How Much House Can I Afford?

"How much house can I afford?" sounds like a single-number question. In practice it is really two questions stacked on top of each other: how much would you like housing to cost as a share of what you make, and how much room is actually left once your existing debts are accounted for? This calculator answers both, then shows you which one is actually setting your limit.

This page is built around income-based purchasing power, whether that income comes from one person or two, alongside your current monthly debts, a housing payment target you choose, a debt-to-income planning limit you choose, your down payment, mortgage rate and term, property taxes, insurance, HOA dues, and mortgage insurance. It produces an estimated affordable purchase price, an estimated loan amount, and a full monthly housing-payment breakdown, along with a plain explanation of what is constraining the number.

What This Page Does Not Try to Replace

This calculator does not attempt to be a full amortization tool. If you already know the home price and want a full payment schedule, use the Mortgage Calculator. If you want a deep look at your debt-to-income ratio on its own, without the home-price question attached, a dedicated debt-to-income calculator is the right tool for that. If you are trying to decide between renting and owning rather than how much to spend on owning, use the Rent vs. Buy Calculator. If you want to isolate the down-payment question by itself, the Down Payment Calculator is built for that. And once you have a monthly housing number from this page, run it through the Budget Calculator to see how it actually sits inside your full monthly life.

This calculator's "Estimate From My Income" mode runs two separate calculations side by side and then takes the lower of the two. That lower number becomes your Modeled Housing Payment Ceiling, and identifying which path produced it is treated as one of the most important results on the page, not a footnote.

Path One: The Housing Budget Target

The Housing-Target Budget is simply your Gross Monthly Income multiplied by the housing-share percentage you choose. The default shown is 28%, which is a common planning starting point, but it is fully editable between roughly 20% and 40%, or any custom value you prefer. There is nothing universal about 28%. Some households are comfortable well above it; others prefer to stay well below it. This calculator will never present it as a rule you must follow.

Path Two: The Debt-Adjusted Housing Room

The Debt-Adjusted Housing Room takes a different approach. It multiplies your Gross Monthly Income by your chosen Total DTI Planning Limit, defaulted to 36%, and then subtracts your current monthly debt payments from that number. The result is the housing payment that would be left over if your total debt load, including a new mortgage, stayed at or under that DTI percentage. Like the housing target, 36% is an editable planning assumption here, not a promise of what any lender will approve.

Why the Lower Number Wins

Because both paths are trying to describe the same ceiling from different angles, this calculator uses whichever one is more restrictive. If your existing debts are light, the housing-target path is usually the tighter constraint. If your existing debts are heavier relative to income, the debt-adjusted path usually becomes the binding one. Either way, the page tells you directly which path set your number, because that single fact often explains the entire result better than any other input on the page.

Selecting Single Buyer or Two-Income Household on this page does more than change a label. It changes how income is gathered, how debt is gathered, and which visuals appear in your results.

Single Buyer Mode

In Single Buyer mode you enter one income, using whichever pay structure fits: annual salary, hourly wage with hours per week, weekly pay, or a monthly figure. You then enter recurring monthly debt broken into common categories, auto loan, student loan, credit card minimum payments, personal loans, and other, or you can skip the categories entirely and enter one already-known total.

Two-Income Household Mode

In Two-Income Household mode, Borrower 1 and Borrower 2 each get their own independent pay-type selector and their own monthly debt entry. Nothing here assumes the two incomes are equal, that both borrowers are paid the same way, or that both borrowers carry similar debt. One borrower could be salaried and the other hourly. One could have significant student loan debt and the other none. The calculator simply adds the two actual incomes together and adds the two actual debt figures together; it never doubles a single number or splits income 50/50 by default.

Married Does Not Automatically Mean "Double the House"

It is tempting to assume that adding a second income simply doubles purchasing power. It does not, for two reasons. First, the second income is whatever it actually is, not a copy of the first. Second, a second borrower usually brings their own debts into the picture, and those debts reduce the Debt-Adjusted Housing Room the same way any other debt would. Two incomes can increase the income available for the calculation, but the debts associated with the borrowers also affect the overall picture. Marriage itself is not what increases purchasing power; the actual combined income and combined debt are what move the number, in either direction.

Once the Modeled Housing Payment Ceiling is known, whether it came from the income-based two-path comparison above or from the amount you typed directly in Start With My Monthly Housing Budget mode, the calculator works backward to find the home price whose estimated monthly housing payment lands right at that ceiling.

What Goes Into the Estimated Monthly Housing Payment

The Estimated Monthly Housing Payment on this page is principal and interest, plus property tax, plus homeowners insurance, plus HOA dues, plus mortgage insurance if you entered any. It is intentionally never called just "the mortgage payment," because the mortgage payment alone is usually only part of what actually leaves your account every month.

Down Payment, Rate, and Term All Shift the Price the Ceiling Can Support

A larger down payment, entered as a percentage or a flat dollar amount, reduces the loan amount needed for a given home price, which frees up room in the payment for a higher price. A lower interest rate does something similar: the same ceiling supports a larger loan when the rate is lower, because less of each payment goes to interest. This calculator does not predict future mortgage rates; it uses the rate you enter and encourages you to test more than one. Loan term works the same way. A 15-year term pays off faster but demands a larger monthly payment for the same loan amount, which usually supports a smaller home price under a fixed ceiling than a 30-year term would. None of the three terms offered is labeled as the "most common" choice, because the right term depends on your own goals, not a default assumption baked into the tool.

