Rent vs Buy Calculator
Every rent versus buy answer depends on a number nobody knows: how fast the home will grow in value. So instead of picking one and handing you a verdict, this works out the growth rate buying actually needs, then puts it next to what the official indices recorded. Switch between India and the United States at the top; every default reloads with that country's figures.
The flat you would buy
Verified base rates: Delhi 6% for men and 4% for women, Maharashtra and Karnataka 5%, Tamil Nadu 7%. Registration fee and any local cess sit on top. Cannot be added to the loan.
Society charges, property tax and repairs, as a share of value.
Brokerage on the sale.
The same flat, rented
Put in what you actually pay. This one is your figure, not ours.
The three numbers nobody knows
Every rent versus buy answer rests on these. The growth default here is 4.2%, which is what the Reserve Bank of India published for the year to March 2026, and not a figure we picked.
RBI says 4.2%. NHB says 4.5%.
What the deposit would earn instead.
Buying only wins above
6.89% a year
- Buying leaves you
- ₹55,12,970
- Renting and investing leaves
- ₹79,66,655
- Difference
- ₹24,53,685
- Cash needed on day one
- ₹15,00,000
On your figures, buying beats renting only if the home grows faster than 6.89% a year for 10 years. You entered 4.2%. For context, the Reserve Bank of India put all-India house price growth at 4.2% for the year to March 2026, and the National Housing Bank put it at 4.5% across fifty cities, where six of those cities fell and Delhi dropped 4.3%. Whether your city beats that number is the whole question, and no calculator can answer it for you.
| Buy | Rent and invest | |
|---|---|---|
| Cash on day one | ₹15,00,000 | Invested instead |
| Monthly at the start | ₹41,656 | ₹20,000 |
| Paid out over 10 years | ₹57,25,745 | ₹33,15,948 |
| Flat worth then | ₹90,53,749 | nothing owned |
| Wealth at the end | ₹55,12,970 | ₹79,66,655 |
The renting path assumes you actually invest the deposit and any monthly difference. Skip that and the comparison collapses. Capital gains tax is not modelled on either side, and neither are the mortgage or home loan tax reliefs. Investment returns are uncertain, so a SEBI-registered investment adviser is the right person to discuss yours. This is arithmetic on the figures you enter, not a recommendation either way.
Cite this calculator
Using this in an article, a report or a class? Please credit it, and link back so readers can run the numbers themselves.
The Money Decoded. "Rent vs Buy Calculator." https://themoneydecoded.com/calculators/rent-vs-buy
The embed drops this calculator straight into your page as a working tool. It is 2260px tall by default and full width, so change the height if your column is much wider or narrower than ours.
Why does it show a flip point?
The flip point is the yearly house price growth rate at which buying finally catches renting and investing the difference. It answers the question a verdict cannot: how much optimism is your answer resting on?
Twenty-seven calculators were read for this build, fifteen Indian and twelve American. Not one publishes this number. Every one of them takes an appreciation rate, computes a single answer, and presents it with a confidence the input does not support. The US survey summed the field up neatly: time is the only variable anyone tests, and every other assumption is a point estimate you would have to retype by hand to challenge.
On the Indian starting figures, a Rs 60,00,000 flat with a 20% deposit held for ten years, the flip point lands at 6.9% a year. On the US ones, a $400,000 home with 20% down held ten years, it lands at 3.53%. Below the hurdle, renting and investing wins. Above it, buying does. Against the 4.2% RBI recorded and the 2.2% FHFA recorded, renting ends about Rs 24,50,000 ahead in India and $58,692 ahead in the US over the decade.
What did house prices actually do?
The Reserve Bank of India recorded 4.2% year-on-year growth in its House Price Index for the fourth quarter of FY 2025-26, and the National Housing Bank recorded 4.5% for the same quarter. RBI covers eighteen cities on a 2022-23 base, drawn from registration data. NHB covers fifty, drawn from bank and housing-finance-company valuations.
The average hides the useful part. NHB's spread ran from Ludhiana at 22.2% down to Delhi at minus 4.3%, and six of the fifty cities fell over the year. Mumbai managed 4.5%. Pune managed 2.9%.
The US figures are lower still. The FHFA purchase-only index rose 2.2% in the year to May 2026 and the S&P Cotality Case-Shiller national index rose 1.1%.
Set that against what the calculators assume. Indian tools default to somewhere between 5% and 7%. American ones range from 0.00% at Freddie Mac to 5% at mortgagecalculator.org. calculator.net defaults to 3% on a page that also says homes grow 3-5% a year and separately attributes a 0.2% figure to Robert Shiller, who never published one. The number carrying the entire verdict is the one nobody sources.
Which is the point of showing the flip point next to it. If buying needs 6.9% in India and the published figure is 4.2%, the honest reading is that your answer depends on your city beating the country by a wide margin for a decade. That might happen. It is just worth knowing that is what you are betting on.
