Rent vs Buy Calculator

This compares buying a home with renting the same home and investing the difference. The owning side carries the mortgage, property tax and insurance, ongoing maintenance, and the cost of selling at the end. The renting side invests the down payment and the closing costs on day one, adds whatever renting saves each month, and pays its own renter’s insurance and a security deposit that sits in a landlord’s account earning nothing.

Major repairs are optional and kept separate from the maintenance percentage, because nobody replaces a roof in smooth annual instalments. A water heater, a furnace, a roof and a catch‑all bucket each carry their own cost and their own replacement cycle, so they land as single large bills in specific years, each inflated to the year it actually happens.

Tax is switched off by default. Turned on, it treats the two sides as the law actually treats them: a home you live in gets the primary residence exclusion — the first $250,000 of gain, or $500,000 filing jointly in the US, and no cap at all in Canada — while the renter’s portfolio gets nothing of the kind. That asymmetry is real, it is large, and it favours buying.

Some of what decides this is not arithmetic at all. Buying is a savings plan you cannot skip: the payment leaves your account whether or not you felt like saving that month, and each one buys a little more of the house. The payment is fixed while rent is not, so owning tends to look better the longer you stay and the higher inflation runs, and in most places the gain on a home you live in is taxed lightly or not at all. You decide what happens to the place, you can stay as long as you like, and you get to belong somewhere. Against that: a house is slow and expensive to sell, every repair is yours, it holds you in one city, and it is a single asset on a single street bought largely with borrowed money — which multiplies the gain and the loss in equal measure.

Renting buys freedom instead. You can leave at the end of a lease, it costs far less to start, the repairs are somebody else’s problem, and your money stays liquid and spread across hundreds of companies rather than sunk into one building. Against that: you build no equity, the rent keeps climbing for as long as you pay it, and somebody else decides whether you stay. And the whole case rests on one condition the numbers quietly assume and most people never meet — that the difference actually gets invested, every month, for decades. The “surplus actually invested” slider exists to test that. It reduces the amount invested on whichever side is investing, and which side that hurts depends on which one has more left over each month.

Defaults are roughly 2026 US medians: a $410,000 price, a 6.5% mortgage and $2,000 rent. Your settings save in your browser, so changing a default here never disturbs numbers you have already entered — only “Reset this tab” brings in new ones.