Buy vs rent breakeven calculator
How many years before buying overtakes renting on your numbers.
Owning’s line is net cost: everything you pay out (deposit, stamp duty + ~£3k fees, mortgage, 1%/yr maintenance) minus the equity you build and any appreciation. We deliberately don’t credit investment returns on your deposit, selling costs, remortgage-rate changes or leasehold charges — each of those pushes the breakeven later. A model to think with, not financial advice.
Buying starts behind. Stamp duty, legal fees, survey and moving typically cost £5,000–£15,000 up front, and selling later costs thousands more in agency and legal fees — money renting never charges. Buying wins by grinding that deficit back: each month some of your payment becomes equity rather than rent, and any house price growth accrues to you. The breakeven is the year the accumulated advantage of owning finally covers the entry and exit costs — and the single biggest thing that moves it is how long you stay.
On typical numbers the breakeven lands around three to five years: stay longer and buying usually wins comfortably; leave after eighteen months and renting almost always would have been cheaper, because the transaction costs never got amortised. The other inputs matter in predictable ways — higher mortgage rates versus rents push breakeven later, fast rent inflation pulls it earlier, zero house-price growth pushes it later but usually doesn’t eliminate it, since the equity-building and rent-avoidance effects persist without any growth at all.
The honest use of this calculator is testing your own horizon against your own numbers. If you are confident of staying five-plus years, marginal-looking buying usually stacks up; if a job move or life change inside three years is plausible, the certainty of renting is worth real money, whatever the ownership-is-always-better folklore says. Run pessimistic growth and rate scenarios before optimistic ones. Illustration, not advice.
Common questions
How long do I need to stay for buying to beat renting?
Typically 3–5 years on ordinary UK numbers — the time it takes equity-building and avoided rent to recover £8,000–£15,000 of buying costs plus future selling costs. High stamp duty (bigger purchases, second homes) pushes it later; first-time buyer relief and fast-rising rents pull it earlier. Your own inputs move it by years.
What if house prices don’t grow at all?
Breakeven arrives later but usually still arrives: with zero growth you are still replacing rent with capital repayment, and a 25-year mortgage still ends while rent doesn’t. What flat prices remove is the fast, leveraged upside — and they make short stays clearly rent-favoured, since there is no growth to bail out the transaction costs.
Why does moving again so soon favour renting?
Because buying charges an entry fee (duty, legal, survey) and an exit fee (agency, legal) that together can approach 5% of the property’s value, while renting charges neither. Amortised over ten years, that is trivial; over eighteen months, it is usually more than any equity gained.
Does this calculator account for the deposit’s opportunity cost?
It lets you: money locked into a deposit could otherwise earn interest or investment returns, which is a genuine cost of buying that simple comparisons skip. With savings rates meaningful, a £30,000 deposit forgoes £1,000+ a year of interest — enough to shift a marginal breakeven by a year or more.
Numbers are half the story. Check the home itself.
One search pulls the official record on any address in England & Wales — value, flood risk, schools, noise and more, scored 0–100.