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Tell us your income and savings instead, and we'll work out the max home price and a qualification signal for Tennessee.
How much house can I afford in Tennessee? →Tennessee Housing Development Agency's statewide 30-year fixed-rate first mortgage (FHA/VA/USDA/Conventional) for homebuyers, paired with optional down payment assistance (Great Choice Plus, a second mortgage); first-time-buyer requirement waived in targeted counties/census tracts. Subject to county-specific income limits and a statewide acquisition (purchase) price cap.
Second mortgage down payment/closing cost assistance paired with a THDA Great Choice first mortgage, offered as either a deferred (0%-interest, due at sale/refinance/payoff) or amortizing loan option, up to 6% of the first mortgage loan amount.
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.
Tennessee taxes your closing twice — once on the sale, once on the mortgage — yet both together run about $1,772 on a $383,600 home. Here's the real math.
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.
Tennessee guide
Most states tax a home sale once, if at all. Tennessee taxes it twice, in two different places, on two different numbers.
The first lands on the deed: a realty transfer tax of $0.37 per $100 of sale price. The second lands on the debt: a recordation tax, usually called the indebtedness tax, of $0.115 per $100 you actually borrow. One taxes the house changing hands, the other the loan being written down and filed, and you can owe both on the same afternoon.
That sounds worse than it is. On Tennessee's median sale price of $383,600 with 20% down, the transfer tax is $1,419 and the indebtedness tax on the $306,880 loan is about $353. Together, $1,772 — roughly 13% of a midpoint closing-cost bill of $13,426.
They're worth understanding separately, because one scales with what you pay for the house and the other with how much you borrow. For every other fee, our line-by-line breakdown of what closing costs actually cover does the general work; this page stays on what's specific to Tennessee.
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 contract will all move the total. Recording offices differ, lender fee schedules differ, and what a seller agrees to cover differs deal by deal. Your Loan Estimate and Closing Disclosure are the authoritative documents. Use this to sanity-check them, not to replace them.
A 2-5% range against Tennessee's $383,600 median sale price gives you roughly $7,672 to $19,180, with a midpoint near $13,426. Drop the price to $350,000 and the same range becomes about $7,000 to $17,500.
A narrower sourced average for Tennessee buyers is 3.63% of the purchase price, or about $13,925 at $383,600 — close enough to the midpoint that the midpoint is a fair planning number. Neither figure includes agent commissions.
Read the full Tennessee guide →9 min read · Updated 2026-08-24