2026 Conforming Loan Limit: Where Your Loan Sits Against the Line

In 2026, 3075 of the 3235 US counties share exactly one conforming loan limit — $832,750. Only 160 are higher. Pick your county, enter the price and your down payment, and this page answers what a lookup table cannot: how far your loan sits from the line, and how much more down payment would put it back under.

Why your county is the wrong variable

Of the 3235 counties in the 2026 FHFA file, 3075 — 95.0% — carry exactly the same one-unit limit: $832,750. Only 160 counties are higher. That means for about 19 buyers in 20, looking up the county changes nothing at all, and the number that actually decides the outcome is the loan amount, not the map.

Limit pages usually present this the other way round, as a table to search. The table is real, but it hides the distribution: the whole country is not spread across a range of limits, it is piled on a single number with a thin tail of 160 counties above it. The tail is below, in full, because it is the only part that carries information.

The 160 counties where the 2026 limit is higher

All 160 counties whose one-unit limit exceeds $832,750 in 2026 are listed below, highest first, so a reader who lands on this paragraph alone still knows what the table is and which year it belongs to. Everything not listed here is $832,750. Alaska, Hawaii, Guam and the US Virgin Islands enter at $1,249,125 because a separate statutory baseline applies to them; Maui and Kalawao in Hawaii reach $1,299,500 on local median home value, which remains under Hawaii's own $1,873,675 ceiling.

Source: FHFA conforming loan limit values for calendar year 2026, all counties, one-unit column.

How the $832,750 figure was set

The 2026 baseline is $832,750, up from the prior year, and the ceiling for one-unit properties is $1,249,125 — exactly 150 percent of the baseline. The ceiling matters because it caps how high any high-cost county can go: a county whose median home value would justify more than $1,249,125 is still held at $1,249,125.

• The 115 percent test is why the distribution is so lopsided: most counties never clear it, so they default to the baseline.
• The 150 percent ceiling is why the tail is short: the highest mainland limit in 2026 is $1,249,125, not whatever the local median would imply.
• Alaska, Hawaii, Guam and the US Virgin Islands are set by separate statutory provisions, which is why 39 of the 160 above-baseline counties are there.
• Only the one-unit column is used here. Two-to-four-unit properties carry higher limits in the same file and are outside this page's arithmetic.

What crossing the line actually changes

A loan above the county limit is not eligible for purchase by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac in that county, which is what "jumbo" means in practice. The consequence is not a penalty written into law — it is that the loan moves out of the standard secondary market and into whatever a lender prices it at.

This page deliberately does not put a rate on that gap. There is no published, checkable national figure for the jumbo spread that would survive being quoted back at us six months from now, and inventing one would make every other number on the page less believable. What is checkable is the distance: the headline figure above is exact, and the extra-down-payment cell is the same gap in the currency that actually closes it.

Reading the answer

The headline is the amount above the limit, so zero is the ordinary, healthy case: the loan fits. A positive number is the exact amount by which it does not. "Room left" is the same gap with the sign kept, which is why it is the more useful figure in a negotiation — it tells you how much price you can still add before the loan stops being conforming.

• Same down payment, higher price: room falls one dollar for every dollar of price.
• Same price, higher down payment: room rises one dollar for every dollar of down payment, because the loan falls by that dollar.
• Switching to a county with a higher limit changes the ceiling, not your loan — which is why the extra-down-payment figure stays put when you change counties.

Questions this page answers

Every external figure on this page, with its source

2026 Conforming Loan Limit: Where Your Loan Sits Against the Line lists each external figure it uses once, with the publisher that issues it and the date it was retrieved. The calculator takes these as its defaults, so any of them can be replaced with a number of your own; a figure that is not in the list is one this page did not take from anywhere.

Values are the ones this page is built with, not a live feed. Where a figure is revised on a schedule, the retrieval date above is when it was read, and the next scheduled refresh is shown at the top of the page.

Where the numbers come from

• Primary sourceFederal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) — www.fhfa.gov · retrieved 2026-10-23. Conforming loan limit values for calendar year 2026, all counties, one-unit column. Every limit on this page comes from this file. Dataset version 2026 — the whole county table was regenerated from that release.
• Primary sourceFHFA — www.fhfa.gov · retrieved 2026-10-23. Announcement of the 2026 values: baseline $832,750, one-unit ceiling $1,249,125 (150 percent of baseline), and the separate statutory provisions for Alaska, Hawaii, Guam and the US Virgin Islands.
• Primary sourceConsumer Financial Protection Bureau — www.consumerfinance.gov · retrieved 2026-10-01. What a conforming loan is and what changes when a loan is not eligible for purchase by the Enterprises.

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Cluster us/mortgage · Unit us-mortgage-conforming-limit · Engine conforming-limit / jumbo · Method: Loan = price − down payment. Over-limit = max(loan − county limit, 0). The highest price that stays conforming at the same down payment = county limit + down payment. Extra down payment needed = over-limit amount. County limits come from the FHFA calendar-year 2026 county file; one-unit (single-family) column only.