Your housing allowance is set by Military Housing Area, not by town. Same rank, same dependents, same check whether you live in Groton or Ledyard, Middletown or Portsmouth. Your property tax bill is not the same. That gap is the whole game.
Lease termination on PCS. Orders for a permanent change of station, or a deployment of 90 days or more, let you terminate a residential lease without penalty. Written notice plus a copy of your orders.
Foreclosure protection. Additional procedural protections apply to mortgages taken out before you entered active service.
The 6% interest cap is narrower than people think. It applies to debt incurred before you entered active duty. It does not cap the rate on a mortgage you take out while already serving. If a lender or a shipmate tells you otherwise, they are wrong, and believing it can cost you real money.
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Why a three-year tour usually argues against buying
You will hear a rule of thumb that a VA buyer needs eight or nine percent appreciation to break even. That figure gets quoted a lot and it is usually too pessimistic, because it ignores the principal you pay down while you live there. On a $425,000 house at 6.66% with zero down and a first-use funding fee, the arithmetic works out closer to this:
Three-year tour — 1.8% a year, about 5.4% total
Four-year tour — 1.0% a year, about 4.0% total
Five-year tour — 0.5% a year, about 2.5% total
The eight-to-nine-percent version is real, but only at the hard end: a two-year tour using the benefit a second time, where the 3.30% fee lands on a loan you barely pay down. That case needs about 8% cumulative in 24 months, and it is genuinely a bad bet. Every step you add to the tour length makes the bar fall away fast, and a funding-fee waiver knocks it down further still.
One thing this break-even does not measure: whether owning beat renting. It answers a narrower question — will you get your capital back out when you sell. If your monthly carry runs well above what the same house rents for, you can clear the break-even and still be behind where renting would have left you. The comparison against your allowance in Step 4 is the other half of that picture.
Comparing Connecticut and Rhode Island rates is a trap
Connecticut assesses at 70% of market value. Rhode Island assesses at roughly 100%. So a Rhode Island rate of $12 per $1,000 and a Connecticut rate of 12 mills are not the same tax at all — the Rhode Island one is about 40% heavier on an identical house.
Sailors moving between SUBASE New London and Newport hit this constantly, and it cuts both ways. Groton’s 24.81 mills at 70% works out to an effective 17.37, while Newport’s $8.69 at 100% stays 8.69. Newport genuinely is the lighter tax on the same price. But Ledyard’s 37.14 mills come to an effective 26.00, and East Greenwich’s $15.57 stays 15.57 — so the Connecticut town is far heavier despite both numbers looking like “teens and twenties.” Every figure in this tool applies each state’s own assessment ratio, so the comparison is apples to apples.
What this tool does not know
Military Housing Area boundaries are drawn by ZIP code, and the towns grouped here are the ones within a realistic commute of each installation — not a certified MHA roster. Towns at the edge of a group may fall into a neighbouring MHA with a different allowance. Confirm yours with the official DoD lookup before you rely on the comparison.
The entitlement figures are planning arithmetic against the 2026 baseline county limit. Your Certificate of Eligibility and your lender’s calculation are the binding answer, and a high-cost destination county carries a higher limit than the baseline used here.
Appreciation scenarios are illustrations, not forecasts. Nobody knows what the next three years do, and any tool that implies otherwise is selling you something.
Information deemed reliable but not guaranteed. Every figure produced by this tool is an estimate built from public data and general assumptions. It is not an appraisal, a loan estimate, an insurance quote, or a tax determination, and no part of it creates a professional relationship. Seaport Real Estate Services and Seaport Advisory make no warranty as to accuracy or completeness and accept no liability for any decision made in reliance on it. Verify property tax with the town assessor, financing and entitlement with your lender and your COE, insurance with a licensed agent, and tax treatment with a CPA or attorney. Connecticut mill rates are OPM FY 2025–26; Rhode Island rates are RI Division of Municipal Finance FY 2026 on the 2025 tax roll. VA funding fee rates effective April 7, 2023 and current for 2026. 2026 FHFA baseline conforming limit $832,750. BAH is entered by the user from their LES; no BAH table is published here. Seaport Real Estate Services is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of the Department of Defense, the Department of the Navy, the Department of Veterans Affairs, or any government agency. Not tax, legal, or insurance advice.