Rent or buy in Texas? Run the numbers.

The calculator

Pick a city to load its median home price, median 2-bedroom rent and property tax rate. Everything else starts at a statewide figure or a plain assumption. Edit any box; the result and the table update as you type.

How it works and what it assumes

• The buyer pays the down payment, then each year pays principal and interest on a 30-year fixed loan, property tax, insurance, HOA dues and maintenance. Net worth is the home’s value minus the loan balance and minus the buying and selling cost you enter.
• The renter puts the same down payment into investments on day one. In any year owning costs more than renting, the renter invests the difference; in any year renting costs more, the buyer invests it. Investments grow at the return you set, once a year.
• “Buying pulls ahead” is the first year from which the buyer’s net worth stays at or above the renter’s through the last year you chose. If buying leads early but falls behind later, renting wins.
• Property tax is the combined rate times the home’s value at the start of each year. We assume the appraisal matches the market price and ignore the 10% yearly cap on homestead values, which would lower the bill in fast-rising years.
• Homestead exemption, kept simple. With the box ticked, $140,000 comes off the value taxed by the school district only. Cities, counties and hospital districts still tax the full value. Many local bodies give their own optional exemptions too (HISD adds 20%, and Bexar County, University Health and San Antonio give 20%; see property taxes), and we leave those out, so the tax line runs high for many owners. The extra $60,000 for owners 65 and older is not included.
• Costs tied to the house (insurance, HOA and maintenance) rise each year with home prices. Rent rises at the rent growth rate.
• Left out: mortgage insurance on loans with under 20% down, flood or windstorm coverage, federal tax effects (the mortgage-interest deduction, and tax on investment gains), refinancing, and the senior exemption. Closing and selling costs are zero unless you enter them. We do not have a sourced Texas figure for them, so the default is 0%, which makes buying look better than it is.

Planning assumptions, not forecasts: home price growth 3%, rent growth 3%, investment return 5%, maintenance 1% of value. These are round starting points we chose. For context, the Texas median was down 0.4% in a year in Q3 2026 and the statewide rent median was down 1.5% (Apartment List, Oct 2026 data, via Texas rent). Use your own view.

Where the defaults come from

City defaults come from our home prices, city comparison, property tax and city pages. The home price is the newest local median on our site; its area and month differ by city. For the four cities where we have not confirmed every rate in the stack, the calculator starts at 2.00%, the low end of the roughly 2% to 2.6% big-city range on our property tax page. That is a placeholder: replace it with the rate on your tax bill.

Statewide defaults and assumptions

Worked example: Houston at the defaults

A $325,000 home (HAR median, Sep 2026) with 20% down at 7.24%, against renting the $1,323 median 2-bedroom (Apartment List, Oct 2026 data). Property tax at $2.1316 per $100 with the homestead exemption on the HISD share. This is the same calculation the tool runs, printed here for readers without JavaScript.

What it takes to flip the answer

Same Houston home over 10 years, changing the mortgage rate and home price growth, and in the last row rent growth and the investment return too (our math):

Add a 6% buying and selling cost to that last case and the result becomes: renting is still ahead after 10 years. Small changes in the assumptions move the answer a lot, which is the main lesson.

Out-of-date numbers you’ll still find online

Keep going

• Salary calculator: how much you need to make to rent in each city.
• Texas home prices: metro medians and a sample monthly payment.
• Texas property taxes: how the rate stack works, exemptions and protests.
• Texas rent and Texas insurance: the other side of the comparison.

How we check

Every default links to its source and date, and anything we chose ourselves is labeled as an assumption. The calculator’s results are our arithmetic on your inputs. Read the full methodology.