Before you compare these two, find out whether you get to.

Where they actually compete

An eligible address, and a buyer who clears both. Now it's a real choice.

This is the narrow case the rest of the internet writes as though it were everybody. Here's the trade, honestly, in the order it usually matters.

The down payment: nothing, against 3.5%

USDA is 0% down. Not a reduced down payment — none. FHA is 3.5% down for a borrower whose credit clears its bar.

That gap is the entire reason people widen a search by one town. It isn't a discount on the down payment; it's the removal of the thing that stops most people who could otherwise afford the house. If you have the income and not the pile of cash, this line decides it and you can stop reading the rest.

The income limit: USDA has one. FHA has none.

For Kootenai, Bonner and Benewah counties, USDA's limit is $122,800 for a household of one to four people and $162,100 for a household of five to eight.

Two things people get wrong about that number, in opposite directions.

It's higher than they assume. "Rural housing loan" reads as a low-income programme, so people rule themselves out before asking, and a great many North Idaho households sit comfortably under that figure with no idea the door was ever open.

And it does not go up because you're near a city. Kootenai County sits at Idaho's floor, the same as Bonner and Benewah. The natural assumption is that a metro county gets a bigger allowance — Boise's Ada County is higher, at $127,300 for a household of one to four. Kootenai is not. Being in the Coeur d'Alene metro buys you nothing here.

FHA, for its part, has no income limit at all. Not a high one — none. So if you're over USDA's number, the choice has already made itself, and it made itself without touching your credit.

Credit: one programme publishes a floor, the other doesn't set one

FHA publishes its bar and it's lower than most people have been told. 580 and above gets you the 3.5% down payment. Between 500 and 579 you can still get an FHA loan, with 10% down instead. Below 500, FHA won't insure it at all.

USDA sets no minimum credit score anywhere in its regulation. What the rule asks for is a credit history showing a reasonable ability and willingness to pay your debts — an acceptable credit score, a credit report, the rest of the picture. There's no number attached to it. If you've seen a USDA minimum quoted somewhere, that figure comes from a part of the rules describing a strong score as something that can support a waiver of the debt-ratio limits. It isn't a floor to get in.

Don't read that as "USDA is easier on credit." Read it as "USDA leaves it to the lender." Both programmes get their own requirements stacked on top by whoever funds the loan, and lenders don't all put the bar in the same place. I work with hundreds of them, so the useful question isn't whether you clear one bank's bar — it's which lender's bar you already clear, on which programme.

Both can be handed to the next buyer. Only one of them lets you walk away.

Almost nobody explains this part, and the version you usually get — "FHA loans are assumable" — is the least interesting true thing about it. Both of these loans are assumable. The difference is what happens to you afterwards, and it's the sharpest split on this page.

The bar for the buyer is different too. A USDA assumption is means-tested — whoever takes over has to meet USDA's own eligibility rules, income limit included — and the property has to meet USDA's site and dwelling standards, or be brought up to them before the transfer. An FHA assumption asks the buyer to be creditworthy. It doesn't ask them to earn under a ceiling.

One thing USDA does here that FHA never has to. If the area your house sits in stops being rural, the loan can still be assumed anyway. That's worth knowing, because the honest weakness of any USDA advice is that the map is a snapshot and I can't promise you the line holds. It turns out the loan you already have doesn't lose its assumability when the map moves out from under it.

So: if you expect to sell into a higher-rate market and you want your rate to be an asset you hand over and forget about, FHA is the one that lets you forget. If you only need the loan to be transferable, both do that.

Both charge you twice, and on the cheap version of each, the monthly charge never stops

Here's where the honest comparison refuses to produce a winner.

FHA. 1.75% of the loan upfront, which can be rolled in rather than paid at closing, plus a mortgage insurance charge every month you hold the loan. Put 10% or more down and that monthly charge comes off after 11 years. Put down 3.5% — which is the whole point of FHA for most people — and it never comes off at all. Not when you've built equity. Not ever, as long as you hold that loan.

USDA. An upfront guarantee fee, which can also be financed into the loan rather than paid at the table, plus an annual fee collected monthly for as long as you hold the loan.

I'm not printing a USDA fee percentage here, and I'd rather tell you why than leave a hole you fill in from somewhere worse. There's no current published fee notice for me to cite. Quoting an old figure as though it were the current one is exactly how bad information about this programme spreads, and you'd be making a decision on it.

So the shape is the same on both sides: a charge at the start, a charge every month, and on the low-down-payment version of each, the monthly one is permanent. Which loan costs you less is a calculation on your actual loan amount, not a rule of thumb, and anyone telling you otherwise on a comparison page hasn't seen your file. I'll run both and show you both, side by side, on the house you're actually looking at.