Buying a Condo vs Renting: What HOA Dues Do to the Math

Condo dues are the variable calculators skip: $300 a month of HOA moves the ten-year result by about $55,000 and lifts the rent buying needs to $2,767. Priced.

Written by Jonathan Nyst Updated September 2026 4 min read The math Every figure re-runnable

A condo is a house with one extra line in the budget, and that line decides the comparison. On our model’s default scenario — a $420,000 home against $2,100 rent, 20% down at 6.5%, ten years — renting and investing the difference already wins by about $67,000 with no association dues at all. Add $300 a month of HOA and the renter’s margin grows to about $122,000; at $600 it is about $177,000, at $900 about $231,000. Put the other way round: the monthly rent at which buying the condo starts to win rises from about $2,468 with no dues to about $2,767 at $300 of dues and about $3,065 at $600. Every calculator that leaves the dues out is answering a question about a different building.

Is it better to buy a condo or rent? Start with the dues

Because dues are the one cost a condo owner pays that a house owner does not, and they behave like rent: monthly, mandatory, rising, and gone. Our model treats them exactly that way — a fixed monthly charge that grows with inflation, on top of the mortgage, property tax, insurance and maintenance the owner already carries. The comparison itself is the same as for any home: one person, two paths, buy the condo or rent an equivalent unit and invest the difference, net worth compared at the end with selling costs and taxes paid.

The reason the dues matter so much is that the like-for-like contest is close to begin with. Owning the default home costs $3,067 a month all in against about $2,115 to rent a comparable one; the renter invests the gap and the $96,600 that never went into a down payment and closing costs. Every $100 of dues widens that gap by $100 a month, and ten years of investing $100 a month at the model’s 7% return is roughly $18,000 of net worth. Where condos dominate, the local page matters too: the New York City page prices in the transfer and mortgage-recording taxes a condo buyer there pays on top of the dues.

How much do HOA dues change the verdict?

Each $300 a month moves the ten-year result by about $55,000 and the tipping rent by about $300. The table holds everything at the defaults and varies only the dues:

The third column is the number to carry into a listing: the tipping-point rent is the monthly rent a comparable unit would have to cost before owning this one beats renting it. Dues push it up almost dollar for dollar, because a dollar of dues is a dollar of rent-like cost with no equity behind it.

What if the rent is high enough that buying wins?

Then the dues decide how much of the win survives, and it is less than you would guess. Take a $2,800 rent, comfortably above the no-dues tipping point, where buying the default home wins by about $61,000 over ten years. At $300 of dues that shrinks to about $6,000 and the break-even year slips from 5 to 9; at $600 renting is back ahead by about $49,000, and at $900 by about $103,000. In that scenario the dues that flip the verdict are about $334 a month — a perfectly ordinary figure for a mid-size building.

This is the honest reading of “condos are cheaper to buy”: the sticker is lower, and the dues quietly hand a chunk of that back every month for as long as you own.

What do the dues buy, and what should the model give back?

The exterior, the roof, the shared systems, the building’s insurance and often water or trash — costs a house owner pays out of the maintenance line. The model still charges its default 1% of value a year for maintenance, which for a condo double-counts some of that. The fair correction is to lower the maintenance rate when you add dues, and the calculator lets you: at $300 of dues and maintenance cut to 0.5%, the ten-year result at $2,100 rent is renting ahead by about $89,000 instead of $122,000, and the tipping rent is about $2,589 instead of $2,767. The dues still cost the owner, because a well-run association charges more than the maintenance it replaces — reserves, management, insurance on a whole building — but the gap is smaller than the raw table shows. Set both inputs to what the association’s budget actually says.

Special assessments and reserves: the risk the model can’t price

A one-time levy to replace a roof, repair a garage or fund an underfunded reserve is the condo owner’s version of the surprise repair bill, with the difference that you do not get to choose the timing or the contractor. The model has no line for it, because there is no honest average to charge; the exposure is specific to the building. What the model can tell you is the scale of the ordinary case — the tables above — so you know how much margin your verdict has before an assessment eats it. Before buying, read the association’s reserve study and its budget, treat a low reserve as deferred dues, and put the annualized figure into the HOA input.

Run your own numbers

Run the default with $300 of dues, then the same with maintenance lowered to 0.5%, then replace the price, rent and dues with the building’s real numbers. Every figure here is computed by the open-source engine documented on the methodology page and guarded by automated tests; the HOA line grows with the model’s inflation rate, and you can set it to anything the association’s budget shows.

Jonathan Nyst

Jonathan Nyst built RentVsBuyMath as an independent project — for himself first. He spent fifteen years marketing financial products, in banking, fintech and payments at CMO level, which is exactly how he knows what a lead-generation calculator looks like from the inside. This is the calculator without the funnel: he is not a lender, broker or agent, the site takes no referral fees, and nobody is paid more if you decide to buy. The whole model is public — every formula documented on the methodology page, the engine MIT-licensed, covered by automated tests including scenarios computed by hand to check it.

Drafted with AI from the engine's output; reviewed and published by Jonathan Nyst. How this site is made · Corrections