How long until buying beats renting?

The headline number depends on one assumption

Every rent-vs-buy comparison has to assume what a renter earns on the cash a buyer ties up. It is the most consequential input in the whole calculation and the one most calculators never show you. Here is what happens to 718 metros as you move it:

At a 3% assumed return, buying eventually wins in 682 of 718 metros. At 7% — roughly the long-run average for a diversified stock portfolio — it wins in 234. Same homes, same rents, same month. The mortgage rate matters far less: moving it from 4% to 8% only shifts the count from 620 to 350.

Twelve metros people ask about

Same model, same month, same assumptions — only the local price and rent differ. Click any city to open it in the calculator with its numbers prefilled.

New York, NY breaks even in 20 years $736,042 home · $3,573 rent · P/R 17.2 Los Angeles, CA never breaks even $965,867 home · $2,927 rent · P/R 27.5 Chicago, IL breaks even in 5 years $359,897 home · $2,275 rent · P/R 13.2 Dallas, TX breaks even in 28 years $365,048 home · $1,673 rent · P/R 18.2 Houston, TX breaks even in 10 years $307,273 home · $1,648 rent · P/R 15.5 Miami, FL breaks even in 8 years $476,638 home · $2,695 rent · P/R 14.7 San Francisco, CA never breaks even $1,144,062 home · $3,301 rent · P/R 28.9 Seattle, WA never breaks even $742,220 home · $2,269 rent · P/R 27.3 Atlanta, GA breaks even in 19 years $381,729 home · $1,854 rent · P/R 17.2 Boston, MA never breaks even $744,972 home · $3,210 rent · P/R 19.3 Phoenix, AZ never breaks even $445,343 home · $1,733 rent · P/R 21.4 Pittsburgh, PA breaks even in 5 years $234,727 home · $1,523 rent · P/R 12.8

Photographs: Carol M. Highsmith / Library of Congress. From the Highsmith Archive, donated to the Library of Congress with rights dedicated to the public; each image used here carries the Library’s “no known restrictions on publication” advisory.

Where buying pays off, and where it doesn’t

Median break-even year across each state’s metros. The obvious story — expensive coasts favour renting — is only half right. California, Washington and Massachusetts do land at the “never” end. But so do Wisconsin, Minnesota and both Dakotas, which are nobody’s idea of an expensive market. What matters is the price-to-rent ratio, not the price: Fargo sits at 24.2 and Green Bay at 25.1, because rents there are unusually low relative to home values in thin rental markets. Meanwhile much of the South and lower Midwest pays back inside a decade.

Each state is shaded by the median break-even year across its metros, so a state with one expensive metro and one cheap one lands in the middle. 17 states have a majority of metros where buying never catches up within 40 years: Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Washington, Wisconsin, Wyoming. Metros are assigned to their primary state, and Alaska and Hawaii are drawn as insets at adjusted scale.

Most metros that work, work quickly

The distribution is bimodal, which is the genuinely useful finding. Where buying works, it usually works fast — the biggest single group breaks even inside a decade. Where it doesn’t, it tends not to work at any horizon. There is comparatively little middle ground, so “stay a couple more years and it’ll pay off” is rarely the right read.

Fastest and slowest metros

Every metro links through to the calculator with its price and rent already filled in, so you can substitute your own mortgage rate, property tax and time horizon.

How much should you trust a break-even year?

Less than any calculator implies — including ours. To test that rather than assert it, we re-ran the identical model with a completely different price measure: Redfin’s median sale price instead of Zillow’s home-value index, on 698 metros where both publish. Rents stayed the same in both runs, so only the price measure varied.

The conclusions held. The two sources agree on the verdict — whether buying ever wins at all — for 85.7% of metros, their price-to-rent measures correlate at r = 0.871, and the return-sensitivity pattern replicates cleanly.

The precise year did not. Only 42.7% of metros land within three years of each other. And the pattern is the opposite of what you’d expect:

The largest metros agree worst. That isn’t a data-quality problem with small towns — it’s the maths near the cliff. Expensive metros cluster around the price-to-rent cutoff of about 18.6, where the break-even year is intrinsically unstable: a few percent difference in how you measure home prices swings it by years, or flips it to “never” entirely. In a cheap metro at a ratio of 12, the same price difference moves break-even by a single year.

So read the table below as a range, not a readout. The rightmost column shows what the same model says using Redfin’s prices. Where the two columns disagree, that metro is genuinely too close to call — which is more useful to know than a false precise answer.

All 718 metros

Showing all 718 metros