Most homeowners wait for PMI to fall off on its own. Three of the four routes out are faster than that, and two of them cost nothing.
Short version: ask for cancellation the moment your balance hits 80% of the original purchase price — waiting for the automatic cutoff instead costs $1,470 on a typical loan. If your home has gained value, an appraisal can get you there years earlier and save several times that.
Every guide to this lists the same four routes. Almost none of them says what each one costs, which is the only thing that decides between them.
Here they are on one loan: a $350,000 house bought with 10% down, so a $315,000 loan at 6.5%, with PMI at 0.40% a year — $105 a month. Doing nothing is the baseline, and on this loan doing nothing means paying the premium until month 109.
| Route | Earliest | What it costs | Saved vs. doing nothing |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Request at 80% | Month 95 | A letter | $1,470 |
| 2. Automatic at 78% | Month 109 | Nothing | — |
| 3. New appraisal | Month 24 | $300–$600 | Up to $8,925 |
| 4. Pay the gap | Any time | The gap itself | See below |
Two things fall out of that table immediately.
The route most people take is the worst one. Doing nothing and letting the premium fall off at 78% is the default, and it costs $1,470 more than writing a letter fourteen months earlier. The letter takes twenty minutes.
The route servicers mention least is the best one. A new appraisal can end the premium years early. On this loan the ceiling is $8,925 — more than six times what the letter saves, for a fee of a few hundred dollars.
The rest of this page is what each route requires and how to tell which one is open to you.
Under the federal Homeowners Protection Act, you can ask your servicer to cancel PMI once your balance reaches 80% of the home's original value — the lower of the purchase price or the appraised value at closing. This is a right, not a favor, provided you are current on payments and have no second mortgage on the property.
The request must be in writing. Servicers are not required to remind you, and most do not.
At 78% of the original value, your servicer must cancel PMI on its own. No request, no cost, no appraisal. The catch is that this is the slowest route, typically arriving a year or more after you could have asked at 80%.
There is also a backstop: if you somehow have not reached 78% by the midpoint of your loan term — month 180 of a 30-year loan — PMI must end anyway, as long as you are current.
The first two routes use what you paid for the home. This one uses what it is worth now, which in a rising market is a completely different number.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac guidelines generally allow cancellation based on current value when the loan is at least two years old and the balance is 75% or less of the new value, or at least five years old at 80% or less. Your servicer orders the appraisal; you pay for it, usually $300 to $600.
This is the route servicers mention least, and for homeowners who bought before a run-up in prices it is often worth years of premiums.
The two thresholds work against each other in a useful way. Early on you need the tighter 75% ratio, but your balance is high. Later the 80% ratio opens up and your balance has fallen. On the same loan:
| When you ask | Balance | Rule | Value needed | Growth needed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Month 24 | $307,723 | 75% | $410,297 | +17.2% |
| Month 36 | $303,714 | 75% | $404,952 | +15.7% |
| Month 60 | $294,875 | 80% | $368,593 | +5.3% |
The five-year mark is where this route gets easy. At month 24 the house has to have gained 17% for the numbers to work. At month 60 it only needs 5.3% — and cancelling then still saves 49 months of premium, $5,145, for an appraisal fee of a few hundred.
Order the appraisal only when you have a reasonable expectation of clearing the threshold. If it comes in short you have paid the fee for nothing, and some servicers make you wait before trying again. The detail of how to judge that is in cancelling PMI with a new appraisal.
If your balance is close to 80% of the original price, a single payment can close the gap and end the premium immediately. The usual advice is to compare that payment against the premiums you would otherwise pay while waiting. That comparison is incomplete, and it gives the wrong answer.
On this loan at month 60 the balance is $294,875, so the gap to 80% is $14,875. Weighed only against the 35 months of premium you would skip — $3,675 — it looks like a poor trade by more than $11,000.
But the money is not spent. It goes into the balance, and the balance is charged 6.5% a year:
| Pay $14,875 at month 60 | |
|---|---|
| Premium avoided | $3,675 |
| Interest avoided | $52,820 |
| Loan ends earlier by | 34 months |
Read that carefully rather than triumphantly. The $52,820 is spread across the remaining twenty-five years, and what you are really earning on the money is your mortgage rate — 6.5%, guaranteed, with the early end of the premium as a bonus on top. That is a decent return and a poor one depending on what the cash would otherwise do.
So the honest rule is the reverse of the usual one. The premium alone never justifies the lump sum. If prepaying the mortgage is something you would consider anyway, ending PMI early makes it slightly better. If it is not, saving $3,675 of premium is not a reason to tie up $14,875.
The same question in its general form — lump sum against the mortgage versus other uses — is worked through in recast, or just pay it down?
See your own dates
Enter your loan and get all four cancellation routes with the date you qualify for each.
Send it in writing and keep a copy. Note the date, and follow up if you do not hear back within 30 days.
There is no official form. Anything containing the elements above works, and plain language is fine. If it helps to start from something:
Re: Request to cancel private mortgage insurance — loan number [NUMBER]
[Your name]
[Property address]
[Date]
I am writing to request cancellation of the private mortgage insurance on the loan above.
The original value of the property was [PURCHASE PRICE] and the current principal balance is [BALANCE], which is [PERCENT]% of the original value. I am current on all payments and have been for the life of the loan. There are no subordinate liens on the property.
Please confirm in writing when the premium will be removed and the effective date. If you require anything further from me to complete this request, please tell me what it is and by when.
[Signature]
Two notes on wording. State the ratio yourself rather than leaving it to be worked out — it removes an excuse for delay. And asking them to name anything missing, with a deadline, tends to produce a faster answer than asking only for cancellation.
If you are using the current-value route instead, replace the middle paragraph with a request that they order an appraisal and confirm the ratio they will apply.
Nothing visible happens for a while, and that is normal. What should happen next:
If the request is refused, the useful move is to ask why in writing. A refusal has to rest on something specific — a payment history problem, a second lien, a ratio that has not been met — and a written reason is either something you can fix or something you can challenge. A vague refusal is not a real one.
If you believe a refusal is wrong and the servicer will not resolve it, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau accepts complaints about mortgage servicers and forwards them for a response. Servicers tend to answer those quickly. It costs nothing and it is a reasonable step once you have a written refusal in hand and believe it is mistaken.
A late payment in the recent past can delay cancellation until your record is clean again. A home equity loan or line of credit counts as a subordinate lien and generally disqualifies you until it is closed. And if your servicer's appraisal comes back lower than you expected, the current-value route closes for the time being.
None of this covers FHA loans. FHA mortgage insurance follows separate rules, and on most FHA loans written since 2013 it cannot be cancelled at all without refinancing.
And if you have not bought yet, the question is a different one — whether to take the premium at all or delay until you have 20%. That comparison is in is it worth waiting to avoid PMI.