Closing Cost Calculator

Some of it is fixed by who receives the service — the buyer's lender charges the buyer, the seller's loan payoff is the seller's — but a great deal of it is custom and contract. Which side pays the owner's title policy flips from county to county. Transfer tax may fall on either party or be split. The settlement fee is often divided. A seller can agree to pay part of the buyer's costs as a concession, which is why the concession field moves both columns here. Read the contract, not the convention.

Roughly 2% to 5% of the sale price for a financed purchase, excluding the down payment. The spread is mostly transfer tax and points: a county with a high documentary tax and a loan with two points bought down will sit at the top of that band, and a cash purchase in a low-tax county will fall below it. If this calculator shows you something well outside the range, the usual explanation is a missing line rather than a bargain — HOA transfer fees, pest inspections and courier charges are all real and all commonly left out of an estimate.

Because it is cash you have to bring to the table, which is the question this page answers. It is not an expense in the way an appraisal is — the reserve sits in your escrow account and pays your own tax and insurance bills — but it is money you cannot spend on the move. Treat it as cash flow rather than cost when you compare two lenders: a lender collecting six months of reserves is not more expensive than one collecting three, it is asking for more cash on the day.

Property tax bills cover a period, not a moment, and rarely line up with a closing. Where taxes are billed in arrears — the common case — the seller has lived in the property for part of the tax year but has not been billed for it yet, so the seller credits the buyer for their share and the buyer pays the whole bill when it arrives. This calculator assumes arrears billing. In a state that bills in advance the sign flips and the buyer reimburses the seller instead, which is worth confirming before you rely on the number.

Because commission, transfer tax and the owner's title policy are all percentages of the price, so they shrink with it. Cutting the price reduces what the seller receives and what the seller pays at the same time. The sensitivity table re-runs the whole settlement at five prices rather than subtracting the difference, so what you see is the real net at each one. On the default figures the percentage-based charges come to 6.75% of the price — 5.5% commission, 0.7% transfer tax and 0.55% for the owner's policy — so a price cut costs the seller about ninety-three cents on the dollar rather than a full dollar. Change any of those three rates and that figure moves with them.

No. A closing disclosure is a regulated document your lender issues before a consummation and it reflects actual quoted charges from named providers. This page is arithmetic on numbers you typed, using national averages you can overwrite. Use it to budget, to compare two offers and to sanity-check a settlement statement — then rely on the disclosure and the title company's figures, which are the ones that bind.