Which assumptions are doing the work?
Three inputs decide almost everything: house price growth, what your money would earn invested instead, and how long you stay. Change any one of them by a percentage point or two and the verdict can reverse.
The renting side assumes you genuinely invest the deposit and the stamp duty on day one, then invest the difference in every year that owning costs more. Spend that money instead and the comparison collapses, which NerdWallet states plainly in the best methodology section in either market: to match a buyer's return, renters must invest the savings and not spend them.
In the US the same job is done by property tax, and it is the single biggest lever on the page. The national effective rate is 0.91% of value, but it runs from 0.32% in Hawaii to 1.83% in Illinois. On an identical $400,000 house that alone moves the flip point from 2.72% to 4.77%, which is why a calculator that leaves property tax out cannot give an honest American answer.
Stamp duty gets its own input because it varies by state and cannot be borrowed. Delhi publishes 6% for a male buyer and 4% for a female buyer. Maharashtra sets 5% inside municipal limits with a percentage point off for women buyers. Karnataka sets 5%, and doubled its registration fee from 1% to 2% with effect from 31 August 2025.
What this calculator does not do
It does not tell you whether to rent or to buy. The arithmetic here covers money, and the decision usually is not only about money: security of tenure, the freedom to move for work, and what a home means to a family are real and do not appear in any of these numbers.
Capital gains tax is not modelled on either side, and neither are the home loan tax deductions, which under the default tax regime are unavailable on a self-occupied property anyway. The investment return input is an assumption about markets, so a SEBI-registered investment adviser is the right person to discuss what is realistic for you.
For the borrowing side of a purchase, the home loan EMI calculator applies the RBI borrowing ceiling and totals the cash you need on the day. If the flat is still being built, pre-EMI against full EMI covers what the wait costs. And the debt-to-income ratio covers whether a lender will lend at all.
Pair this with the guide
Rent vs Buy: The Growth Rate Buying Actually Needs works through where the official numbers come from, why two government indices disagree, and what the price-to-rent ratio actually measures. The calculator gives you your flip point. The post explains what to compare it against.
Frequently asked questions
What is the flip point in a rent versus buy comparison?
The flip point is the yearly house price growth rate at which buying finally catches renting and investing the difference. It matters because every rent versus buy verdict rests on an appreciation figure the reader guessed at, and the flip point tells you how much optimism your answer needs. On a Rs 60,00,000 flat with a 20% deposit at 8.5% over ten years, the flip point comes out at 6.9% a year, against the 4.2% the Reserve Bank of India recorded. Of fifteen India pages and twelve US pages surveyed in August 2026, none published one.
What did Indian house prices actually do?
The Reserve Bank of India's House Price Index recorded 4.2% year-on-year growth in the fourth quarter of FY 2025-26, across eighteen cities on a 2022-23 base. The National Housing Bank's RESIDEX index recorded 4.5% across fifty cities for the same quarter. The spread inside that average is the part worth knowing: it ran from Ludhiana at 22.2% down to Delhi at minus 4.3%, and six of the fifty cities fell. Mumbai managed 4.5% and Pune 2.9%.
Why do rent versus buy calculators disagree so much?
Because they quietly assume different appreciation rates and rarely explain why. Across the US tools surveyed, the default ranged from 0.00% at Freddie Mac to 3% at calculator.net, 4.5% at NerdWallet and 5% at mortgagecalculator.org. Indian tools clustered at 5% to 7%. That single input swings the verdict more than anything else on the page, and calculator.net's own prose cites Robert Shiller's finding of roughly 0.2% real appreciation while its default sits at 3%.
Does the renting side assume I invest the difference?
Yes, and that assumption carries the whole comparison. The renter here invests the deposit and the stamp duty on day one, then invests the yearly difference whenever owning costs more than renting. If that money is spent instead, the renting path collapses and buying wins easily. Every serious calculator makes the same assumption and NerdWallet states it plainly in its methodology: to match a buyer's return, renters must invest the savings rather than spend them.
How much is stamp duty, and can it go in the loan?
It varies by state and it cannot be added to the loan. Delhi's Revenue Department publishes 6% for a male buyer and 4% for a female buyer, plus a 1% registration fee. Maharashtra's Schedule I sets 5% inside municipal corporation limits and 4% in a gram panchayat area, with a 1 percentage point reduction for women buyers under a March 2021 order. Karnataka sets 5%, and adds a further 10% of that duty as an infrastructure surcharge under section 3B, which works out to 5.5% in all. Tamil Nadu's registration portal publishes the highest of the four, 7% on market value plus a 2% registration fee. RBI's Directions bar lenders from counting these charges inside the property value, so they are cash out of pocket.
