Loan limits for 2026: conforming, FHA, and the line where a loan becomes jumbo

For 2026 the baseline conforming loan limit on a one-unit home is $832,750, and the high-cost ceiling is $1,249,125. The Federal Housing Finance Agency announced both on 25 November 2025 and revises them every November for the January that follows. Neither is a national number you can apply everywhere: the limit is published county by county, 3,075 of the 3,235 counties and county equivalents in the 2026 file sit at the baseline, and 160 sit above it.

BEDRWay is not a lender or a mortgage broker. We are not licensed to originate mortgages in any state, we set no rates and quote none, and nothing here is an offer of credit. Every figure on this page is a published limit, not a decision about a person. We introduce you to one licensed loan officer who works where you live, and only that person can tell you what you would be offered.

Reviewed by the BEDRWay editorial team. Last reviewed 21 September 2026. Every figure names its publisher and the day it was read.

The 2026 conforming loan limit

The conforming loan limit is the largest balance Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are allowed to buy. That is the whole of it. It is not a cap on what a home may cost, it is not a cap on what a lender may lend, and it is not a judgment about a borrower. It is the line where a loan stops being saleable to the two enterprises, which is why crossing it changes the product rather than the person.

For 2026 the baseline is $832,750 for a one-unit property, an increase of $26,250 over 2025. The size of that increase is not discretionary. The Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 ties it to the change in the FHFA House Price Index, and the nominal, seasonally adjusted, expanded-data index rose 3.26 percent between the third quarters of 2024 and 2025, so the baseline rose by the same proportion. FHFA also rounds: baseline values down to the nearest $50, high-cost values down to the nearest $25 (FHFA conforming loan limit FAQs, updated November 2025, read 21 September 2026).

Why it is a county number and not a state one

Where housing is expensive, the limit goes up. The test is statutory: in any area where 115 percent of the local median home value exceeds the baseline, the applicable limit is higher, and the high-cost figure is capped at 150 percent of the baseline. For 2026 that cap works out to $1,249,125.

The area in that test is a core-based statistical area, not a state, which is the detail that trips people up. FHFA takes the median value of the highest-cost county in each core-based statistical area and applies the resulting limit to every county in it. Its own worked example for 2026 is Santa Barbara County, California: a median home value of $819,000, multiplied by 115 percent, gives $941,850, which is above the baseline and below the ceiling, so that is the county's limit. The same arithmetic produces the other two outcomes. Where the multiplication lands above the ceiling, as it does around Washington DC, every county in that area simply takes the ceiling. Where it lands below the baseline, as it does around Tallahassee, every county in that area takes the plain baseline and there is nothing local about the answer at all.

That is why there is no such thing as a state loan limit, and why a page promising one is telling you something that does not exist. There are 3,235 counties and county equivalents in the 2026 file. In it, 3,075 of them carry the baseline and 160 carry something higher, and both of those counts are replaced every November.

The 2026 conforming limits by number of units

Read out of the FHFA conforming loan limit file for calendar year 2026, the HERA-based final flat list of all counties, on 21 September 2026. A five-unit building is not a single-family property at all and none of these limits reaches it.

Alaska, Hawaii, Guam and the US Virgin Islands

These four have been treated separately since the Emergency Home Finance Act of 1970, and the rule is that their baseline sits 50 percent above the national one. In practice that makes their 2026 baseline $1,249,125, the same figure that is the high-cost ceiling in the rest of the country, with a ceiling of their own at $1,873,675. Every county equivalent in those four places is at or above that baseline in the 2026 file, and one Hawaii county is above it, which is the only way any county in the country carries a one-unit conforming limit larger than $1,249,125.

FHA loan limits for 2026

FHA limits are published by HUD, on a separate document and a fortnight later, but they are not an independent calculation. The National Housing Act pins them to the conforming figure at both ends. The area limit is 115 percent of the median one-family price in the area, it may not exceed 150 percent of the conforming limit for a property of that size, and it may not fall below 65 percent of it (12 U.S.C. 1709(b)(2)(A), read 21 September 2026). Those two boundaries are what the industry calls the FHA floor and the FHA ceiling.

