How Much a 50-Year Mortgage Saves You Now, Costs You Later

Home sales in recent years have sagged as both mortgage rates and home prices rose. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Key Points

• A 50-year mortgage could save borrowers approximately $280 monthly on a $400,000 loan at a 6.3% rate compared with a 30-year loan.
• Borrowers with a 50-year mortgage would pay more than $425,000 in interest than with a 30-year loan if held to maturity.
• The typical first-time homebuyer’s age reached a high of 40 in the year ending June 2025, according to the National Association of Realtors.

A 50-year mortgage would save home buyers cash in the short-term, but could ultimately cost them more in the long-run.

The concept of a 50-year home loan is buzzy after President Donald Trump posted an image on Truth Social over the weekend suggesting his administration could introduce a 50-year mortgage.

Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, said in an X post that “we are indeed working on The 50 year Mortgage—a complete game changer.”

Details are sparse on how such a loan would work. “President Trump is always exploring new ways to improve housing affordability for everyday Americans,” a White House official said in an email to Barron’s. “Any official policy changes will be announced by the White House.”

A FHFA spokesman said in an email that “we continue to evaluate all options to address housing affordability, including studying how to make mortgages assumable or portable.”

The suggestion of a 50-year mortgage and its drawbacks highlight the challenge of solving for high home purchase costs in a notably unaffordable housing market. Both mortgage rates and home prices rose significantly over the past several years—as have insurance costs and property taxes for many homeowners.

Assuming a 50-year loan would come with the same mortgage rate as a 30-year loan, such a product would save buyers a modest amount on their monthly payments. The borrower of a $400,000 loan at a 6.3% rate would save about $280 a month by spreading their monthly cost across 20 more years compared with a 30-year loan.

Those monthly savings come at a cost: assuming the borrower held on to the loan through maturity, they would pay more than $425,000 in interest than they would with a 30-year loan—or more than the cost of that initial loan to begin with.

It’s likely that a 50-year loan would have a different rate than a 30-year mortgage. The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage is priced off the 10-year Treasury yield because of its loan term, with a fluctuating spread that accounts for risks unique to mortgage lending.

A longer loan term could lead to higher home prices, Realtor.com senior economist Joel Berner said in a statement. “The result of subsidizing home demand without increasing home supply could be an increase to home prices that negates the potential savings,” Berner wrote. (News Corp, which owns Barron’s, also owns Realtor.com operator Move.)

Homeowners’ equity would grow more slowly with such a product, Evercore analyst Stephen Kim wrote in a report. “After ten years, the buyer would have paid off less than 4% of the principal, vs. almost 16% for a 30yr mortgage,” he wrote. “Reduced home equity accretion, in an environment of flattish home price growth, could over time increase the amount of mortgage risk in the system.”

Home sales in recent years have sagged as both mortgage rates and home prices rose. Significant easing in either look unlikely: Mortgage rates are tangled up with the Federal Reserve’s fight against inflation, and aren’t expected to return to their prepandemic levels below 4%. Meanwhile, roughly two-thirds of U.S. households homes are owner-occupied, according to census data, making threats to home prices an issue for homeowners’ finances.

While the housing market has remained unaffordable, the age of the median home buyer has stretched higher. The typical first-time buyer in the year ended June 2025 was 40, the National Association of Realtors said earlier this month, a high.

Whether the 50-year mortgage comes to fruition has yet to be seen. In posts that followed, Pulte said the longer term loan “is simply a potential weapon in a WIDE arsenal of solutions that we are developing right now.”

“We are also working on ways to give relief in the 5 year mortgage, the 10 year mortgage, and the 15 year mortgage,” he posted. “At Fannie and Freddie, we are evaluating how to do assumable or portable mortgages, in a safe and sound manner,” Pulte later added.

Write to Shaina Mishkin at shaina.mishkin@dowjones.com