Mortgage Affordability Doesn’t End at Closing (Sponsored by Truework, a Checkr company)

Randy Lightbody examines why refinance-dependent buyers challenge the mortgage industry’s traditional understanding of affordability.

For decades, I’ve seen firsthand how our industry has treated affordability as a milestone rather than an ongoing measure of financial stability. Once a borrower clears underwriting and closes on a home, we generally consider the affordability question answered. But today’s market suggests otherwise.

The findings from Truework’s newly released 2026 Recent Homebuyer Report, based on a survey of 1,000 Americans who purchased a home within the past two years, point to a growing disconnect between mortgage qualification and the ability to comfortably sustain payments over the long term. For many borrowers, the assumption that they’ll eventually be able to refinance into a lower rate is changing how we should think about affordability after closing.

In particular, three findings have changed the way I think about what affordability really means today, and what our industry should be doing differently.

When Refinancing Becomes Part of the Plan

For a growing share of today’s borrowers, mortgage affordability is contingent on a future refinance. In other words, they’re not just buying a home; they’re counting on a future event to make that home sustainably affordable.

Our survey bears that out. Eighty-five percent of mortgage holders now say refinancing to a lower rate matters to their financial well-being, up from 56% just a year ago. Half say their mortgage becomes unsustainable without one. I don’t think these buyers are being reckless. I think they’re doing the best they can in a rate environment that hasn’t given them much room to work with.

We’re calling this Conditional Affordability: a mortgage that looks affordable today, but only as long as a buyer’s bet on lower rates, higher income, or continued financial sacrifice actually pays off. And it’ll only get worse as homeowners’ insurance and tax costs increase.

This is the typical experience for mortgage holders in this survey. Yet our industry’s traditional affordability equation based on income, debt and down payment doesn’t match reality for today’s buyers.

Affordability Is No Longer One-Size-Fits-All

Our research identified four distinct approaches to managing mortgage payments among recent buyers, but only about one in five qualify as “Payment-Confident Buyers”—those who aren’t relying on a future rate cut to maintain their financial stability. Everyone else is either waiting for rates to fall, watching them closely, or making the math work through sheer budget discipline.

I think about the people behind those numbers: buyers who carefully budgeted, stretched to purchase a home they planned to stay in, and reasonably expected today’s high rates wouldn’t last forever. None of them did anything wrong. The problem is that qualifying for a loan and being able to sustain it over the long haul are turning out to be two different questions, and I don’t think our industry has fully caught up to that gap.

The Risk Isn’t Limited to First-Time Buyers

As you might expect, first-time buyers are carrying the greatest risk in today’s market. A whopping 87% of these first-timers say they’ll need to take real financial action if they can’t refinance soon. However, what I found even more interesting is how close Millennial buyers came to that number, with 82% also saying they’ll need to take action if they can’t refinance – even though for the majority (68%) this was not their first home purchase. Yet, two-thirds of them still bought expecting rates to fall. They’d done this before, and they still made the same bet.

This isn’t meant to be a criticism of Millennial buyers. I think this tells us something important about who’s actually the most vulnerable in today’s market, and it isn’t always the people we assume.

What This Means for Mortgage Lenders

None of this means buyers made bad decisions. It means our jobs might be changing. For years, our whole system has been built around one moment: can this borrower close the loan? What this data tells me is that we need a second question as well: Can this borrower sustain the loan if the rate relief they’re counting on doesn’t materialize on schedule? This second question feels more likely than ever to become the norm.

The loan officers I talk to who are getting ahead of this are having the refinance conversation earlier and more honestly. They’re walking first-time buyers and Millennials through what actually happens if rates don’t move for another two or three years (or longer), not just what happens if they do. They’re treating financial education as part of the origination conversation itself, not something that shows up later if a borrower runs into trouble.

There’s a lot more in the full report, including how these numbers break down by generation and the big financial and personal sacrifices recent buyers are making now or planning to make in the future to stay in their new homes. The biggest takeaway is this: the work of making a mortgage sustainable doesn’t end at the closing table. Increasingly, closing isn’t the end of the affordability conversation; it’s actually where the real test of affordability begins.

Randy Lightbody is Head of Mortgage and Government at Truework (a Checkr company). The 2026 Truework Recent Homebuyer Report surveyed 1,000 U.S. adults who purchased a home in the past 24 months. The full report and methodology are available at Truework.

[Sponsored content includes material submitted independently of the Mortgage Bankers Association and MBA NewsLink and does not connote an MBA endorsement of a specific company, product or service. For more information about sponsored content opportunities, contact Bill Farmakis at bill@jlfarmakis.com or 203/834-8832.]