Is it better to buy a home or rent? While answering that question often comes down to individual circumstances, the rising costs associated with owning a home appear to have shifted the math considerably in one direction.
A year ago we used NerdWallet’s rent-versus-buy calculator to estimate how long it would take for the high costs of buying a home to pay off over renting in the Bay Area’s biggest cities. We plugged in the average Zillow home values and Apartment List rent estimates and found that San Francisco had the highest break-even point of 20 years, compared to 10 years for San Jose, 8 years for Fremont and 7 years for Oakland.
But entering 2025 average home values and rent prices yielded a dramatically different result: For all three cities, the calculator showed it would take longer than the 30 years charted in the calculator before owning was a better deal. Meaning, you’ll only break even once you’ve paid off that 30-year mortgage…