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How much house can I afford in Montana? →Montana Board of Housing's primary 30-year fixed-rate, below-market-interest-rate first mortgage for first-time homebuyers (no ownership of a principal residence in the prior 3 years, with exceptions) purchasing a home anywhere in Montana; borrowers must first qualify for an FHA, VA, RD, or HUD-184 loan. Subject to statewide/county income and purchase-price limits.
Down payment and closing cost assistance for borrowers using a Montana Housing first mortgage with an FHA or VA government loan: a low-interest second mortgage loan of $1,500 to $15,000, repaid over a term (commonly cited up to 15 years) separate from the first mortgage.
Fewer listings, fewer buyers, and sellers who have a reason to be on the market in December. Here is what a winter discount is actually worth on a $400,000 house — in monthly payment, in lifetime interest, and in the seller concessions a quiet market makes possible — and the three ways a winter purchase goes wrong.
Montana charges no transfer tax and no mortgage recording tax, so closing on the $527,848 median home runs about $10,029 to $15,308. Here's where it goes.
The operational guide to buying property with a partner, friend, sibling, or parent — credit and DTI mechanics, title vesting, a clause-by-clause co-ownership agreement, and how the exit actually works.
A month-by-month plan for the year before you buy: what to do in each phase, what never to touch, how to document every dollar, and how to survive closing day.
Montana guide
Montana's statewide median sale price is $527,848. That is a half-million-dollar house in a state most people still picture as cheap. Now put the other number next to it: the transfer tax Montana collects on that sale is $0.
There isn't one. No realty transfer tax, no deed tax, no documentary stamp under a different name. Every one percentage point of transfer tax a state charges would be $5,278 on a $527,848 sale, and Montana charges zero of them. It has no mortgage recording tax either, so the size of the loan you take out doesn't trigger a percentage-based government charge the way it does in some states.
What's left in a Montana closing is the ordinary machinery: lender charges, title insurance, escrow and settlement fees, recording, and prepaids. Buyers here typically run 1.9% to 2.9% of the purchase price, excluding agent commissions. For what each of those lines actually is and why it exists, start with our line-by-line breakdown of closing costs and come back here for the Montana-specific parts.
A note before you start: this is general education, not financial, legal, or tax advice. Every figure below is a statewide number from CalculatorByState's sourced dataset, and your county, lender, title company, and purchase contract will all move the total. Recording fees and settlement charges are set locally and by the company doing the work, so nothing here is a quote. Your Loan Estimate and Closing Disclosure are authoritative. Use this to sanity-check them, not to replace them.
Run the 1.9%–2.9% range against Montana's $527,848 median sale price and you get roughly $10,029 to $15,308, with a midpoint of 2.4%, or $12,668.
That range is unusually tight. The gap between 2.9% and 1.9% is exactly one percentage point, so the entire distance between a cheap Montana closing and an expensive one is $5,278 on the median home — less than a single transfer-tax line moves the total in states that charge one.
Read the full Montana guide →9 min read · Updated 2026-08-24