Cash for the down payment
$40,000
Enter the price, the down payment and what each end of the trade costs. The calculator reports the round trip as one number, the price the house has to reach to cover it, and how long that takes.
Assumptions this tool makes. Both ends of the trade are inputs rather than findings. No federal agency publishes a national average closing cost rate, and what a seller pays is set by the listing agreement, by state law and by negotiation, so the defaults of 3% for buying and 6% for selling are where a reader starts rather than what this site asserts; replace them with the figures on your own Loan Estimate and your own listing agreement and every number on the page moves. Buying costs are treated as money spent at closing and are not financed into the loan; when they are financed the interest they create is a real extra cost and this page does not compute it. Excluded entirely are the loan's interest and principal, property taxes, homeowners insurance, maintenance, HOA dues and the cost of moving: those are financing and holding costs, not transaction costs, and principal in particular is excluded because it comes back on a sale while a fee does not. The price the house has to reach assumes the whole round trip is carried by the price of the house, which holds when nothing else about the property changes between the purchase and the sale; it is not a forecast and it does not allow for improvements, for depreciation, or for a market in which the house sells for less than was paid. Growth compounds monthly at one twelfth of the annual rate entered, a convention registered in the data ledger, which makes twelve monthly steps of 2.6% compound to 2.63% over a year. The default rate of price growth is the twelve-month change in the FHFA House Price Index to July 2026, a national repeat-sales average rather than a forecast, and the same release reports twelve-month changes from 0.6% in the Mountain division to 6.3% in the Middle Atlantic, which is why one national figure is shown as a single rung of a ladder. The month reported is the first month in which the value reaches the line, not the month whose value is nearest to it. Transfer taxes and recording fees differ by state and are not modelled. The years before you sell decide whether the sale happens before or after the month the price reaches the line; they do not move that month.
| Buyer closing costs | Buying | Selling | Round trip | Price needed | Growth needed | Selling ÷ buying |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1.00% of price | $4,000 | $25,787 | $29,787 | $429,787 | 7.4% | 6.45× |
| 2.00% of price | $8,000 | $26,043 | $34,043 | $434,043 | 8.5% | 3.26× |
| 3.00% of price | $12,000 | $26,298 | $38,298 | $438,298 | 9.6% | 2.19× |
| 4.00% of price | $16,000 | $26,553 | $42,553 | $442,553 | 10.6% | 1.66× |
| 5.00% of price | $20,000 | $26,809 | $46,809 | $446,809 | 11.7% | 1.34× |
| Cost of selling | Buying | Selling | Round trip | Price needed | Growth needed | Selling ÷ buying |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4.00% of sale price | $12,000 | $17,167 | $29,167 | $429,167 | 7.3% | 1.43× |
| 5.00% of sale price | $12,000 | $21,684 | $33,684 | $433,684 | 8.4% | 1.81× |
| 6.00% of sale price | $12,000 | $26,298 | $38,298 | $438,298 | 9.6% | 2.19× |
| 7.00% of sale price | $12,000 | $31,011 | $43,011 | $443,011 | 10.8% | 2.58× |
| 8.00% of sale price | $12,000 | $35,826 | $47,826 | $447,826 | 12.0% | 2.99× |
| Growth a year | Months to reach the line | Value when you sell | Against the round trip |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0.00% a year | Never | $400,000 | -$38,298 |
| 1.00% a year | 110 months | $420,500 | -$17,798 |
| 2.60% a year | 43 months | $455,467 | +$17,169 |
| 4.00% a year | 28 months | $488,399 | +$50,101 |
| 6.00% a year | 19 months | $539,540 | +$101,242 |
A closing cost is money spent to move a property from one owner to another, and none of it becomes equity. Buying a house means paying one set of fees to complete the purchase; selling it later means paying a different set to complete the sale. Every dollar of a down payment turns into ownership and comes back when the house is sold. Every dollar of a closing cost is spent, and what it buys is the transaction rather than the house.
Most calculators on this subject ask for a price, apply a percentage, and answer with the cash a buyer needs at the table. That figure is real and it is the one a buyer is asked for at the worst possible moment, but it covers one end of a two-ended trade. A household that buys and then sells pays twice, and the second payment tends to be the larger of the two: the sale price is higher than the purchase price was, and brokerage compensation is charged as a percentage of the sale.
