The range is wide because the price is set by risk. Two people with the same loan can pay very different premiums, and some of the difference is inside your control.
Rough figure: 0.3% to 1.5% of the loan amount per year, divided by twelve. Most conventional borrowers land in the narrower 0.3% to 0.8% band — the top of the range is reserved for low credit scores at high loan-to-value. On a $315,000 loan at 0.40%, that is $105 a month. Left to run its course, it is about $11,400 in total.
Almost every page that answers this question gives you a monthly figure and stops. The monthly figure is the small number. PMI is temporary, so what you really want to know is how many months you will pay it and what that adds up to — because that total is what a decision can change.
Take a concrete case and follow it to the end. A $350,000 house, 10% down, so a $315,000 loan at 90% loan-to-value. Thirty-year fixed at 6.5%, principal and interest of $1,991 a month. PMI at 0.40% a year adds $105 to that.
Under federal law the premium comes off automatically once the balance reaches 78% of the original value. On this loan that is $273,000, and scheduled payments alone get there in 109 months. But that is only one of the ways this ends:
Total PMI paid before it comes off
Do nothing
$11,445
Ask at 80%
$9,975
+$200 a month
$6,510
+$400 a month
$4,830
Same loan, same premium rate, four different endings. Waiting for the automatic cutoff is the most expensive option available to you, and it is also the default — it is what happens if you do nothing at all.
Do nothing — 109 months, $11,445. The servicer drops the premium on its own at 78%. No paperwork, no request, no appraisal. Also nine years of payments.
Ask at 80% — 95 months, $9,975. You do not have to wait for 78%. Federal law lets you request cancellation at 80% of the original value, which arrives 14 months earlier on this loan. The request is a letter. That letter is worth $1,470.
Add $200 a month — 62 months, $6,510. Extra principal pulls the 80% mark forward by nearly four years. The saving on PMI alone is $4,935, and that is before counting the interest the extra principal also avoids.
Add $400 a month — 46 months, $4,830. Under four years instead of over nine. Worth being honest about the trade: that money is now locked in the house rather than sitting in an account you can reach. If your emergency fund is thin, the smaller number is the better decision even though the table says otherwise.
The gap between the top row and the bottom row is $6,615 on a loan where the monthly premium is only $105. That is the reason the monthly figure is the wrong thing to focus on.
The percentage is annual and applies to the loan amount, not the house price. Divide by twelve for the monthly line on your statement. On the $315,000 loan above:
| Annual rate | Per month | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| 0.30% | $79 | $945 |
| 0.40% | $105 | $1,260 |
| 0.50% | $131 | $1,575 |
| 0.80% | $210 | $2,520 |
| 1.50% | $394 | $4,725 |
The bottom row is not a typical outcome. It is what the pricing looks like at the far end — a low credit score combined with a very small down payment. Most borrowers who are asking this question are somewhere in the first three rows.
Mortgage insurance is not priced by a person looking at your file. It is priced off a grid, and the grid has two main axes.
Loan-to-value, in bands. Pricing steps at boundaries rather than sliding smoothly — the common breaks sit around 85%, 90%, 95% and 97%. This matters when you are still choosing a down payment: moving from 95% to just under 90% can drop you a full band, and the band change is worth more than the slightly smaller balance. Moving from 91% to 90.5% is worth nothing, because you have not crossed anything.
Credit score, also in bands. Scores are grouped, typically in twenty-point steps from the mid-700s downward. Inside a band your exact score is irrelevant. Crossing into the next band down is what costs money, and near the bottom of the scale the steps get steeper — the distance between the best and worst band is not a few percent, it is several times the premium.
The practical consequence of a grid is that small moves near a boundary are worth far more than large moves in the middle of a band. If you are twelve points below a break, those twelve points may be the cheapest money you will ever make on this loan.
Everything else adjusts the grid result rather than setting it.
Your monthly statement should itemize it, often labelled mortgage insurance rather than PMI. It also appears on the Closing Disclosure from when you bought. If you cannot find it, your servicer can tell you in one call.
Do not estimate when you can look it up — the range is wide enough that a guess can be off by a factor of three.
Conventional PMI has an expiry date built into federal law. The Homeowners Protection Act covers loans on a primary residence closed after July 1999, and it sets three separate exits:
One detail decides whether these dates apply to you: original value means the lesser of the purchase price or the appraised value at closing. It does not move when your house appreciates. A market that has risen 30% does not bring the automatic date forward by a single month.
Cancelling on the basis of what the house is worth now is a real route, but it runs through your servicer's own rules and the investor guidelines behind them, not through the federal schedule. It usually means ordering an appraisal, and it has its own waiting periods. That path is covered separately in cancelling PMI with a new appraisal, and the full set of exits is in how to remove PMI.
FHA loans are outside all of this. Their mortgage insurance follows different rules and on most modern FHA loans it does not come off at all — see FHA MIP vs. conventional PMI.
Nothing, for you. PMI protects the lender if you default. It exists so that lenders will write loans with less than 20% down, which for most buyers is the difference between owning and not owning. That is a real benefit — but the premium itself gives you no coverage.
Which is why cancelling it as early as you can is worth the effort. The payment is pure cost with no return.
See your own dates
Enter your loan and get all four cancellation routes with the date you qualify for each.
Improve your credit before applying. If you are still shopping, a higher score at application lowers the premium for as long as you carry it.
Ask about single-premium PMI. Some lenders let you pay it in one upfront amount instead of monthly. This can cost less overall if you keep the loan a long time — and more if you sell or refinance early.
Ask about lender-paid PMI. The lender covers the premium in exchange for a higher interest rate. There is no monthly line item, but the higher rate applies for the life of the loan and cannot be cancelled at 80%. That trade is usually worse than it sounds — you are converting a charge that expires in nine years into one that runs for thirty. The full comparison against monthly and single-premium is in lender-paid PMI: what the rate bump costs.
Ask about split-premium. A smaller amount upfront in exchange for a lower monthly rate. It sits between the single-premium and monthly options and is worth pricing if you expect to hold the loan into the middle of the range but not for decades. Fewer lenders offer it, so you have to ask by name.
Watch the band boundary when you choose a down payment. If you are still shopping and you are close to a loan-to-value break, finding the extra few thousand to cross it changes the rate for every month you carry the premium. Being just above a boundary is the most expensive place to sit.
Worth saying that the largest version of this question — whether to delay the purchase entirely until you have 20% and no premium at all — usually goes the other way. The total premium above works out at 2.85% of the purchase price, which a rising market can erase in a single year. The thresholds are in is it worth waiting to avoid PMI.
Cancel it as soon as you qualify — and pay to get there sooner. The cheapest PMI is the PMI you are no longer paying. This is the lever that dominates all the others: the table at the top of this page moves by $6,615 on this lever alone, while the difference between a good and a mediocre premium rate is a few hundred a year. Send extra principal, then send the cancellation letter the month you cross 80%.