Mortgage calculators

Start from the question, not the calculator

Most people land here with one sentence in their head and no idea which of eighteen boxes it belongs in. This is the shortest route from that sentence to the right tool. Where two are listed, run them in the order given, because the first one produces the number the second one needs.

Buying a home: what you can afford, and what the day itself costs

Nine tools, and they answer different questions in a rough order. Worked down that order, each one hands the next its input, which is why running the third one first usually produces a number you then have to throw away.

Start with home affordability if you do not yet have a price in mind. It runs the 28/36 rule against the income and the debts you enter, and tells you which of the two ratios binds first, which for most people is the total-debt one rather than the housing one. It is the wrong tool once you have a specific house in view: at that point the price is a fact, not an output, and you want the payment calculator instead. That one states principal and interest on assumptions you set, with the APR of those same assumptions beside it. What it cannot tell you is whether a lender would agree with the rate you typed in, because nobody here sets one.

Down payment and closing costs answer the same worry from two sides: what the day itself costs in cash. The first turns a percentage into a figure, and shows what is left to borrow and the loan-to-value that produces. The second splits the bill into lender fees and third-party costs, which matters because only one of those two moves the APR. Run both. Budgeting for the down payment and being surprised by the rest is the most common way a purchase comes apart in its last two weeks.

PMI is worth running only under twenty percent down on a conventional loan. It gives the premium, and more usefully the two separate dates it can come off: the one you may ask for, and the later one the servicer owes you without being asked. It is the wrong tool on an FHA loan, where two premiums are charged on two different schedules, and the FHA calculator exists to put each of them in the right place rather than adding them together. The VA calculator is narrower still, for a borrower with entitlement, and its whole point is that the funding fee is a one-time charge financed into the loan rather than something billed every month.

Two of the nine are not price tools at all. Debt-to-income is the one to run first if you already suspect the answer is no: it shows both ratios a lender measures and how much room is left under each ceiling, and it is the fastest way to find out that clearing one card can change more than another thousand dollars in the bank would. Rent vs buy sits a layer above the whole question, comparing what owning costs against what renting costs with maintenance counted. It deliberately invents no appreciation rate and assumes no tax benefit, which makes it conservative on purpose, and makes it the wrong tool if what you wanted was a forecast rather than a comparison of today.

Background reading for this group: the first-time buyer guide.

Refinancing: whether it is worth doing, and when it pays for itself

Four tools, and the order matters more here than anywhere else on this page, because three of them will happily produce an encouraging number about a refinance that never repays its own costs.

Break-even comes first, always. It answers the only question that actually decides the thing: how many months of a lower payment it takes to recover the cash the refinance costs, and whether it ever does. Compare that number against how long you expect to keep the house, not against the term of the loan. Then the refinance calculator compares the loan you have against the one you are considering, and prints the signed difference in total interest next to the monthly one. Those two disagree more often than people expect, because a smaller monthly figure on a fresh thirty-year schedule can cost more across the life of the debt than the loan it replaced. That second number is there precisely so the first one cannot hide it.

Amortization is a tool for understanding rather than for deciding. It shows how a payment splits between interest and principal, what the first year of it actually buys, and the month the principal share finally overtakes the interest. Run it on the loan you already have before you replace it, because a new thirty-year term restarts that schedule at its least useful point, and that cost appears nowhere in a quote.

Extra payment is the alternative nobody sells you, because nothing is originated and nobody is paid when you take it. It walks the schedule month by month rather than approximating, and shows what a fixed amount extra takes off the interest and off the term. It is the wrong tool if the goal is a lower required payment: paying extra shortens the loan, it does not reduce what you owe on the first of the month. If the pressure is monthly rather than lifetime, read the refinance guide for what a longer term does instead.

Background reading for this group: the refinance guide.

Pulling cash out: how much equity you have, and how much of it you can reach

Three tools, and the first two are arithmetic you can finish before speaking to anybody. Neither needs a rate, which is why they can be exact where almost everything else on this site can only be an estimate.

Home equity is the starting point: what the property is worth, less what is still owed on it, and roughly how much of that a cash-out refinance could reach. Loan-to-value is the same division written the way a lender writes it, plus the combined figure once a second lien or a HELOC is counted behind the first loan. That combined number is the one that decides things when a line of credit already sits behind the first mortgage, and it is the one people leave out.