The third line is the one usually missing. Selling costs are taken out of the sale price rather than added to it, so a house that sells for exactly what was paid still leaves the seller short by the selling costs on their own. The price has to clear the purchase price and the buying costs and still leave enough behind to pay the selling costs out of what remains, which is why the divisor is there and why the answer is larger than the two costs added together.
Buying costs are a list of separate charges rather than one fee, and the CFPB's own description of them names the families: appraisal fees, tax service provider fees, title insurance, government taxes, and prepaid expenses such as property taxes, homeowners insurance and the interest due before the first payment arrives. Each family is priced on a different scale. An appraisal is a flat charge; a title policy is priced per thousand dollars of loan; a recording fee is set by the county; a transfer tax is a percentage set by the state; prepaid interest is a daily charge that depends on which day of the month the closing falls on.
That is why this page asks for a single blended rate instead of itemising. A per-item model would need every one of those inputs and would still be wrong for the next county. The rate entered stands for the sum. A reader who has the sum already, from the Closing Cost Details page of their own Loan Estimate, can replace it; a reader who does not has a starting point rather than a promise.
No typical rate is reported here, and the figure that circulates as one should be treated with suspicion. Articles on this subject commonly report that the CFPB puts closing costs at 2% to 5%, and the CFPB pages on closing costs, both of which are listed among the sources below, contain no such range; the secondary articles that repeat it are not even consistent about whether the denominator is the price or the loan amount. What a borrower actually faces is itemised on their own Loan Estimate, so the rate is an input here and the page says so rather than dressing a guess up as a benchmark.
On the default purchase the buying side is $12,000, and the cash at the table is $52,000, of which the fees are 23.1%. That share moves sharply with the down payment, because the down payment and the fees are the two things the cash is made of: at 3.5% down the $12,000 is 46.2% of the $26,000 needed, and at 20% down it is 13.0% of $92,000. A buyer who budgets for the down payment alone is short by the whole buying cost at every one of those levels.
The round trip is the buying costs plus the cost of selling, and its size is what most buyers underestimate. A $400,000 purchase with 10% down costs $12,000 to buy and $26,298 to sell, for $38,298 in total. That total is 96% of the down payment, so the fee bill across a single buy-and-sell cycle comes within four percentage points of the deposit the buyer spent years assembling.
None of the total is arbitrary, and one identity makes the whole page checkable. The price the house has to reach is the price plus the buying cost, divided by one minus the selling rate, and the selling cost is that price times the selling rate. Adding the two costs gives the buying cost plus the selling rate times the price, all over one minus the selling rate, which is the same as the price the house has to reach minus the price that was paid. The dollars the house must gain are exactly the dollars the round trip costs.
| Amount | Charged on | Rate | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Buying costs | $12,000 | $400,000 purchase price | 3% |
| Cost of selling | $26,298 | $438,298 sale price | 6% |
| Round trip | $38,298 | — | — |
Where the round trip comes from on a $400,000 purchase with 10% down
The table is really about the two bases in the third column. Both ends are quoted as a percentage, and a 3% buying rate against a 6% selling rate looks like a two-to-one relationship, but they are charged on different amounts: the buying costs on the $400,000 that was paid, and the cost of selling on the $438,298 that has to be received. The cost of selling ends up 2.19 times the buying cost rather than 2.00, and the extra comes from the base as much as from the rate. The base is itself inflated by the costs it has to carry, which is the circularity the divisor resolves.
The ladder in the calculator above moves the buying rate from 1% to 5% and leaves the cost of selling where it is, and the ratio in the last column falls from 6.45 to 1.34. Even at the bottom of that range, where the buyer pays almost nothing and the section above says a cheap buying rate is the whole story, the selling side is still more than six times the size of the buying side on the same transaction.
A house that has to reach $438,298 from $400,000 has to gain 9.6%, and how long that takes depends entirely on the rate of growth. The rates ladder in the calculator above runs five rates against the same purchase, and the answer ranges from nineteen months at 6% a year to never at zero. Measured against the five years the sale is assumed to happen after, only the top three rungs of that ladder get there in time.
