Purchase mortgage closing costs dipped in 2025

Closing costs for a purchase mortgage transaction average 1.04% of the home sales price, but this can range from a low of just 39 basis points to a high of 3.06%, a report from LodeStar Software Solutions found.

On a dollar basis, the national average was $4,528 with a median home price of $433,632.

"Compared with last year's report, both average and median sales prices declined modestly, and closing costs moved lower as well," said Ron Carvalho, director of data operations at LodeStar.  "Despite those decreases, closing costs remained largely unchanged as a percentage of the sales price, shifting only slightly from 1.06% to 1.04% on average and from 0.86% to 0.85% at the median."

Take away recording fees and taxes, the national median closing cost is $2,993.

This is the second year LodeStar has studied this dataset, taking the closing fees from a sample of over 620,000 purchase quotes made between Jan. 1 and Dec. 31, 2025. Homes where the price was over $10 million were not included.

What is included in the calculation?

Average closing costs include the average fees, recordation charges and transfer taxes required to close a typical purchase transaction. It also includes settlement/closing/escrow fees, and the cost of title policies, both owners and lenders.

LodeStar found that on a percentage basis, closing costs are lowest in those states which do not have any, or just minimal, property transfer taxes.

At the other end of the spectrum, the highest closing costs are where the transfer taxes make up a bulk of the overhead.

Delaware was the state with the highest average closing costs, both on dollar and percentage basis, at $12,707 and the aforementioned 3.07%. The District of Columbia had a higher average dollar amount of closing costs at $13,836 but also an average sales price of $616,676.

Besides South Dakota at 0.39%, the other states at the low end are Colorado, 0.5% and Iowa, 0.56%.

States that added the largest amount of mortgage debt in 4Q

In a separate report just released by WalletHub, Delaware is ranked second for states adding the most mortgage debt between third and fourth quarters of last year.

Closing costs on a purchase are typically not rolled into the mortgage borrowings. The No. 1 state, Alaska, had a 72 basis point average closing cost last year.

"Alaska residents added the most mortgage debt, at least in percentage terms, with the average balance rising by 2.52% to $248,013," said John Kiernan, WalletHub editor. "Only one other state had an increase above 2%, and 19 states even saw decreases during Q4."

Delaware's increase was 2.51%, which brought the average balance in the state to $210,542.

"Mortgage interest rates are the highest they've been in around a decade, and home prices have seen a meteoric rise in recent years as well," Kiernan said. "Even small increases in home prices can lead to thousands of dollars in extra mortgage interest costs for homeowners."

Vermont ranked 50th in mortgage debt growth quarter-to-quarter, per WalletHub, and had an average closing cost rate of 2.34%, just ahead of New York, according to the LodeStar report.