Cash-out refinance turns those ratios into money: what you would actually receive once closing costs have come out of the proceeds, at a ceiling you set rather than one we assume, because that ceiling is a lender policy and lender policies differ. It is the wrong tool for a HELOC or a second mortgage, both of which leave the existing loan alone and are priced on their own terms. The cash-out guide covers which of the three fits which situation.

Background reading for this group: the cash-out refinance guide.

Rental property: whether the rent covers the loan, and whether the deal is worth doing

Two tools, for a loan underwritten on the property rather than on you, and they answer two questions that are easy to confuse.

DSCR asks whether the property can be financed. It divides gross rent by PITIA, which is the formula used by every lender that publishes one, and returns the ratio, the break-even rent and the pricing band the result lands in. It is the wrong tool for a home you intend to live in: a DSCR loan is business-purpose credit, and the consumer protections that attach to a mortgage on your own house do not attach to it. Rental property ROI asks the other question, which is whether the deal is worth doing at all. Net operating income, cap rate and cash-on-cash return, with a vacancy allowance you can see rather than one buried in the arithmetic.

Run both. A property can clear the coverage test and still be a poor purchase, and a property with a good return can fail coverage and never reach the closing table at all.

Background reading for this group: the DSCR loan guide.

The three numbers a calculator cannot get from you

Almost everything these tools need comes out of your own situation. Three figures do not, and all three are reset on an annual cycle, which is why they are stated here with a publisher and a date rather than left to anybody's memory.

The conforming loan limit, above which a loan is a jumbo

The Federal Housing Finance Agency set the 2026 baseline conforming loan limit for a one-unit property at $832,750, an increase of $26,250 over the 2025 value, in a news release dated 25 November 2025 and read on 21 September 2026. Above that line a loan is a jumbo, underwritten to a lender's own rules instead of to Fannie Mae's or Freddie Mac's, which usually means a larger down payment and tighter reserves. In designated high-cost counties the limit is higher, running up to a ceiling of $1,249,125, a figure the statute fixes at 150 percent of the baseline. FHFA states the 2026 value rose in every United States county or county equivalent but 32 of them.

The FHA floor and the FHA ceiling

FHA derives its own limits from that same baseline. HUD Mortgagee Letter 2025-23, dated 11 December 2025 and read on 21 September 2026, puts the FHA national low-cost area limit for a one-unit property at $541,287, which is 65 percent of the conforming figure, and the high-cost area limit at $1,249,125, which is 150 percent of it. Both apply to case numbers assigned on or after 1 January 2026. Your own county sits at one of those two ends or somewhere between them, and neither this page nor any tool on it looks your county up, so treat the pair as the outer walls rather than as your number.

None of the three is a rate and none of them is a decision about you. They are ceilings on the size of loan a particular program will buy or insure, and they are worth knowing before you run affordability or the FHA calculator, because a result sitting just above one of these lines is a different conversation from a result sitting just below it.

What these tools will not do

Four limits, stated once here rather than discovered one at a time later.

• They quote no rate. BEDRWay is not a lender, is not licensed to originate in any state, and publishes no rate table. Where a tool needs a rate you type one in yourself, and what comes back is the arithmetic of your own assumption rather than an offer of credit.
• They make no credit decision. Nothing here reads a credit file or a bank statement, and no output on this site is an approval, a pre-approval or a commitment from anybody. Only a licensed loan officer looking at your documents can say what a lender would actually do with the file.
• They trust the inputs. A calculator is a rearrangement of what it was given. Take a property tax figure off a listing rather than off the county record, and every number downstream of it inherits the error without saying so.
• They do not know your county. Loan limits, transfer taxes, title pricing and insurance all vary by state and often by county. None of these tools looks yours up, which is the main reason a figure here and a figure from a loan officer can both be right and still differ.

Each calculator prints its own assumptions next to its result, and names its sources at the foot of the page. If a number looks wrong, the assumption above it is the first place to look.

How BEDRWay works

BEDRWay is not a lender, a mortgage broker or a servicer, and we do not underwrite, price or approve anything. You tell us your situation, and we introduce you to one licensed loan officer who lends where you live. One person, not a pool of them bidding, and not a call center. That loan officer pays us a flat fee for the introduction whether or not a loan ever closes, which is why the calculators and the introduction both cost you nothing.

Not sure which product you are even looking at? Start with the loan programs we cover or the plain-English guide to how a mortgage works. What happens to what you tell us is set out in our privacy policy, and you can opt out at do not sell.

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