November 12, 2025
More on the 50-Year Mortgage
CC0 1.0 Public Domain Pixnio
Marketplace interviewed me in Trump Floated a 50-Year Mortgage to Address Housing Affordability. How Would That Work? The transcript reads,
President Donald Trump proposed a 50-year mortgage over the weekend, in a social media post. The idea came from Bill Pulte, the Federal Housing Finance Agency director.
“The average age of a first-time home buyer is now 40 years old. The notion that you’d finish paying off your mortgage at 90 is probably not something that most people contemplate when they want to buy a home,” said David Reiss, a professor at Cornell Law School.
Still, in the short term, a 50-year mortgage would appear cheaper — slightly. Robert Bridges did the math; he’s associate professor emeritus at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business.
“The payment on a 50-year mortgage, for instance, for a $200,000 loan at 6% would be about $1,052, where a 30-year loan would have a payment of $1,199,” Bridges said.
So that’s a difference of $147 in that example. But it comes with costs to the borrower as well, for starters the interest rate would be higher.
“You pay more for a 30-year mortgage than you do for a 15-year mortgage,” Reiss said. “So you will probably pay more for a 50-year mortgage than you would for a 30-year mortgage.”
According to the American Enterprise Institute, a 50-year mortgage would, initially, increase a homeowner’s buying power by 8%.
“Over time, maybe months, maybe years, that would fade,” said Edward Pinto, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Basically, if everyone’s buying power goes up, so does the price of housing. And a longer mortgage also means it takes longer to build up equity.
“And then you’re really left with not much advantage, and you become really a renter with a mortgage,” Pinto said.
A longer loan where it takes longer to build equity also leaves homeowners more vulnerable to risks in the market if home prices stagnate, which Pinto predicts they will in the coming years.
“This has been tried with 40-year loans before, and every time it’s been tried in the United States, it’s failed,” Pinto said.
Failed because they’re too risky, he said. That’s one reason we don’t already have 50-year mortgages.
“It doesn’t seem like this is really the remedy for the housing problem that we all know we have in this country,” Bridges said.
Which is first and foremost, he said, that we don’t have enough of it.
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