Floor five
Every loan on this floor is a different answer to the same four questions: who guarantees it, how long it runs, whether the rate can move, and what you have to prove. The index below groups them and lets you cut it down to the group you are actually in.
All sixteen
The groups are a filing convenience, not a ranking. A programme in one group is not a step up from a programme in another — they answer different constraints, and the one that fits yours is the one to read.
How to narrow it
Nobody chooses between sixteen programmes. You answer a handful of questions about your own situation and three or four survive. These are the questions, in roughly the order they matter.
This is the first fork and it closes more doors than credit does. Nothing down puts you in VA or USDA if you are eligible. Three to three and a half per cent puts you in FHA or a low-down conventional programme. Twenty per cent removes mortgage insurance from the conversation entirely.
Eligible service is worth checking before anything else, because a VA loan can be the only programme on this page with no down payment and no monthly mortgage insurance at the same time. The trade is a one-off funding fee, which some borrowers are exempt from altogether.
W-2 pay stubs and two years of returns fit the ordinary programmes. If you are self-employed and your returns understate what you actually earn, or if you are buying a rental that pays for itself, the qualification basis changes — and so does the programme, the pricing and the protections that come with it.
A primary residence, a second home and an investment property are three different risk classes with three different sets of rules. Rural addresses open USDA. A house that needs work before anyone can live in it needs a renovation loan rather than an ordinary purchase loan.
Above the conforming limit for the county, the loan cannot be sold to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, so the underwriting becomes the lender’s own. That is what jumbo means: not a better or worse loan, a differently underwritten one, usually with more reserves asked for.
The single most under-asked question. An adjustable rate you will refinance out of in four years and a thirty-year fixed you will hold to term are answers to different problems. Points, mortgage insurance and closing costs all pay back over time, so the holding period decides whether any of them is worth buying.
What actually differs
Programme names describe who stands behind the loan. They say almost nothing about what it will cost you. These four things do, and each one has a page here that computes it.
The biggest silent difference between programmes. Conventional PMI can be cancelled once the scheduled balance reaches 80 per cent of the original value, and terminates automatically at 78. FHA annual MIP runs for the life of the loan above 90 per cent loan-to-value at origination and for eleven years below it. VA has no monthly mortgage insurance at all. Over a decade that difference is measured in five figures.
Price FHA insurance over the loan →Fifteen years against thirty is not simply a bigger or smaller payment; it is a completely different split between interest and principal in the early years. And restarting a thirty-year clock six years into an existing loan adds six years of interest even when the rate falls, which is the trap that makes a cheaper payment more expensive.
See where each payment goes →A fixed rate buys certainty. An adjustable rate buys a lower opening payment and hands you the index risk once the fixed period ends. The question is never which is better but how confident you are about how long you will hold the loan — and what the payment becomes if you are wrong.
Run a payment both ways →Ordinary programmes want pay stubs, returns and statements. Bank statement and DSCR programmes swap that documentation for a different basis — deposits, or the property’s own rent — and price the swap. Non-QM programmes sit outside the Qualified Mortgage rules, which changes the borrower protections attached to the loan as well as the paperwork.
Open the calculators →Questions
Fewer than the names suggest. Almost every programme on this page is a combination of four choices: who insures or guarantees it, how long it runs, whether the rate is fixed, and what you are asked to prove about your income. Most of the sixteen differ in only one of those four.
Cheapest over what period, and measured how? A programme with a lower rate and permanent mortgage insurance can cost more over ten years than one with a higher rate and insurance that cancels. The only defensible comparison is total cost over the period you expect to hold the loan, which is what the calculators on this site compute.
Not always. VA loans carry no monthly mortgage insurance at any down payment, though most borrowers pay a one-off funding fee. Conventional loans above 80 per cent loan-to-value carry borrower-paid PMI that can be cancelled under the Homeowners Protection Act. FHA loans carry an annual MIP that runs for the life of the loan when the loan-to-value at origination is above 90 per cent.
No. This site publishes no rates, no APRs and no rate table. Every calculator starts from a round placeholder rate you can change, and says so on the page. Pricing depends on the day, the file and the investor, so a published number on a demonstration site would be wrong the moment it shipped.
Start from the constraint rather than the catalogue. If cash is short, read down payment assistance and FHA. If you have served, read VA before anything else. If your income is hard to document, read bank statement and DSCR. If the price is above the conforming limit, read jumbo. Each page states what the programme costs rather than what it is called.
Colour scheme
Each scheme is drawn twice — once for the light theme and once for the dark — and contrast-checked in both before it is offered here.
Built against WCAG 2.2 AA as a target. It has not been independently audited, so no conformance is claimed. If something here blocks you, that is a bug.