By Jessica Martinez · Contributing Writer, Business & Finance · July 2, 2026By Jessica Martinez · Contributing Writer, Business & Finance · July 2, 2026Enter your numbers to see the estimate.
Educational estimate at a 5.875% expected rate. Nothing you type is stored or sent anywhere. Actual proceeds depend on rates, HUD limits and a HECM counselor.
You can estimate a reverse mortgage with three numbers: your age, your home's value, and what you still owe on it. That is the whole input list. None of it needs to leave your browser, and the calculator above never asks for your name, phone number, or email. Type the numbers, read the estimate, close the tab. Nobody calls you.
If that sounds like a low bar, try searching "reverse mortgage calculator" and clicking the first few results. Most of them stop you at a form: full name, phone, email, sometimes your street address, before they will show you a single dollar figure.
Because the calculator is not the product. You are.
A large share of reverse mortgage "calculator" sites are lead generators. The estimate is bait; the form is the point. Once you submit it, your contact information is sold to brokers and loan officers who pay for the introduction, which is why the calls start within minutes and keep coming for weeks. The math behind a reverse mortgage estimate is public. HUD publishes the actual factor tables lenders use. There is no computational reason any site needs your phone number to run it.
So run it here without one. Here is what the calculator is doing with your three numbers.
A federally insured reverse mortgage is a Home Equity Conversion Mortgage, or HECM. The amount you can borrow, called the principal limit, comes from three inputs.
The starting point is your home's appraised value or the FHA lending limit, whichever is lower. For 2026 that limit is $1,249,125, up from $1,209,750 last year, according to HUD's Mortgagee Letter 2025-22 issued in December 2025. HUD calls this figure the maximum claim amount. If your home is worth $400,000, your maximum claim amount is $400,000. A $2 million home still gets calculated at $1,249,125. Our 2026 HECM lending limit and cost reference has the full table.
You must be at least 62. Older borrowers qualify for a larger percentage of the home's value, for a blunt actuarial reason: the loan is expected to run for fewer years.
Lenders take a 10-year Treasury index and add their margin. In early July 2026 that put expected rates roughly between 5.9% and 6.6% depending on the lender, according to rate data published by All Reverse Mortgage. Higher expected rates mean you can borrow less. Our interest rate guide covers how the pieces fit.
HUD combines age and expected rate into a principal limit factor, a percentage published in its PLF tables. At a 5.875% expected rate, near the middle of what lenders offered in mid-2026, a 70-year-old's factor is 40.9 percent of the maximum claim amount, per All Reverse Mortgage's 2026 benefits-by-age table built from the HUD figures. A 62-year-old gets 35.1 percent; an 80-year-old gets 48.2 percent. Those are the factors the calculator above uses.
Your existing mortgage balance matters because a HECM must be the only lien on the home. Whatever you still owe gets paid off first, out of your proceeds.
Say you are 70, the house appraises at $400,000, and you owe $120,000 on a conventional mortgage.
Then come the costs, which most borrowers finance into the loan rather than paying in cash. The upfront FHA mortgage insurance premium is 2% of the maximum claim amount, so $8,000 here, and an annual premium of 0.5% accrues on the balance over the life of the loan, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The origination fee is capped by FHA rules: the greater of $2,500 or 2% of the first $200,000 of value plus 1% of the rest, never more than $6,000. On a $400,000 home that formula hits the $6,000 cap exactly. Third-party closing costs (appraisal, title, recording) typically add $2,000 to $4,000 more.
Financing all of it, our 70-year-old ends up with somewhere around $26,000 to $28,000 in usable proceeds, or the option to leave that amount in a line of credit that grows over time. Not $163,600. The gap between the headline principal limit and the money you can actually reach is exactly what lead-gen sites gloss over, and it is the number worth knowing before anyone has your phone number. If you want to adjust the closing-cost assumption yourself, the full reverse mortgage calculator exposes it as an input.
Want a version keyed to both age and the expected rate at once, plus a reference grid instead of a single decade-anchored figure? A HUD-based factor tool built around both variables together estimates the principal limit and shows the range alongside it.
An honest calculator comes with an honest disclaimer. A few things move the real quote away from the quick estimate.
The PLF is set by the expected rate when your case number is assigned, and rates drift weekly with the Treasury index. Some lenders offer a rate lock mechanic; some don't. A half-point swing changes a 70-year-old's proceeds by thousands of dollars.
The 2% upfront MIP is fixed by FHA, but origination fees under the cap are negotiable, and title costs differ a lot by state.
Fixed-rate HECMs pay a single lump sum. Adjustable-rate loans offer a line of credit, monthly payments, or a mix, and HUD limits how much you can draw in the first year (generally 60% of the principal limit, or your mandatory payoffs plus 10%). A quick estimate shows the pool, not the plumbing.
A younger spouse, a condo that needs FHA approval, property tax arrears, or a financial assessment that requires a set-aside for taxes and insurance will all shrink or reshape the number. A longer breakdown of what actually sets your borrowing ceiling covers each factor in more depth.
The estimate on this page gets you within honest range of what a lender will say. When you want the exact figure, you will have to talk to a lender and complete a HUD-required counseling session. But that should happen when you decide it happens, not because a website traded your phone number to five brokers.
Yes. The math requires only your age, your home value, and your current mortgage balance. Name, phone, and email add nothing to the calculation. The calculator on this page runs entirely with those three numbers and stores none of them.
They are lead-generation tools. The site sells your contact details to brokers and loan officers, which is why submitting the form triggers sales calls. The actual formula is public: HUD publishes the principal limit factor tables that determine every HECM quote.
Close enough to decide whether to keep going. The three inputs drive the principal limit, and published FHA costs (2% upfront mortgage insurance, the $6,000 origination cap) are predictable. What the quick estimate can't nail down is your lender's margin, third-party closing costs in your state, and file-specific items like a younger spouse or a required set-aside.
This one. It uses the 2026 FHA lending limit of $1,249,125 from HUD Mortgagee Letter 2025-22 and principal limit factors keyed to current expected rates, which in July 2026 run roughly 5.9% to 6.6%, based on rate data published by All Reverse Mortgage.
Jessica writes the pieces on this site that involve a phone number you did not want to give out. She would rather send you to the primary HUD document than paraphrase it badly.