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Can Your Tax Refund Buy You a Home?

Tax Refund Home Calculator 2026

The only calculator that connects your IRS tax refund to your actual home buying power. Enter your refund, see your options. Built by a banker.

$3,170
Avg. US tax refund 2026
3.5%
Min FHA down payment
1 in 4
Buyers fund down payment with refund
1
Your Tax Refund
Enter your expected or actual IRS refund amount
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$
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2
Your Target Home
What kind of home are you looking at?
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3
Location & Costs
Help us estimate closing costs and monthly obligations
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The part almost nobody publishes free

Prices and rates are widely reported. Whether a lender says yes is not. In the complete 2025 federal record, denial rates across the 100 largest FHA lenders ran from 1.8% to 78.7% — same programme, same year.

And it is not simply who applies where: standardizing on state, loan amount, income, debt-to-income and loan-to-value, applicant mix explains only a 2.7× range in expected outcomes.

Which lenders approve most → Your metro → Denied? →

CFPB HMDA 2025, computed by FinanceRateCalc. Covers the highest-volume lenders published per market, not all lenders. Historical observations, not predictions. CC BY 4.0, not independently reproduced.

The Denial Dispatch
One finding a week from the federal mortgage record.
One chart, three paragraphs, every Saturday. Measured, not assumed.
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FinanceRateCalc · Independent analysis of the complete federal HMDA record · Measured, not assumed. · No lender or AI vendor funds or previews this work.