How We Calculate Buy vs. Rent

Of 294 Military Housing Areas. Average shortfall across all stations if rented after PCS: $1,726/mo. Data snapshot 2026-08, generated 2026-09-03, a locked snapshot (not live rates).

What the model measures

Most home-buying calculators ask one question: can you afford the monthly payment? For a service member that is the wrong question, because your BAH follows you when you PCS but your mortgage stays behind. The number that matters is whether the local rental market can carry the home after you leave.

So for every duty station we compute the monthly cash flow of buying the typical 3-bedroom home (Zillow's mid-tier ZHVI, a typical-value index rather than a sales median) and renting it out at your next PCS:

That landlord cycle is observed, not assumed: in a November 2022 snapshot of AHRN, the DoD-commissioned housing platform, rental inventory concentrated in installation towns like El Paso, Killeen, Clarksville, Fayetteville, and Hinesville across 12,893 landlord accounts, direct evidence of the buy-then-rent-out cycle this model prices.

The loan assumptions

PITI uses a pinned 6.34% VA 30-year rate (held fixed for the 2026 report cycle so every market is judged at the same rate and the published rankings do not shift every time rates move), first-time VA use with the 2.15% funding fee financed into the loan, $0 down, and a 30-year term. The interactive calculator works differently: it auto-fills the live VA 30-year rate from Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis data (FRED series OBMMIVA30YF, updated daily on business days) and lets you change all of these. The published article and chart use the single fixed-rate scenario so the numbers are reproducible.

Two tiers, plus a Gem highlight: buy or avoid

Cash flow alone is too blunt, because it treats every monthly loss as a dealbreaker. A small loss can be worth it if you can afford it and it is buying you an asset. So we score each base on three lenses (cash flow, wealth, and affordability) and sort it into just two tiers: a market is a buy if the loss is affordable on your base pay and it still builds wealth, otherwise it is an avoid. A Gem is not a third tier; it is a highlight we add to a buy that is also a major, high-volume base or has strong long-run appreciation, and that grades C or better on area livability (below). A great deal in an area with failing schools and high crime keeps its Buy, but not its star.

Total return (shown as wealth built per month in our tables) is the wealth lens: cash flow, plus the equity your tenant pays down on your loan each month (averaged over a 4-year tour), plus appreciation. Equity is reliable; it does not need the market to rise. Appreciation is the biggest and least reliable number, so we cap it at a conservative 4% for the verdict and show each base's actual 15-year sustained rate only as context. That rate is a geometric-mean annual change over the last 15 years, so it reflects a full market cycle rather than a one-year spike. The cap is deliberate on top of that: several markets have posted double-digit gains in a single recent year, and a base should not qualify as a good buy just because it rode a hot streak that no one should project forward.

Affordability is measured against base pay only, not BAH. This is the crux. Your BAH covers your housing at your next station; the shortfall on the home you left behind comes out of base pay. So a monthly loss is "affordable" only if it is 10% or less of base pay for a real pay grade. Each grade's base pay is taken from the 2026 pay table at a representative mid-career years-of-service point (E-4 at 4, E-5 at 6, E-6 at 8, E-7 at 12, O-3 at 6, O-4 at 12 years), so every threshold can be checked against the published DFAS pay chart. The most senior grade the model checks is an O-4, whose 10%-of-base-pay limit is about $990/mo. So a $7,500-a-month loss is not a buy hiding behind a big number: it is many times over that line at every rank we model, which is why we classify markets like it as avoid. The station rankings assume a single military income, the conservative default since we cannot know your household. Two honest disclosures about that choice. First, lenders themselves count BAH as effective income when qualifying a VA loan (VA Lenders Handbook, Pamphlet 26-7), so excluding it here is deliberate conservatism about what happens after you PCS, not a description of what you can borrow. Second, most of the force above E-4 is married (58.7% at E-5 to E-6, 81% at E-7 to E-9, per the 2024 DoD Demographics Profile), so the report also publishes dual-income sensitivity bands using published spouse-income statistics: $31,222 a year for spouses who moved in the past year and $35,000 median for spouses with earnings (IVMF Military Spouse Employment Landscape 2025, 2023 ACS). Marriage reaches roughly six in ten E-5 to E-6 households and eight in ten E-7 and above, but only one in four junior enlisted, and the bands only apply where the spouse actually earns: about 54% of active-duty families are dual-income in practice (IVMF 2025). The calculator lets you add your own spouse take-home pay, which widens the household income the loss is judged against and can honestly move a verdict for a dual-income family.

