That 75/25 split is a fixed assumption inside this calculator, not a rule drawn from your tax bill or insurer. On the same $2,000 rent, 6.71%, 30-year, 20%-down scenario above, 75% of the rent — $1,500 — is run through the identical reverse-amortization math, producing a maxAffordableWithTaxInsurance figure of $290,274, versus $387,032 for the unadjusted figure. The gap between those two numbers, $96,758 in this example, is entirely the size of that built-in 25% haircut — it is not a locality-specific estimate of what your actual taxes and insurance would cost.

What paying rent doesn't prove about qualifying for a mortgage

Comfortably affording a rent payment and qualifying for a mortgage of the same size are different tests, and this calculator only answers the first one. A lender's decision runs on your documented income, your existing debts, your credit history, and the cash you actually have saved for a down payment and closing costs — none of which are inputs here. The equivalent home price above is a ceiling implied by the payment math alone, not a preapproval.

Two costs of ownership fall outside even the 75/25 adjusted figure. HOA dues, where they apply, are not part of the 25% carved out for taxes and insurance — they are a separate, ongoing cost on top of it. And the itemized mortgage interest deduction some renters expect to gain from owning is smaller than it used to be for anyone financing near the top of this calculator's price range: IRS Publication 936 limits the deduction to interest on the first $750,000 of acquisition debt ($375,000 married filing separately) — a limit that does not bind on the $309,626 loan in the worked example above, but would on a rent-supported loan amount well above it.

Why the rate you use matters more than the rent you enter

Because the loan amount is the present value of an annuity, it moves with the interest rate in a way that isn't linear or obvious from the rent figure alone. Holding the $2,000 rent and 30-year term fixed, dropping the rate lets the same monthly payment amortize a larger principal — the annuity factor (1+r)ⁿ − 1)/(r(1+r)ⁿ) grows as r shrinks — while raising the rate shrinks the supportable loan for the identical payment. The practical consequence is that the single biggest lever on your equivalent home price is not how precisely you estimate your rent, it's which rate you plug in. Re-run this calculator with your actual quoted rate rather than a survey average once you have one, since even a few tenths of a point moves the answer by a meaningful amount on a 30-year term.

Term length, and where the loan lands relative to conforming limits

Term length works the same lever as rate, in the opposite direction from what shortening the term does to a monthly payment on a purchase loan. Here the term is doing the opposite job: it is not something you're choosing to pay off faster, it's an assumption baked into how much loan your fixed rent payment can carry. A 15-year term forces more principal repayment into the same monthly payment, so it supports a noticeably smaller loan than a 30-year term at the identical rent and rate — the same $2,000 payment amortized over 180 months instead of 360 buys far less present value, because there are half as many payments to spread the principal across.

It's also worth checking the equivalent home price this calculator returns against the loan-size categories that actually govern mortgage pricing. The 2026 baseline conforming loan limit set by the FHFA is $832,750 for a one-unit home, with a high-cost-area ceiling of $1,249,125. Someone whose rent-supported loan amount comes out well under that baseline is looking at conventional, conforming pricing broadly consistent with the PMMS average used above. Someone whose figure lands above it — a renter in a high-cost metro paying rent well into five figures a month, for instance — would in practice be shopping jumbo pricing, which does not necessarily track the 6.71% conforming average this worked example relies on.