The house you didn’t buy
Pick your metro, then the year you almost bought, and see what that house is worth now. The result also works out the mortgage you didn’t take, the rent you paid instead and what the down payment would have done in an S&P 500 index fund.
410 US metro areas · FHFA all-transactions index, 1975→2026 Q2 · every computation on this site is checkable arithmetic.
Start with the famous ones
How it works
1 · The index
FHFA’s all-transactions House Price Index follows repeat sales of the same homes in each metro, quarter by quarter. It is public data, so every number here can be recomputed.
2 · The mortgage you didn’t take
The calculator amortizes a 30-year loan at the average rate for the year you would have bought (Freddie Mac’s survey via FRED). It shows the equity you would hold today and that equity as a multiple of your down payment.
3 · The alternatives
Enter the rent you paid, and the result estimates that rent today and the total you paid over the same years. A market line follows your down payment through an S&P 500 index fund instead. In some metros and years that figure is larger than the home equity.
Methodology
House values come from the FHFA all-transactions House Price Index, which gives quarterly figures for each metro area as far back as 1975 in the earliest markets.
A purchase in year Y is valued at that year’s average index level and scaled to the latest quarter. Mortgage math uses that year’s average 30-year fixed rate (Freddie Mac PMMS via FRED). The rent line grows the rent you enter with the metro’s HUD 2-bedroom Fair Market Rents, or with the national CPI rent index for purchase years before 1983. The market line invests the same down payment in an S&P 500 index fund, the TSP C Fund, with dividends reinvested (monthly returns from tsp.gov, from 1988).
Limits: the index tracks the metro as a whole, and a single street or house can move differently. Condition, remodels, taxes, insurance, maintenance and selling costs are not modeled. Full methodology →