Property Tax, Insurance, HOA, and Mortgage Insurance Are Never Guessed From a National Average

Property tax rates vary enormously by state, county, and even individual municipality, so this calculator does not assume a local default; it uses the property tax percentage or annual dollar figure you enter. The CFPB recommends checking your actual local rate whenever possible. Homeowners insurance works the same way: the sample figure shown is clearly marked as an example, not a national average, because insurance costs depend heavily on location, coverage, and the individual property. HOA dues default to $0 and are always included in the payment calculation when entered, never hidden from the total. Mortgage insurance also defaults to $0 and is never auto-invented from your down payment percentage, since actual PMI, FHA MIP, VA funding fees, and USDA guarantee fees are structured very differently from one another and depend on the specific loan program.

Lender-style debt-to-income calculations generally do not include ongoing maintenance and repair costs, because they are not a fixed contractual obligation the way a mortgage payment is. This calculator follows that same convention for its Estimated Monthly Housing Payment and DTI figures. But maintenance is still a real cost of owning a home, so it is tracked separately and added into a second figure called the Estimated Homeowner Planning Outflow, which equals the Estimated Monthly Housing Payment plus whatever optional maintenance reserve you choose to enter, in dollars per month or as a percentage of home value per year. This distinction, lender-style payment versus your real planning outflow, is one of the most useful things this page can show you, because it keeps the DTI-style figure comparable to how lenders actually calculate it while still giving you an honest number for your own budget.

A lender's underwriting process considers far more than this calculator can model: credit score, verified income documentation, employment history, assets and reserves, the specific loan program, property appraisal, occupancy type, and current investor guidelines, among other things. This tool cannot reproduce that process, and it is not trying to. What it can do is give you a transparent, adjustable planning estimate so you can see how income, debt, down payment, rate, and housing costs interact before you ever talk to a lender.

DTI guidelines vary by loan product and underwriting method. As one labeled example, Fannie Mae's Selling Guide generally caps DTI at 36% for manually underwritten conventional loans, with allowances up to 45% in certain scenarios with compensating factors, while loans run through Desirable Underwriting (DU) casefiles can be treated differently. That is one example from one guide, not a universal ceiling, and it is not the default this calculator forces on you. Your own 36% field above is a planning assumption you control.

Buying on a single income does not require a second income to be valid or safe. It simply means the entire Housing-Target Budget and Debt-Adjusted Room are built from one paycheck rather than two, so recurring debt has a proportionally larger effect on the result. If your single-income estimate feels tight, three tools can help you refine it: the Budget Calculator to check the resulting payment against your real month-to-month spending, the Take-Home Pay Calculator to see what actually lands in your account after taxes and withholdings, and the Savings Goal Calculator if you are still building toward a larger down payment before you buy.

Two Incomes Can Increase the Income Base, but the Debts Come Too

Two-income households often see a larger Housing-Target Budget simply because combined income is larger. But the Debt-Adjusted Room is calculated from combined debt as well, so a second income with significant debt attached can pull the ceiling back down even as the income side goes up. That is exactly why this calculator asks for each borrower's debt independently instead of asking for one combined debt figure. It also means the household's Modeled Housing Payment Ceiling is not simply "whatever the higher earner could afford alone, times two." It is the actual combined math, run through the same two-path comparison as any single buyer would use.

A single result is useful, but a range of results is more useful. This calculator automatically builds three comparison views alongside your main estimate: a rate scenario table showing your entered rate one percentage point lower and one percentage point higher, a debt scenario table showing your current debts $250 lower and $250 higher (never dropping below $0), and a price scenario view showing your estimated home price $25,000 lower and $25,000 higher than the modeled estimate. None of these are recommendations. They exist so you can see how sensitive your result is to small changes in the assumptions, before those assumptions become real decisions.

Why Sensitivity Matters More Than the Headline Number

Two households can land on the exact same Estimated Home Price and be in very different positions. One household's number barely moves when debt or rate shifts a little; the other household's number swings sharply. Running the scenario tables tells you which kind of household you are, and that is often more useful for decision-making than the single headline price by itself.

This calculator works entirely from the numbers you type in. It cannot see your credit score, your verified income documentation, your assets and reserves, gift funds, the specific loan program you might use, the appraisal, occupancy requirements, loan limits, seller concessions, discount points, rate locks, or how an adjustable-rate mortgage might behave over time. It also cannot see your other monthly expenses such as utilities, childcare, food, transportation, healthcare, or savings goals, none of which are part of a standard debt-to-income calculation but all of which are part of your real life. The full Important Limitations list further down this page spells these out in detail. None of this makes the estimate useless; it makes it a starting point for a conversation with a lender and with your own budget, not a final answer from either one.

This calculator is an educational planning tool. It does not know, use, or evaluate any of the following, all of which can meaningfully affect actual loan eligibility and pricing: