2026 FHA Loan Limits: How High Can You Go in Your County?

The one-unit national floor is $541,287 and the standard one-unit ceiling is $1,249,125. Every county sits somewhere between those two figures, and a separate exception ceiling applies in Alaska, Hawaii, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

HUD applies a statutory percentage to the county's median house price, then floors and caps the result against the national floor and ceiling. The county-by-county file is published in the HUD CHUMS dataset.

They apply to FHA case numbers assigned on or after January 1, 2026. The case number assignment date, not your contract date, controls which year's limit applies.

No. It caps the insured loan amount. You can buy above the limit by bringing the difference in cash on top of your required down payment.

Yes. HUD publishes separate one, two, three and four-unit limits for every county, and the multi-unit figures are substantially higher.

A county whose calculated limit reaches the national ceiling. Those counties are usually large coastal or mountain-resort metros where median prices are far above the national median.

Yes. HUD reissues them annually, normally in late fall for the following calendar year, alongside the FHFA conforming loan limit announcement.

Use HUD's official FHA mortgage limits lookup and the underlying CHUMS county file. Both are linked in the sources at the end of this article.

The property's county. If you live in one county and buy in another, the limit for the property's county governs.

Yes. A cash-out or rate-and-term FHA refinance is subject to the same county limit as a purchase, in addition to FHA's loan-to-value ceilings.

The file cannot be insured as written. You either increase your down payment to fall under the limit or move to a conventional, jumbo or other program.

Yes. The special exception ceiling recognises construction costs in Alaska, Hawaii, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands and sits well above the mainland ceiling.