Take the standard rent-versus-buy comparison and run it across all fifty states — each state's own median home price, its own effective property tax rate, its own average homeowners insurance premium, its own most recent house price appreciation, against its own HUD median two-bedroom rent.
In 27 of the 50, buying never breaks even inside thirty years. Among the 23 where it does, the median break-even is year 22. Only one state comes in under ten years.
That result is real, it is computed from sourced state data, and you should not act on it — because it does the single thing this guide exists to stop you doing. Section 6 takes it apart.
By the end of this guide you will have run five gates in order, each with a number you compute from your own situation: how long you will stay, whether you can carry the monthly gap, what your appreciation assumption is and how much it is load-bearing, what the rate is doing to your break-even, and how much to put down. You will finish with a break-even year, a confidence interval around it, and a decision you can defend to yourself in three years.
A note before you start. This is general education, not personalised financial advice. Mortgage rates in worked examples are 6.65% for a 30-year fixed and 5.95% for a 15-year, from the Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey for the week of 20 August 2026 — illustrative, and certainly not the rate you will be quoted. State median home prices, effective property tax rates, average homeowners insurance premiums and appreciation rates come from this site's own sourced fifty-state dataset, cited per state. Rents are HUD Fair Market Rents for FY2026 — the 40th percentile of gross rent, so roughly 60% of units cost more. Confirm every figure against your own lender documents, your own quotes and your own market before deciding anything. This site takes no lead-generation and no affiliate money; nothing here routes you to a lender, an agent or a brokerage.
The four numbers that actually decide it
Almost every rent-versus-buy argument is conducted with two numbers — the rent and the mortgage payment — and those two cannot answer the question.
Here is the median Ohio home against the median Ohio two-bedroom rent:
| Median home price | $245,500 |
| Mortgage principal and interest at 6.65% | $1,418/month |
| Median two-bedroom rent | $978/month |
A $440 gap, and buying builds equity. Obviously buy.
Now the same house with the other three costs of ownership included:
| Monthly | |
|---|---|
| Principal and interest | $1,418 |
| Property tax at Ohio's 1.36% effective rate | $278 |
| Homeowners insurance at Ohio's $2,080 average | $173 |
| Maintenance at 1% of value a year | $205 |
| All-in first-year cost of owning | $2,075 |
| Rent | $978 |
| Real gap | $1,097 |
Not $440. $1,097 a month — $13,164 a year, before a single closing cost.
The mortgage payment is 68% of the true cost of owning. Comparing it to rent omits a third of the picture, and it omits the third that never builds equity.
Why there is a break-even at all
If buying costs $1,097 a month more, why does anyone say it wins?
Because most of the mortgage payment is not a cost. Principal repayment is a transfer from your bank account to your own equity — you still have the money, it is just held in a house. Only the interest, tax, insurance and maintenance are genuinely spent.
So the comparison has two sides that move in opposite directions over time:
Buying starts far behind. The down payment, the closing costs and the early cost gap all land at once, and early mortgage payments are almost entirely interest, so equity builds slowly.
Then it catches up. Rent rises every year; a fixed-rate payment does not. Equity compounds. Eventually the accumulated equity plus the rent you avoided exceeds everything you spent.
The break-even year is where those two lines cross — and the entire question is whether you will still be there when they do.
Three things determine where it lands, and section 6 shows that one of them dominates the other two combined.
The gate that settles most cases before any arithmetic
There are five gates in this guide and the first one needs no calculation at all.
How long will you stay?
Across the fifty-state run, the fastest break-even in the country was year seven, and the median among states that broke even at all was year twenty-two. Against those numbers a three- or five-year horizon loses everywhere, and no appreciation assumption rescues it.
The reason is transaction costs. Buying consumes roughly 2–5% of the price on the way in and around 7% on the way out — call it 10% of the purchase price paid to complete two transactions. On a $245,500 house that is close to $25,000, and recovering it inside five years requires the house to appreciate about 2% a year just to get back to level.
So Gate 1 has two definite answers and one continue:
- Moving within five years → rent. Stop here; the rest of the guide will not change it.
- Staying twenty years or more, and the payment is comfortable → buy. The mortgage ends and the rent does not.
- Anything between → keep going. That is what the other four gates are for.
One correction to apply before you answer. People are bad at this estimate and wrong in a consistent direction — jobs change, relationships change, families grow. Whatever number you first thought of, subtract two years and answer with that. If the decision survives the subtraction it is robust; if it does not, you have learned that your case depends on a horizon you may not have.