Santa Monica sits at the western edge of Los Angeles, where the city meets the Pacific. It has the beach and the pier, some of the region's best public schools, walkable streets of restaurants and shops, and neighborhoods that range from Spanish bungalows north of Montana to condo towers along Ocean Avenue. It is one of the most sought-after places to live in Los Angeles, and one of the most expensive places to buy a home in the country. This report is built from every home purchase mortgage made in the city in 2025, reported by the lenders themselves, so the numbers below are what buyers actually paid, actually put down, and actually earned.
Local Markets
ReportSanta Monica, CA·2025 data
What it actually costs to buy a home in Santa Monica
Real figures from every mortgage made in Santa Monica last year, for anyone wondering what it would actually take to live here.
The typical home cost
$1,645,000
Half of buyers paid $1.1M to $2.6M
The typical buyer brought to closing
$501,536
Down payment plus closing costs
01
What does a home cost in Santa Monica?
There is no complicated reason Santa Monica costs what it costs: it is a place a lot of people want to live, and there are not many homes in it. The typical home bought here last year cost nearly twice the Los Angeles County figure, more than twice California's, and a little over four times the national one, all measured the same way. Here is what that looked like for the people who bought one.
$1.1M$1.6M$2.6M
Shaded: where the middle half of buyers landed. Mark: the median — half above, half below.
Right now, Redfin puts the median sale price, three months ending August 2026 at $1,725,858 (as of August 2026). That figure includes cash buyers and is more recent; the one above is what buyers who financed paid.
The typical home bought with a mortgage in Santa Monica in 2025 cost $1,645,000. Half of buyers paid between $1,090,000 and $2,630,000. Prices in Santa Monica barely moved from 2024.
Santa Monica
$1,645,000
2025, median
Los Angeles County
$875,000
2025, median
California
$705,000
2025, median
United States
$395,000
2025, median
Same method, same year, same kind of loan: a 30-year first mortgage on a single-unit home the buyer will live in. The county and national figures are what buyers who financed paid, not all sales.
02
How much money do you need saved before you can buy?
This is the number that decides who can buy here, and it is rarely published. The down payment is almost all of it; the closing costs, large as they look on their own, barely register next to it. Most buyers in Santa Monica arrive with far more than the 20% that counts as a full down payment elsewhere.
Santa Monica buyers brought a median of $501,536 to the closing table, what lenders call cash to close. That is a $490,000 down payment (26.6% of the price) plus $10,809 in closing costs: the lender's fees and the appraisal, title, and escrow charges. Down payments in Santa Monica rose 5.4% from 2024.
$287k$502k$1.0M
Shaded: where the middle half of buyers landed. Mark: the median — half above, half below.
- Down payment$490,000
- Closing costs$10,809
Closing costs here are the “Total Loan Costs” line on a Closing Disclosure. Prepaid interest, escrow deposits, and transfer taxes are not included, so the amount actually wired is somewhat higher. Estimate yours with the closing cost calculator.
A bigger down payment buys a smaller loan: a lower monthly payment, usually a slightly better rate, and no mortgage insurance. A smaller one keeps cash in your pocket, but under 20% down most lenders add mortgage insurance to the payment, and the loan itself is larger. Here is what the typical Santa Monica home would take at different down payments:
10% down
$175,309
$164,500 down + $10,809 closing costs
20% down
$339,809
$329,000 down + $10,809 closing costs
27% down (typical here)
$501,536
$490,000 down + closing costs
- Under 10% down6.6%
- 10–20% down7.3%
- 20% or more86.1%
Low-down-payment loans are common nationally; here they are rare. The conventional mortgage guide covers what different down payments mean for your loan.
03
What would you pay every month?
The monthly payment is where Santa Monica stops looking like the rest of the county. Property tax alone on the typical home runs well above what many Angelenos pay in rent, and that is before anyone has paid the mortgage.
At today's rate of 7.28% (Freddie Mac, October 1, 2026), the typical Santa Monica home and loan come to about $8,859/mo. To see the payment on a different price, rate, or down payment, use the payment calculator.
One limit of this data: it doesn't record whether a home is a house or a condo, so there is no separate condo price. Condos here cost less than houses on average, and a condo policy is cheaper to insure (about $89/mo instead of $275/mo), but condos carry HOA dues, often several hundred dollars a month, which no public dataset reports.
| Per month | |
|---|---|
| Loan payment (principal and interest) | $6,945/mo |
| Property tax | $1,639/mo |
| Homeowners insurance (house policy) | $275/mo |
| Total | $8,859/mo |
Loan payment on a $1,015,000 loan at 7.28%. Property tax on a $1,645,000 home at Santa Monica's 1.20% rate. Insurance is the median premium insurers quoted for Santa Monicain the California Department of Insurance's survey: $3,304/yr for a house ($750k of rebuild coverage), $1,069/yr for a condo. Not included: HOA dues, earthquake insurance, mortgage insurance, prepaid interest, escrow deposits. Rates change weekly; buyers in 2025 got a median rate of 6.125%.