The rate of price growth is the one figure on this page taken from a published series rather than entered by the reader, and it is deliberately modest. The FHFA House Price Index covering the twelve months to July 2026 puts national house prices 2.6% higher, and the same release reports twelve-month changes running from 0.6% in the Mountain division to 6.3% in the Middle Atlantic, so a single national figure is a compromise rather than a forecast. At 2.6% the purchase reaches its line in 43 months, inside a five-year hold with $17,169 to spare at the end of it.
The 43 months are worth checking against arithmetic rather than taken on faith. Compounding at a nominal 2.6% a year means dividing that rate by twelve and applying the result sixty times over the five years, and the convention is recorded in the data ledger because it changes the answer: twelve monthly steps of 2.6% a year compound to 2.63% across the year, not 2.6%. The page reports the first month in which the value reaches the line rather than the month whose value is closest to it, so a sale in the month before that one is short of the line and a sale in that month is past it.
The holding period decides whether the sale happens before or after that month, and it does not move the month itself. Over one year at the default growth rate the house is worth $410,525 and the sale is $27,773 short of the round trip; over ten years it is worth $518,626 and clear by $80,328; over thirty years it is clear by $433,555. The same 43 months applies to all three, because the line the price has to cross was fixed on the day the house was bought.
The buying rate is quoted before it is known, and the federal rule governing how far it may then move is the most useful thing a buyer can carry to the closing table. Closing costs fall into three groups, and the CFPB states the rule plainly: some costs the lender can increase by any amount, some the lender can increase by up to 10%, and some the lender cannot increase at all. A lender that deliberately underestimates the costs on a Loan Estimate is breaking the law.
The groups sort by who controls the charge rather than by how large it is. A charge the lender sets and the buyer cannot avoid is one the lender must stand behind, which is why it cannot move. A charge the buyer could have shopped for but chose from the lender's list sits in the middle. A charge that depends on the calendar, the insurance market or the tax authority has no limit at all, because the lender does not control it either. Reading a Loan Estimate with those three groups in mind turns a wall of line items into a short list of the ones worth arguing about.
| Can it change? | What falls in this group |
|---|---|
| No, at all | Fees paid to the lender, to a mortgage broker, or to an affiliate of either, for a required service; fees for a required service the lender did not allow the buyer to shop for, where the provider is not affiliated with the lender or broker; transfer taxes |
| By up to 10% in total | Recording fees; fees for required services where the buyer chose a provider from the lender's written list, provided that provider is not an affiliate of the lender |
| By any amount | Prepaid interest; property insurance premiums; amounts placed into an escrow or reserve account; fees for services the buyer shopped for with a provider not on the lender's list; property taxes and other charges for third-party services the lender does not require |
The three groups as the CFPB describes them, with the regulation behind each in the sources below
The 10% is a ceiling on the total of the middle group rather than on any single charge inside it, so one recording fee can double as long as the group as a whole stays within 10%. If it does not, the lender owes the difference: the regulation requires the excess to be refunded to the buyer no later than 60 days after the closing. The CFPB's consumer page states the entitlement to that refund, and the regulation itself supplies the deadline, which is why both are cited below.
Four of the reported figures come from a single multiplication each, and reading them back off the page is the quickest way to see whether a calculator is doing what it says. The buying cost is 3% of the $400,000 purchase, which is $12,000. The price the house has to reach is $412,000 divided by 0.94, which is $438,297.87. The cost of selling is 6% of that, which is $26,297.87. The round trip is the two added together, $38,297.87. The page rounds each of those to the nearest dollar and shows them as $12,000, $438,298, $26,298 and $38,298.
The identity is easier to check by subtraction than by algebra. $438,297.87 less $400,000 is $38,297.87, which is the round trip to the cent. The price the house has to reach is the price that was paid plus the round trip, by construction rather than by coincidence, which is why a rising market is not what makes the trade break even — it is only what decides when. The second identity is the same fact divided through: $38,297.87 over $400,000 is 9.574%, which the page shows as 9.6%.
