Am I better off renting?
Rent versus buy
The honest version of this comparison has one rule: whichever party spends less in a given month invests the difference, at the same return. Most calculators only let the renter do that, which decides the answer before you type anything.
This is a wealth comparison over a fixed period. It knows nothing about wanting to paint a wall, or about a landlord selling the building.
Your inputs
The purchase
The single most important input on this page. Buying rarely wins over three years and rarely loses over fifteen.
The rental
The assumptions that decide it
Applied to whichever side has money to invest. Both sides, same rate — that is the point.
Agent commission, transfer tax, the repairs a buyer asks for. This is the number people forget.
Your result
After the period you named
Renting is ahead by $46,671
on these assumptions and no others
Where each side ends up
Month one
The house at the end
Buying starts behind — the down payment and the buying costs have gone. It catches up through equity and stops paying rent that keeps rising.
Owning is roughly flat; renting climbs. Where they cross is not the same as where net worth crosses.
Take this with you
Every number you entered is in the address bar. Copy the link and it opens with your inputs restored — that is how everything else here shares.
What this assumes
- Symmetry. Each month the cheaper party invests the difference at the return you set. The renter also starts holding the down payment and the buying costs, because that money never left their account.
- Selling costs are deducted from the home's value at the end, since the comparison only means anything if the house is turned back into money.
- Mortgage insurance is charged and terminated by the programme's own rule, so it disappears from the owning cost at the right month rather than never.
- Rent resets once a year, not continuously.
- No tax treatment. No mortgage-interest deduction, no capital-gains exclusion, no state credit. Most households take the standard deduction and get no interest benefit at all; if yours does not, the comparison shifts toward buying.
- No transaction costs on the invested portfolio, and no tax on its gains — which shifts the comparison toward renting. The two omissions partly cancel.
Demonstration form
Have someone look at it
If this were a working site, this is where the conversation would start.