How much cash do I need to close?

Cash to close is everything you wire or bring as a cashier's check on closing day: the down payment, plus the one-time costs of getting the loan and transferring the home, minus whatever the seller agreed to credit you and minus the deposit you already made. At the defaults, with no credits and no deposit entered, that is $80,000 down on a $400,000 price plus $14,000 of closing costs, a check of $94,000. Discount points, if you buy the rate down, join the costs side: a point is 1% of the loan, so it prices off the amount you borrow, not the price of the house.

The model has one hard rule, and it is the one people get wrong: seller credits offset closing costs and points, never the down payment. The down payment is equity you are required to bring; the credits can only shrink the fee side of the check. With $10,000 of credits at the defaults the check falls to $84,000, and a credit larger than the costs stops there. The warning under the result reports the unusable excess when you cross that line.

The deposit is the other subtraction, and it is the one people forget. Earnest money paid when the offer was accepted is credited at closing: the CFPB's mortgage key terms describe it as money that may be applied to closing costs or the down payment once the sale is finalized. It is not an extra cost and it is not free money; it is part of this check, paid early. Enter $10,000 of earnest money at the defaults and the $94,000 the purchase takes leaves $84,000 to bring on closing day. The composition figure carries it as its own row, so the parts always add up to the number above them.

Every figure on this page and in the JSON twin comes from one function, so the two never drift. The closing-cost default is a published range's midpoint, not a guess; the price and down payment are examples to be replaced.

The closing-cost estimate is one percentage standing in for a stack of line items. The stack has four broad layers: lender fees (origination, underwriting, the credit pull), title work (the search, settlement, and title insurance), third-party reports (the appraisal, sometimes a survey or inspection the lender requires), and prepaids (property tax and homeowners insurance paid into escrow at closing, plus interest for the days before your first payment).

Freddie Mac puts the total at 2% to 5% of the purchase price. On a $400,000 home that is $8,000 to $20,000; the default here is the middle of the range, $14,000. Where you land inside it depends mostly on your state's taxes and title customs and on the lender's fees, which is why the rate is an adjustable assumption rather than a constant. When your Loan Estimate arrives, enter its actual total as a percent of the price and the check updates.

The down payment percent is the biggest lever on the check, and it prices a real decision. Dropping from 20% to 10% down on the default price cuts the check from $94,000 to $54,000, keeping $40,000 in your pocket on closing day.

The consequence is monthly. The loan grows to $360,000, and a conventional loan under 20% down requires private mortgage insurance, which Freddie Mac puts at 0.36% to 0.84% of the loan per year. At the mid-range 0.6% that is about $180 a month here, on top of the larger principal-and-interest payment the bigger loan carries.

PMI is not forever. Under the Homeowners Protection Act, as the CFPB explains it, you can request cancellation once the balance reaches 80% of the home's original value, and the servicer must terminate it automatically when the balance is scheduled to reach 78%. The trade the calculator lets you price is cash now against a removable monthly cost; whether it is worth it depends on what the kept cash would otherwise do.

What a point buys. The calculator prices the cost of a discount point exactly, 1% of the loan, but the rate reduction a point purchases varies by lender, loan, and day. Pricing that trade needs the two quotes side by side; this page prices the upfront side only.

Your state and your contract. Transfer taxes and recording fees differ enormously by state and city, which is most of the spread inside the 2% to 5% range. Prorations, where the buyer and seller split the current property tax bill or HOA dues at the closing date, shift the check in either direction. Both are in your Loan Estimate and Closing Disclosure, not in a national default.

Your contract's fine print. The deposit is an input here, but whether you keep it if the deal falls through is a contract question rather than an arithmetic one: it turns on the contingencies you negotiated into the offer. And lender-specific rules, like the cap on seller contributions for your loan program, can bind before this model's arithmetic does.

This calculator is built to be used without a browser. Every input is a query parameter on this page, and the same parameters on the JSON twin return the complete answer as a document.

GET /tools/cash-to-close.json?price=550000&downPct=10

The response carries inputs after parsing and clamping, result with the down payment, the loan and its loan-to-value, closing costs, points, the credits applied, the cashRequired total the purchase takes, the cashToClose check left after the deposit already paid, and the monthly mortgage insurance a down payment under 20% adds, plus sensitivity tables by down payment percent and closing-cost rate, drivers ranked by effect with a plain sentence each, assumptions that say for every field whether you supplied it and name the source when the default came from one, sources with a URL and an as-of date for each source the tool cites, which is an empty list on the calculators whose every default is an example input rather than a published figure, warnings, a disclaimer, and in tool the canonicalUrl and jsonUrl that carry only your non-default parameters. The canonical URL is the answer's permanent address; use it when you cite the number.

Parameters, all optional, in any order:

• price ($), default $400,000.
• downPct (%), default 20%.
• closingRate (%), default 3.5%, from Freddie Mac, What are closing costs and how much will I pay?.
• points (%), default 0%.
• sellerCredits ($), default $0.
• earnestMoney ($), default $0.

Values accept plain numbers and loose human formats such as 100k, $100,000, or 6.5%. Unknown parameters are ignored, values outside a field's range are clamped and reported in warnings, and the endpoint never fails on bad input. Responses are cacheable for a day; the defaults change when their sources publish, and tool.version changes when the method does.

• Freddie Mac, What are closing costs and how much will I pay?, as of 2026-02-26. Closing costs typically run 2% to 5% of the home purchase price, paid in addition to the down payment.
• Freddie Mac, Breaking down PMI, as of 2026-08-21. Private mortgage insurance typically costs $30 to $70 per month for every $100,000 borrowed (0.36% to 0.84% of the loan per year). Required on conventional loans with less than 20% down.
• CFPB, Mortgages key terms, as of 2026-08-22. Earnest money is a deposit a buyer pays to show good faith on a signed contract agreement to buy a home. If the home sale is finalized or closed the earnest money may be applied to closing costs or the down payment.
• CFPB, When can I remove private mortgage insurance (PMI) from my loan?, as of 2023-08-28. Under the Homeowners Protection Act a servicer must automatically terminate PMI on the date the principal balance is scheduled to reach 78% of the home's original value; the borrower may request cancellation at 80%.

Default values on this page: closing costs 3.5% of the price (Freddie Mac, What are closing costs and how much will I pay?). The price and down payment defaults are examples, and points, seller credits, and earnest money default to zero. The monthly mortgage-insurance context figure uses 0.6% of the loan per year, the middle of the range in Freddie Mac, Breaking down PMI, with the removal rule from CFPB, When can I remove private mortgage insurance (PMI) from my loan?. The deposit's treatment at closing follows CFPB, Mortgages key terms.

Carlo is a personal finance agent. It knows your accounts, debts, and goals, so instead of the check on an example house it can tell you what this purchase leaves in your emergency fund, what the monthly payment does to your savings rate, and whether the smaller down payment is worth it for you. Text it the question.

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