Area livability: a separate grade, not part of the verdict

"Is this a good deal?" and "would my family want to live here?" are different questions, so we answer them separately. Every market gets a Livability grade (A to F) built from three pillars measured on each market's hand-verified commuter ring (the same geography the prices use): schools (academic achievement of the school districts actually serving the ring's ZIP codes, from the Stanford Education Data Archive, which links 2009 to 2019 state tests to the NAEP scale so districts are comparable across states; each ZIP's population is allocated to its districts with Census-derived weights), safety (FBI-reported 2024 violent and property crime rates by county, built only from agencies that reported all 12 months, with recently-transitioned under-reporting agencies excluded), and amenities (restaurants plus arts, entertainment, and recreation establishments per 10,000 residents, from Census County Business Patterns 2023, by county). Safety and amenities stay at county grain because their sources publish nothing finer; schools moved to district grain in September 2026 after a reader showed us why county pooling fails (see the update note below).

Each pillar is a percentile versus the other military housing markets, not a national rating, weighted schools 40%, safety 40%, amenities 20%; the grade is the quintile of the composite (A = top fifth of military markets). Where a county's police agencies covered less than half its population in 2024 we show no safety score at all rather than a misleadingly low one, and the grade reweights to the remaining pillars with a note. The livability grade never changes the financial Buy/Avoid verdict; it gates the Gem star and informs your judgment.

Data sources and vintages

Every input, with the exact vintage it was pulled from:

Home values

Zillow ZHVI 3-bedroom (2026-07-31), population-weighted across commuter ZIPs where Census data is available (284 of 294 stations). Where a ZIP has no 3-bedroom series the all-homes ZHVI fills the gap (131 of 294 markets blend or use all-homes), and 3 use documented county or Redfin medians; the calculator's data-quality badge shows each market's exact source

Rents

HUD Fair Market Rents FY2026, 3-bedroom, the federal standard rent benchmark published for every county; Zillow ZORI where no FMR match exists (5 markets); and 11 markets use a documented local figure where the metro-wide FMR misstates the local market, each disclosed on the calculator's data-quality badge

Appreciation

FHFA House Price Index (2025)

Homeowners insurance

Insurance.com/Quadrant 2026-08-25 (state avg, $300K dwelling)

Flood insurance

FEMA NFIP RR2.0 + live NFHL 2026-08 (modeled only for FL Keys)

Property tax

Tax Foundation / Census effective rates (2022 vintage)

Commuter-ZIP weights

ACS 5-Year 2024

BAH

Official 2026 DoD Basic Allowance for Housing rates

Schools (livability)

Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA) 6.0 pooled achievement of the school districts serving each market's commuter ZIPs, 2009-2019 assessments NAEP-linked (Reardon et al. 2025); districts mapped to ZIPs via MCDC Geocorr 2022 with 2020-census population weights. County pooled achievement is the labeled fallback for the few markets without usable district data (Hawaii runs one statewide district; Vermont's post-merger boundaries do not match the SEDA frame)

Crime (livability)

FBI Crime Data Explorer, Summary Reported Crime 2024; full-year-reporting agencies rolled up to county, per-county coverage disclosed

Town names

GeoNames US postal data (CC-BY 4.0) for sub-market place labels

Amenities (livability)

Census County Business Patterns 2023 (NAICS 722 + 71 establishments) per ACS 2023 county population

Mortgage rate

6.34% VA 30-year, held fixed for the 2026 report cycle so all 294 markets are judged at the same rate and published rankings do not shift with daily rate moves. The interactive calculator is not pinned: it auto-fills the live VA 30-year rate from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED, Optimal Blue Mortgage Market Indices series OBMMIVA30YF), updated daily on business days, and you can override it

Why commuter ZIP codes, not the base ZIP

Enlisted families rarely live on the waterfront next to the base. If you price San Diego off Point Loma or Norfolk off the oceanfront, every number is wrong. For each base we use the ZIP codes where E-4 to E-7 families actually live, typically affordable suburbs 20 to 30 minutes out. Where Census population data is available for those ZIP codes (284 of 294 stations), we population-weight them so the bigger communities count more; for the rest, where population data is sparse, we average the ZIPs evenly. The calculator's data-quality badge shows which method applies for your base. Either way, this is why our home prices are lower, and more honest, than a base-ZIP lookup.

