Enter your income and debts to see your debt-to-income ratio and which loan programs you qualify for. Free, no email, no credit pull.
Illustrative only. DTI thresholds vary by lender, loan type, and compensating factors. This is not a pre-approval or financial advice.
Approximate guidance — lender overlays and compensating factors apply.
Debt-to-income ratio (DTI) is the percentage of your gross monthly income that goes toward debt payments. It’s one of the most important numbers a mortgage lender looks at — more predictive of repayment risk than credit score alone. A lower DTI signals you have room in your budget; a high DTI raises a flag that new debt could strain you.
Lenders calculate two figures. Front-end DTI (also called the housing ratio) measures only the proposed housing payment — principal, interest, taxes, and insurance (PITI) — as a share of income. Back-end DTI adds all recurring monthly debts: car loans, student loans, minimum credit-card payments, and the housing payment combined. Back-end DTI is the number lenders weight most heavily.
Conventional wisdom (and many conventional loan guidelines) holds that front-end DTI should stay under 28% and back-end DTI under 36%. In practice, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac programs routinely approve back-end DTIs up to 45% with strong credit, and government-backed loans (FHA, VA) go higher still with compensating factors. The 28/36 rule is a useful starting target, not an absolute ceiling.
For W-2 employees the income figure is straightforward. For self-employed borrowers, it depends on the loan type. On a conventional loan, lenders use the two-year average of net income from Schedule C or K-1 — after write-offs. On a self-employed mortgage (including bank-statement programs), the lender averages your deposits and applies an expense factor. The two numbers can be dramatically different. Enter the figure a lender will actually count — not gross revenue — to get an honest DTI estimate.