The total cost of renting versus buying over your horizon.
Cheaper option over the horizon
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Net cost of buying
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Total cost of renting
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The two columns this tool compares
Rent or buy is rarely a clean financial question, because the right answer turns on how long you stay, where rents and house prices go, and the mortgage rate you can get. This calculator puts the two paths into the same units so you can compare them over a horizon you choose. On the buy side it adds up your mortgage payments, Local Property Tax, insurance and maintenance, and your deposit, then subtracts the equity you own at the end. On the rent side it sums the rent you pay, growing each year by your assumed rent inflation.
The clever part is the equity offset. Buying looks expensive until you remember that a large share of what you pay comes back to you as ownership of an appreciating asset. The tool nets the value of the home, less the outstanding mortgage balance, against the cost of buying, which is what makes the comparison fair rather than just stacking rent against repayments.
Ten years on a €400,000 home
Run the defaults: rent of €1,800 a month rising 3 percent a year, a €400,000 home with a €40,000 deposit, a 4 percent mortgage over 30 years, 3 percent property growth, 1 percent a year for insurance and upkeep, over a ten year horizon. The mortgage on the €360,000 loan is about €1,719 a month, so roughly €206,243 paid over ten years. Holding costs add about €50,574. After ten years the home is worth around €537,567 and the loan balance is about €283,622, leaving terminal equity near €253,944. Net the equity against the costs and buying comes to about €42,873. Renting over the same decade totals about €247,620. On these inputs, buying is the cheaper path by a wide margin.
| Buy side | Amount |
|---|---|
| Mortgage paid over 10 years | €206,243 |
| Holding costs (LPT, insurance, upkeep) | €50,574 |
| Deposit | €40,000 |
| Less terminal equity owned | €253,944 |
| Net cost of buying | €42,873 |
| Total cost of renting | €247,620 |
Costs the headline number leaves out
That €42,873 buy figure deserves a health warning, because it nets out €253,944 of equity you have not actually turned into cash. That equity is real but locked in the walls of the house, only realised if you sell, and a sale brings its own selling costs. The model also leaves out the one-off costs of buying. On a €400,000 home you would pay stamp duty of about €4,000 at the 1 percent residential rate, plus solicitor’s fees, a valuation, and a survey, none of which appear in the result. There is also the opportunity cost of the deposit, the return that €40,000 could have earned if invested instead of sunk into the purchase.
So treat the verdict as directional, not gospel. The result is acutely sensitive to your assumptions. If you take one thing away, let it be this. The single biggest driver is how long you stay. Buying tends to win over long horizons because the equity has time to build and the upfront costs are spread thin, while renting can be the smarter choice if you might move within a few years, since you avoid the transaction costs entirely. Nudge the horizon down to three or four years and watch the verdict often flip. Would-be first-time buyers and anyone weighing a move are the readers in mind here, and the right way to use the calculator is to test a range of horizons and growth rates rather than trust one run.
Why does buying look so much cheaper than renting here?
Because the buy figure subtracts the equity you build, which is large after ten years of repayments and price growth. Rent, by contrast, buys you nothing you keep. If you instead compared pure cash outflows without crediting the equity, the gap would close sharply, and selling the home to access that equity would also cost a few percent in fees. The equity offset is what makes buying look strong on these numbers.
Does the calculator include stamp duty and legal fees?
No. The buy side covers mortgage payments, Local Property Tax, insurance and maintenance, and the deposit, but it leaves out the one-off purchase costs such as stamp duty, solicitor’s fees, and a survey. On a typical home these add several thousand euro, so add them to the net cost of buying for a fuller picture before you decide.