Rent vs Buy Calculator

What can move this result

• It only knows the figures you type in. Offsets, deductions, prior-year losses, other income, your partner's position and anything you have not entered are not in the result, and any of them can move it a long way.
• Rates and thresholds change, sometimes mid-year and occasionally with retrospective effect. Where a financial year or verification date is shown, use it to check that the result matches the period you need — outside that period the result is wrong rather than approximate.
• Assumptions are set to a reasonable default and every non-statutory one can be changed. Defaults are not predictions, and a small change to a growth or inflation assumption compounds into a large change in a long projection.
• Where a result reaches two or more years into the future it is shown in today's dollars as well as future dollars, because a future-dollar figure overstates what the money will actually buy.
• It is a generic calculator. It is not built around any particular product, it does not compare the market, and it cannot tell you whether a product is suitable for you.

Why these default assumptions are reasonable

• Mortgage rate: 6.2% a year. The RBA's published average variable rate on outstanding owner-occupier loans (table F6, July 2026). It is an average across the whole market rather than a sharp new-customer offer, because the comparison runs for decades and loans drift back to the average. Source · You can change this input.
• Rent growth: 3% a year. Sits between the RBA's 2.5% inflation-target midpoint and the post-2022 run of the ABS CPI rents series, which spiked well above it before moderating. Rent growth is the renter's side of this comparison, so a figure above pure inflation avoids flattering renting. It is a scenario setting — rerun the comparison with your own lease history. Source · You can change this input.
• Property price growth: 4% a year. RBA research (Fox and Tulip, RDP 2014-06) put long-run real dwelling appreciation near 2.5% a year; adding the RBA's 2.5% inflation midpoint gives about 5% nominal, and the default sits a point below that. Deliberately below the raw multi-decade historical average, because that era's structural decline in interest rates cannot repeat — and because overstating property growth biases this whole comparison toward buying, which is the error that matters here. A one-point change flips the long-run answer, so test your own scenarios. Source · You can change this input.
• Return on invested savings: 6.1% a year. What the renter's deposit-equivalent earns if invested instead: ASIC Moneysmart's published return assumption for a balanced portfolio (net of tax and net of investment fees, measured in a superannuation setting; a forward-looking outlook, not an achieved return), the same figure used across this site. Raising it favours renting and lowering it favours buying. Two things to know before you trust the default. It is measured inside superannuation, where the fund pays the tax on earnings; a renter investing in their own name pays their own marginal rate on distributions and realised gains, which this comparison does not deduct, so the real after-tax return is below 6.1% for most people. And it is NOT set symmetrically with the property growth figure above: that one is deliberately pitched below its own source, because overstating property growth biases the comparison toward buying. This one is the published figure as published. Vary both. Source · You can change this input.