For 2026 the one-unit floor is $541,287 and the one-unit ceiling is $1,249,125. Mortgagee Letter 2025-23 states both in words, as 65 percent and 150 percent of the same $832,750 conforming figure, and lists all four unit counts for each. Counties between the two carry whatever the 115 percent test produces, which is why a county can sit well above the FHA floor and still be nowhere near the conforming limit in the same place.

The 2026 FHA limits by number of units

Read out of FHA Mortgagee Letter 2025-23 on 21 September 2026. The three high-cost figures below the first row are the same numbers as the conforming ceilings above, and that is not a copy. Both sets are 150 percent of the same conforming baseline, arrived at by two agencies applying two statutes to one figure and published in two documents a fortnight apart. They have matched for years. There is no rule that says they must, so they are tracked separately here.

The FHA special exception areas, and a fifty dollar disagreement

Alaska, Hawaii, Guam and the US Virgin Islands get a higher FHA ceiling than the rest of the country, adjusted, in the letter's own words, to account for higher costs of construction. For one unit in 2026 that ceiling is $1,873,625.

Which is fifty dollars away from the $1,873,675 FHFA publishes as the conforming ceiling for the same four places, and both of those numbers are correct. They are set by different agencies, in different documents, under different rounding instructions, and neither is the arithmetic answer: 150 percent of $1,249,125 is $1,873,687.50 before anybody rounds anything. If you are comparing the two, compare the documents rather than assuming one has a typo.

What makes a loan jumbo

A jumbo loan is a loan above the conforming limit for the county the property sits in. There is no second criterion. It is not a credit tier, not a product family, and not a price band that starts at a round number. FHFA states it in one sentence on its own conforming loan limit page: mortgages above this amount are known as jumbo loans.

Which is why jumbo is a county-dependent word. A $900,000 loan is a jumbo loan in most of the United States and an ordinary conforming loan in the 145 counties whose 2026 one-unit limit is above that figure. Nothing about the borrower changes between those two counties. What changes is whether Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac is allowed to buy the loan, and a lender keeping a loan on its own books or selling it into a private market writes its own eligibility terms rather than the enterprises' ones.

Two things often get folded into the word and do not belong there. FHA has no concept of a jumbo loan: a loan above the FHA limit for a county is simply not FHA-insurable, and it becomes a conventional loan question. And VA loan limits stopped tracking the conforming limit altogether on 1 January 2020, when the Blue Water Navy Vietnam Veterans Act of 2019 took effect, so a VA borrower is not bounded by the figures on this page at all (FHFA conforming loan limit FAQs, read 21 September 2026).

How to find the limit for your own county

Go to the publisher. Both agencies maintain a lookup, both are free, and both are replaced wholesale each year, which is precisely why a copy of them on a site like this one would be worse than a link.

• FHFA conforming loan limit values, all counties
• FHFA conforming loan limit map
• HUD FHA mortgage limits lookup

Three things decide the answer, and only one of them is about you. The first is the county the property is in, which is not always the county your mailing address implies, and it is the property's county that counts rather than yours. The second is the number of units. The third is whether that county sits in a core-based statistical area with a more expensive neighbor, because if it does it takes the neighbor's limit. Once you have the number, the loan-to-value calculator is the right tool for working out where a particular purchase price and down payment land against it.

What a loan limit does not decide

A limit caps the loan, never the price of the house. Somebody buying above the limit in their county with a large enough down payment can still be inside it, and the loan stays conforming. That is the single most common misreading of these figures, and it goes the other way too: a modest home in an expensive county does not become a jumbo purchase because the county's limit is high.

And none of these numbers is a credit decision. Whether a lender will write a particular loan on a particular property depends on the file in front of an underwriter, and no published limit stands in for that. What this page is good for is arriving at the conversation knowing which number applies where you are buying, and knowing that the word jumbo describes a threshold rather than a verdict.

The mortgage requirements by state overview covers the six requirements that are genuinely set by your state rather than by your lender, and the home loans page covers the programs themselves.

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