Two to five percent of the loan amount, spread across a dozen line items. Some are fixed by third parties. Some are the lender's margin, and those are negotiable.
Rough figure: the number you will see quoted everywhere is 2% to 5% of the loan amount — on a $340,000 refinance, roughly $7,000 to $17,000. That figure bundles together two different things. Strip out the part that is not actually a cost and the fees alone usually land closer to 1% to 3%.
A range that runs from 2% to 5% is not much of an answer. It is wide for two reasons, and once you know both you can predict roughly where you will land before anyone sends you a number.
An appraisal costs what it costs whether the loan is $120,000 or $600,000. So does the credit report, the recording fee, and most of the title work. Only the origination charge moves with the loan size.
Take the midpoints of the ranges in the table below — about $2,165 of fixed third-party charges — and add origination at 0.75%. The pattern is immediate:
| Loan amount | Origination | Total fees | As a % |
|---|---|---|---|
| $100,000 | $750 | $2,915 | 2.9% |
| $200,000 | $1,500 | $3,665 | 1.8% |
| $340,000 | $2,550 | $4,715 | 1.4% |
| $500,000 | $3,750 | $5,915 | 1.2% |
| $750,000 | $5,625 | $7,790 | 1.0% |
The percentage nearly triples going from a large loan to a small one, and the dollar amount barely moves. This is the single biggest reason refinancing a small balance is harder to justify: the costs are close to fixed, so they have to be recovered out of a smaller monthly saving.
It also means the advice to ignore a refinance unless you can drop your rate by some fixed amount is backwards. The threshold depends on your loan size, not on a rule of thumb.
The 2% to 5% figure that gets repeated usually includes prepaid interest and the initial escrow deposit. Neither is a charge for refinancing — they are your own future taxes and insurance, moved into a new account. More on that below, but it is the reason two lenders can quote wildly different totals for identical work.
State differences do the rest. Title insurance and transfer taxes vary enormously by state, and in a handful of them the transfer tax alone can outweigh every lender fee combined.
| Item | Typical range | Negotiable? |
|---|---|---|
| Origination or lender fee | 0.5%–1% of loan | Yes |
| Appraisal | $300–$800 | Sometimes waived |
| Title search and insurance | $700–$2,500 | You may shop for it |
| Credit report | $30–$100 | No |
| Recording fees | $50–$250 | No, set by the county |
| Discount points | 1% per point | Optional entirely |
| Prepaid interest and escrow | Varies | Not a fee — your own money |
Some of these are fees you pay to someone. Others are prepayments of your own expenses — property taxes and insurance going into a new escrow account.
That second group is not a cost of refinancing. You would pay it either way, and your old servicer refunds the balance of your existing escrow account within a few weeks. When comparing offers, look at fees, not the total cash to close, or you will compare two different things.
Whatever the fees come to, you have three ways to settle them, and lenders present them as a convenience choice. They are not. They are three different prices, and which one is cheapest depends entirely on how long you keep the loan.
Take the $340,000 refinance at 6.5% with $8,000 in fees:
Now follow all three to the point where you sell or refinance again. Total cost means every payment made, plus the balance still owed, plus any cash you handed over at closing:
| How you pay the $8,000 | Leave after 3 yrs | Leave after 7 yrs | Stay 30 yrs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pay cash at closing | $73,184 | $155,934 | $441,651 |
| Roll it into the balance | $74,717 | $159,415 | $451,855 |
| No-closing-cost, higher rate | $69,024 | $156,913 | $464,081 |
Read that table across, not down. The cheapest option changes. At three years the no-closing-cost version wins by $4,160. At thirty years the same offer is the most expensive of the three, by $22,430 — a swing of more than $26,000 driven entirely by how long you stay.
On these numbers the two swap places at month 75 — six years and three months. Before that, taking the higher rate and keeping your $8,000 wins. After that, paying at closing wins, and the gap keeps widening for as long as you hold the loan.
Your own crossover moves with the size of the rate bump and the size of the fees, so treat six years as the shape of the answer rather than the answer. The point is that there is a crossover at all, and that the honest question is not "which costs less" but "how long am I keeping this loan".
The no-closing-cost route has its own trade-offs beyond the arithmetic — that is covered in the no-closing-cost refinance.
Look at where the middle row sits in both tables. Rolling the fees into the balance is second in the short run and second in the long run. It is never the cheapest of the three, in either direction.
That does not make it wrong. It is the option you take when you do not have $8,000 and you do plan to keep the loan — a compromise, not a bargain. It just should not be presented to you as the free one, which is usually how it is presented.
Lender fees. Origination, underwriting, processing, and application fees are the lender's own charges. Bring a competing Loan Estimate and ask them to match it. This works more often than people expect.
Title services. Federal rules let you shop for some title services rather than accepting the lender's provider. The Loan Estimate marks which ones.
Points. Buying down the rate is optional. It only pays off if you keep the loan long enough, and that is a separate break-even calculation from the refinance itself.
Run your own numbers
See the break-even month and what a refinance costs across the whole loan.
Every lender must give you a Loan Estimate on the same standardized form. Page 2 lists the fees; section A is the lender's own charges, which is where the real difference between offers usually sits.
Get at least three. Request them within a short window so the credit inquiries count as a single event for scoring purposes, and compare the same loan type and term across all of them.
It is worth putting a number on the middle option, because the number is larger than it sounds.
$8,000 added to a 30-year loan at 6.5% raises the payment by $50.57. Over 360 payments that comes to $18,204 — $10,204 of it interest. The financing costs more than the thing being financed, by 28%.
That is the full-term figure, and most people do not hold a loan for thirty years. Leave after seven and the rolled-in fees have cost about $3,500 more than paying cash rather than $10,000. The penalty scales with how long you stay, which is the same variable that decides everything else on this page.
Two practical notes. Rolling fees in raises your loan-to-value, and on a tight appraisal that can move you into a worse pricing tier or trigger mortgage insurance you did not have before — check the ratio after the fees are added, not before. And if you are refinancing specifically to shorten the term, adding to the balance works against the thing you are trying to do.
Refinancing your primary residence comes with a protection that buying a house does not. Under federal truth-in-lending rules you have three business days after closing to cancel, for any reason or none. The clock starts at the latest of three events: signing, receiving your truth-in-lending disclosure, or receiving the two copies of the notice of right to cancel that the lender has to hand you.
Saturdays count as business days here; Sundays and federal holidays do not. During the window the loan does not fund and nobody disburses anything, which is why a refinance closing does not put money in your hand the same afternoon.
Using it requires written notice to the lender inside the window — a phone call does not count. If you cancel, the lender must return everything you have paid, including the fees discussed on this page.
The right applies to a refinance on a home you live in. It does not apply to a purchase, an investment property, a second home, or to refinancing with the lender that already holds your loan when you take no additional cash out.