Why does property tax matter so much for a US buyer?
Because it is a permanent charge proportional to the value of the home, it never amortises away the way interest does, and it varies enormously by state. The US national effective rate is 0.91% of value, but Tax Foundation figures for 2023 put it at 0.32% in Hawaii and 1.83% in Illinois. On an identical $400,000 house with an identical loan, that difference alone moves the growth rate buying needs from 2.72% to 4.77%. No other input on this page has that much influence, which is why a rent versus buy tool that omits property tax cannot give an honest American answer.
Did Robert Shiller find that houses appreciate only 0.2% a year?
No. Shiller published a historical data series running from 1890, not a percentage, and the data file states no appreciation rate anywhere. The 0.2% figure is third-party arithmetic on his index, and it is what the series gives if you stop measuring in the year 2000. Run the same series to 2026 and it gives 0.56% a year in real terms; run it from 1991 and it gives 1.65%, which independently matches the 1.64% you get from the FHFA index deflated by consumer prices. A Philadelphia Fed working paper published in 2024 separately argues the series understates growth before 1987, finding real prices grew 142% between 1890 and 1987 against just 37% in the Shiller index.
What is the gross rental yield in Indian cities?
No official Indian source publishes one. RBI and the National Housing Bank both stop at price indices, and searches of Knight Frank India's research pages, Anarock's site and Anarock's own Q1 2026 residential market report returned no occurrence of the term. The rental yield figures circulating online come from property portals computing them from asking rents against listing prices, which is marketing rather than research. That is why this calculator takes your actual rent as an input instead of applying a yield.
Sources
- Reserve Bank of India, All-India House Price Index for Q4:2025-26 (Press Release 2026-2027/355, released 29 May 2026; 4.2% year-on-year growth, index at 115.9, base year 2022-23, eighteen cities), rbi.org.in
- National Housing Bank, NHB RESIDEX press release for Q4 FY 2025-26 (4.5% annual growth across fifty cities, ranging from Ludhiana at 22.2% to Delhi at minus 4.3%, six cities declining, base year shifted to FY 2024-25), residex.nhbonline.org.in
- Revenue Department, Government of NCT of Delhi, property registration charges (stamp duty and transfer duty at 6% for a male buyer and 4% for a female buyer, registration fee 1%), revenue.delhi.gov.in
- Department of Registration and Stamps, Government of Maharashtra, Maharashtra Stamp Act Schedule I (Article 25(b), 5% within municipal corporation limits, with the 1 percentage point reduction for women buyers under the order dated 31 March 2021), igrmaharashtra.gov.in
- Department of Stamps and Registration, Government of Karnataka, Karnataka Stamp Act 1957 (Schedule Article 20(1), five per cent of the value, substituted from six per cent by Act 15 of 2012 with effect from 1 April 2012; and section 3B, additional duty at ten per cent of the duty chargeable, for infrastructure projects), igr.karnataka.gov.in
- Registration Department, Government of Tamil Nadu, Duty and Fees table on the TNREGINET portal (Conveyance (Sale), stamp duty 7% on the market value of the property, registration fee 2% on the market value), tnreginet.gov.in
- Federal Housing Finance Agency, House Price Index, purchase-only seasonally adjusted, May 2026 data released 28 July 2026: 2.2% year-on-year. FHFA publishes no long-run average, so any multi-decade figure quoted here is our own calculation from its published series, fhfa.gov
- S&P Cotality Case-Shiller Home Price Indices, May 2026 data released 28 July 2026: national index 1.1% year-on-year, 10-city 2.4%, 20-city 1.6%. Note the index was rebranded from CoreLogic, and most coverage quotes the 20-city figure
- Tax Foundation, Facts & Figures 2025, Table 33, property taxes paid as a percentage of owner-occupied housing value, calendar year 2023, computed from US Census Bureau American Community Survey data, taxfoundation.org
- Robert J. Shiller, historical US home price series accompanying Irrational Exuberance (3rd edition, Princeton University Press, 2015, updated by the author), annual from 1890. Growth rates quoted here are our own calculation; the series itself publishes no rate, shillerdata.com
- Lyons, Shertzer, Gray and Agorastos, The Price of Housing in the United States, 1890-2006, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Working Paper 24-12, June 2024, revised October 2025, philadelphiafed.org
- Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, on removing private mortgage insurance, and 12 U.S.C. section 4901, for the 80% and 78% thresholds measured against original value, consumerfinance.gov
- Fannie Mae, Barriers to Entry (December 2021), for median closing costs net of credits at 2.18% of sale price on 2020 data, fanniemae.com
- Observations about how other rent versus buy calculators handle assumptions, sensitivity and purchase costs come from a live review of fifteen India pages and twelve US pages on 18 August 2026, reading served markup and calculator scripts rather than marketing copy.