The 43 months can be checked month by month, and the boundary is worth knowing about. At a nominal 2.6% a year applied monthly, the value after 42 months is $438,064.48, which is $233.40 short of the line, and after 43 months it is $439,013.62, which is past it. The month reported is the first month in which the value reaches the line, so a sale in month 42 is short and a sale in month 43 is not. A reader stepping through the same arithmetic and landing one month either side should check the compounding convention before assuming a disagreement, because dividing an annual rate by twelve is a choice the ledger records rather than a rule of arithmetic.
A difference of a few cents from your own working is the order in which figures are rounded, since the running text on this page rounds to the nearest dollar while the arithmetic behind it does not. A difference larger than that means one of the two implementations disagrees, and the corrections page explains how to report it.
Both, and the buyer usually pays more of them. The CFPB's summary is that a buyer generally pays all of the costs associated with the transaction, although the contract or state law may put some of them on the seller. What matters for this page is that the two sides are charged on different bases and at different rates, so both are inputs rather than assumptions. On the default figures the buying side is $12,000 and the selling side is $26,298.
At the default rates of 3% for buying and 6% for selling, $12,000 to buy and $26,298 to sell, a round trip of $38,298. That is 96% of the $40,000 down payment on the same purchase, and the selling side alone is 2.19 times the buying side. Both rates are inputs: enter the figures from your own Loan Estimate and your own listing agreement and every number on the page moves with them.
Not one published by an agency, and a widely repeated range is misattributed. Articles on this subject commonly report that the CFPB puts closing costs at 2% to 5% of the price; the CFPB pages on closing costs contain no such range, and the articles repeating it are not consistent about whether the percentage is of the price or of the loan amount. What a buyer actually pays is itemised on the Closing Cost Details page of their own Loan Estimate. This calculator therefore asks for the rate rather than asserting one, and the default is a starting point rather than a finding.
Some can and some cannot. Fees paid to the lender, to the mortgage broker or to an affiliate of either, fees for required services the buyer was not allowed to shop for, and transfer taxes cannot rise at all unless there is a change in circumstances. Recording fees and fees for services chosen from the lender's written list can rise, but not by more than 10% in total. Prepaid interest, insurance premiums, escrow deposits and fees for services the buyer shopped for off the list have no limit. If the middle group exceeds 10% anyway, the lender must refund the excess within 60 days of the closing.
Long enough for the price to rise by the round trip as a share of what was paid, which on the default figures is 9.6% and takes 43 months at the FHFA's most recent twelve-month rate of national house price growth. The holding period does not change that month; it only decides whether the sale happens before or after it. At a growth rate of zero the page reports Never, because a flat price never clears the round trip however long the house is held. The loan's own interest is not part of this figure either: the principal comes back on a sale, but the interest paid along the way is a separate cost that belongs to the payment calculators.
No. The round trip is the cost of the two transactions, not the cost of the loan. Interest, discount points and fees financed into a mortgage are financing costs; property taxes, insurance, maintenance and HOA dues are holding costs. Neither is a transaction cost, and neither is counted here. The exclusion is deliberate on a page about a single distinction: a down payment becomes equity and a principal payment reduces debt, while a closing cost does neither, and that is precisely why it has to be paid for out of the price.
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Cluster us/mortgage · Unit us-mortgage-closing-cost-calculator · Engine amortizing-loan / closing · Method: Both ends of one trade are counted on the same property at the price entered. The buying cost is the price multiplied by the buying rate. The price the house has to reach is the price plus the buying cost, divided by one minus the selling rate, because the selling cost is taken out of the sale price rather than added to it. The selling cost is that price multiplied by the selling rate, and the round trip is the two costs added. Two identities follow and the page uses both: the price to reach less the price paid is exactly the round trip, and the growth needed is therefore the round trip as a share of the price, reported once rather than twice. The months to reach the line are found by stepping the price forward one month at a time at one twelfth of the annual growth rate entered, and reporting the first month in which the value reaches the line; a growth rate of zero returns a sentinel that the page prints as Never. Costs excluded are the loan's own interest and principal, property taxes, insurance, maintenance, HOA dues and moving costs, none of which are transaction costs.