04
Who actually buys in Santa Monica?
The loans say something about the buyers that no survey would. Incomes are high, loans are large, and almost nobody uses a government-backed program, not by choice but because the price of entry sits above the ceiling those programs allow.
Santa Monica buyers in 2025 earned a median household income of $380,000; half earned between $225,000 and $667,000. Santa Monica buyers' incomes rose 6.1% from 2024.
42% of these loans were jumbo loans, loans larger than the $1,249,125 limit for a standard mortgage in Los Angeles County. Above that line lenders apply their own rules, which usually means a higher credit score, more cash in reserve, and a bigger down payment.
Nearly every loan was conventional: 1 FHA and 2 VA loans out of 279. That is not because FHA buyers avoid Santa Monica. The FHA limit of $1,249,125 sits below almost every home here, so the program can't reach the market.
Median buyer income
$380,000
Jumbo loans
42%
116 of 279 loans
FHA or VA loans
3
of 279 loans
05
Could you do it?
None of this means Santa Monica is out of reach. It means the path in is narrower and better defined than most people assume: a large amount of cash, a high income, and a loan that lenders scrutinize more closely than a standard one. Here is what the math says it takes.
To get approved for the typical Santa Monica home at today's rate, with the 27% down payment that is typical here, you'd need to earn about $436,100 a year.
Santa Monica buyers in 2025 earned a median of $380,000. That is below today's line, and the gap is mostly rates. Buyers in 2025 got a median rate of 6.125%, which would have put the bar at about $396,461. The rest is buyers putting even more down, or lenders allowing more than the guideline.
A guideline, not a quote: it caps housing costs at 28% of income and includes property tax and house insurance. Run your own numbers in the affordability calculator.
Appendix
How we made this
Every mortgage lender of any size must report each loan it makes under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, and the federal government publishes those records one loan at a time. We took every home purchase loan in Los Angeles County for 2025, kept the 279 inside Santa Monica's city limits that look like a typical homebuyer's mortgage, and computed medians from those. Every figure is a median, computed per loan first and then across loans; the “middle half” is the 25th to 75th percentile. Any figure based on fewer than 50 loans is not shown.
Full methodology, sources, and caveatsShow
From 42,509 loans in Los Angeles County to 279
- source file42,509
- originated42,509
- home purchase42,509
- in geography399
- first lien395
- principal residence313
- single unit294
- site-built291
- not reverse mortgage291
- not open-end line of credit289
- not business purpose288
- 30-year term279
“Inside Santa Monica” means the property's census tract is one of the 19 tracts whose housing sits in the city (rule: housing-unit share in place >= 0.5). We exclude second homes, investment properties, multi-unit buildings, manufactured homes, reverse mortgages, home equity lines, business-purpose loans, and anything other than a 30-year first mortgage.
Rounding and gaps
The public file rounds property values to the nearest $10,000 and loan amounts to the middle of a $10,000 band, so individual down payments carry a few thousand dollars of rounding; the medians largely wash it out. Closing costs were reported on 98.6% of these loans; the rest are left out of that figure only. Down payment percentages come from the first-lien loan amount; a small number of buyers also carried a second mortgage.
Sources
- FFIEC HMDA Loan/Application Register, public loan-level file, 2025
- Current price: Redfin, median sale price, three months ending August 2026
- Typical home value: Zillow, $1,667,060 as of 2026-08-31
- Property tax: Los Angeles County Auditor-Controller, tax rate area lookup, 2026-2027, tax rate area 08004, 08604
- Loan limits: FHFA and HUD, 2026
- Insurance: California Department of Insurance, 2026 Homeowners Insurance Premium Comparison (survey of insurers covering over 90% of the market; standard scenarios, not quotes)
- Current mortgage rate: Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey, via FRED
Notes
- Public HMDA rounds property_value to the nearest $10,000 and loan_amount to the midpoint of its $10,000 band; per-loan down payment inherits that rounding.
- income is reported in thousands and stored here in dollars.
- down_payment_pct comes from combined loan-to-value, which includes second mortgages; down_payment_pct_from_dollars is (property value - first-lien amount) / property value.
- cash_to_close = down payment + total loan costs, over loans where total loan costs is reported; excludes prepaids, escrow and transfer taxes.
- Loans with total_loan_costs = 0 are kept (lender-paid costs recovered through the rate) and counted in n_zero.
- Use down_payment_pct_from_dollars as the headline down payment percentage (all loans); down_payment_pct (from combined LTV) is the basis for under_10_pct_down and under_20_pct_down.
- No figure in this record includes HOA dues, earthquake insurance, prepaid interest, escrow deposits, or transfer taxes.
Methodology version 1.0.0. Spotted an error? Email contact@loanwise.ai.