If the plan is to keep your current house, rent it out, and use that rent to qualify for the next mortgage, one piece of that plan just stopped working. The signed lease.
Fannie Mae’s rewritten rules say lease agreements “are not permitted for any departing residence.” Not discounted. Not permitted. Your lender is going to price your old house off market comps now, whether the comps are kind to you or not.
The rewrite landed in Selling Guide Announcement SEL-2026-08 on September 2. It’s mandatory for applications dated November 1, 2026 and later, and lenders were told they can start early, which means yours may already be running it.
Under the old approach, a lease was the document underwriters wanted. Paper on the table, a number on the paper, a signature at the bottom. You can see why that appealed to anyone whose file needed help, and why an agency buying the loan decided a page signed by two people who know each other isn’t evidence.
The paper is out. The neighborhood is in. Gross monthly rent now has to come from a complete appraisal that includes market rents, a Single-Family Comparable Rent Schedule (that’s Form 1007, the appraiser’s written opinion of what a place rents for), or market analysis tools like Zillow, Redfin, or the MLS. Take the tools route and your lender has to pull at least three comparable rentals.
Show the math. Say the house you’re leaving carries a PITIA of $1,900 a month. PITIA is principal, interest, taxes, insurance, and any HOA dues, the whole housing payment. You have a tenant lined up at $2,300.
The lease is invisible now. If three comps back up $2,300, you take 75 percent of that, which is $1,725, then subtract the $1,900 payment. You land at negative $175, and a negative number goes straight into your debt-to-income ratio as a monthly debt. If the comps come back at $2,000 instead, it’s $1,500 minus $1,900, or negative $400. Same house, same tenant, same rent check clearing every month, and $225 more in debt on your application because a comp set read the street differently than your tenant did.
Then there’s the part that kills deals. Landlord for less than twelve months? Your lender has to verify six months of reserves covering the vacated house’s payment. On that $1,900, it’s $11,400 you have to document, sitting on top of the down payment and the closing costs.
Verdict: questionable, and it turns entirely on your comps. If your lease is below market, you just got a raise. If you were counting on a strong lease to carry a thin file, you have a problem.
Pull your own comps before you apply. Find three rentals near you with the same bedroom count and rough condition, write the numbers down, and take 75 percent of the middle one. That’s the same evidence your lender will use, so you can see the answer before an underwriter does.
Then run the new payment against your income in our mortgage calculator, entering the negative rental number as a debt instead of assuming the rent covers itself. If six months of the old house’s payment isn’t somewhere you can document, either close before November 1 with a lender still on the old rules, or qualify on your income alone. If your loan officer can’t say which version they’re underwriting to, our mortgage hub and lender comparison are where to start over.
One thing that did not change, and it’s the reason a strong lease was never worth as much as people assumed: rent from a departing residence can only offset that house’s own payment. It never becomes extra qualifying income for the new loan.
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