Flood and insurance

Homeowners insurance starts from current 2026 state averages at a standardized $300,000-dwelling profile. Where a market's typical price exceeds $300,000 we scale the premium up in proportion to price, because a $1.1M home is not insured at the $300K rate; below $300,000 we keep the full state average, the conservative direction. One known gap runs the other way: the state average is an owner-occupied homeowners premium, while the scenario is a landlord, and a landlord (DP-3) policy on the same home typically costs 15 to 25% more, so the insurance line is, if anything, slightly favorable to buying. This is still an estimate, not a quote: in markets where land is most of the price (dense cities), proportional scaling can overstate the premium, and on coastal homes carriers can charge more than any average suggests. We include an NFIP flood premium only where flood coverage is effectively universal and we have a documented local figure (currently the Florida Keys, a FEMA VE high-velocity zone). A handful of markets sit entirely on a barrier island, Nantucket, the Outer Banks, Cape May, and Atlantic City, where flood insurance is effectively mandatory. We do not yet have a per-market NFIP figure for those, so we flag them with a "flood insurance likely required" note on the calculator's data-quality badge rather than model a premium; each already ranks avoid on price and tax alone, so the flag does not change the verdict, but a buyer there should budget for flood. For every other market we checked the commuter ZIPs against FEMA's live National Flood Hazard Layer, but ZIP-level sampling over-states exposure near rivers and cannot replace a parcel-level determination, so we do not attach a flood premium; the commuter-ZIP sampling also targets inland areas where flood is generally not mandatory. Check your specific address on FEMA's Flood Map Service Center.

Assumptions and limits (read these)

• These are market-typical values (Zillow's mid-tier index for prices, HUD's county standard for rents), not a quote for a specific home. Your price, rent, and insurance will differ.
• Insurance is a state average at a $300K dwelling, scaled up with the typical price above $300K, and it is an owner-occupied premium; a landlord (DP-3) policy typically runs 15 to 25% higher.
• Property-tax rates are a 2022 vintage and have not been refreshed this cycle.
• About 10 of 294 stations use a simple average of their commuter ZIPs rather than population weighting, because Census population data was sparse at that geography. The data-quality badge flags which.
• The rent figure is HUD Fair Market Rent, a broad-market number; a specific 3-bedroom may rent above or below it.
• The model assumes you rent the home out at PCS. Selling instead is a different calculation, driven by appreciation and 6 to 10% transaction costs.
• Wealth built is pre-transaction-cost. Realizing it requires selling (or refinancing), and a sale costs 6 to 10% of the price; on a marginal buy, those exit costs can absorb years of accrued equity and appreciation.
• School scores come from SEDA 6.0, whose assessments run 2009 to 2019: the best cross-state-comparable data available, but entirely pre-COVID, and district performance has shifted since. SEDA tests grades 3 through 8, so in states that run separate high-school districts the score reflects the elementary and unified districts; high-school quality is not separately measured. A few markets (Hawaii, Vermont) fall back to county-pooled scores, labeled in the tool, where usable district data does not exist.
• Appreciation is historical (FHFA) and does not predict the future.

Reproducible by design

The rankings, the article numbers, and this page all read from one shared calculation, so those published figures cannot drift apart. One intentional exception: the report's embedded "Find your station" widget runs the interactive calculator's five-factor verdict on a 3-year tour (including BAH coverage while stationed), while the ranking tables average equity over a 4-year tour and judge affordability on base pay alone, so the widget's verdict for a base can read differently from its ranking tier; both assumptions are labeled where they appear. The raw source files are archived in a dated snapshot with a checksum manifest, and the published figures regenerate byte-for-byte from that snapshot. When we refresh the data, everything updates together.

How we make money

MyBaseGuide is an independent publisher, not a real-estate brokerage or lender. We do not take real-estate agent referral fees. The site is supported by advertising, including from VA lenders and home builders, which is labeled as advertising and never changes the numbers in our tools or the rankings in this analysis. We tell you when a home does not pencil out, even at a base where a lender would happily write the loan.