VA loans in IdahoVA prices your appraisal by county. The Idaho schedule it retired still opens on its site, and it allows less.

A VA loan is federal. The entitlement, the fee, the rules an underwriter applies — none of it changes at a state line, and anyone telling you Idaho has its own version of a VA loan is selling you something.

Two things do change with the address, though, and they are both VA's own numbers: what the appraisal is allowed to cost, and how many business days VA allows it to take. Both are set county by county. And the file those numbers replaced has been out of force since the spring, but it has not gone anywhere: VA's own site still serves it to anyone who has its address.

What VA allows where you are buying

The fee and the clock, by Idaho county

This is the table in force, effective 1 May 2026. It is one national schedule keyed by state and county — the eight regional schedules VA used to run were retired when this replaced them.

VA publishes this as its Appraisal Fees and Timeliness Table. Verify it at the source before you rely on it: VA adjusts these for market demand without issuing a new effective date, and says so itself, which is why this page reviews the table quarterly rather than annually.

The clock is not the day you signed anything. It starts on the first business day after the appraisal is assigned, and weekends and federal holidays do not count toward it.

Against the rest of the country, Idaho sits among the cheaper and the faster states — which is worth knowing mostly because it sets your expectation correctly when somebody tells you a VA appraisal is slow.

The part that actually costs you time

Across most of Idaho, the retired file pays the appraiser less than the county allows

VA's fee page no longer shows the eight regional schedules this table replaced, but the files themselves are still on VA's site, and each one still opens at its own address. Open one and it says it took effect in December 2021. It gives no end date, and nothing in it says it has been replaced.

Here is what that does in Idaho, and it is not a filing quirk with no victim:

Adams County — the retired file allows $150 less than the county's real allowable.

Blaine County — $100 less.

Every county on the statewide default, and Ada and Canyon — $50 less.

The Adams number is the one that hides best, because the retired file's figure there is also, awkwardly, what the new table sets as Idaho's statewide default. Nothing about it looks wrong on the page it is typed onto.

What happens next has no drama in it at all. A lender working from the retired file — an old bookmark, a saved copy, a link that still resolves — authorises the lower number, no appraiser on VA's panel takes the assignment at that number, and the order sits unfilled until somebody works out why nobody has picked it up. The borrower's entire experience of this is an appraisal that is late and nobody able to say when it is coming.

That is a thing your lender can get right before the order goes out, and it is worth one question: which schedule are you ordering off, and what fee is on the order?

Where you are buying, specifically

Coeur d'Alene, Post Falls, Boise — and the county line an hour north

Kootenai County appears in neither named band, so a VA appraisal in Coeur d'Alene or Post Falls is allowed the statewide default and eight business days.

Boise is the same money and one day quicker: Ada and Canyon are the only Idaho counties VA gives a seven-day clock, so Meridian, Nampa and Caldwell sit there too.

Drive an hour north out of Kootenai County into Bonner or Boundary and both numbers move at once — the single-family fee goes to $900 and the clock goes to twelve business days. Sandpoint and Bonners Ferry are a different appraisal market to Coeur d'Alene, and VA's schedule is the only place that says so in writing.

None of that is a reason to buy anywhere in particular. It is a reason to know, before you write an offer with a closing date in it, which clock your county is on.

What else can land on the order

The add-ons VA allows, and the three it never lets you be charged

Where the property is proposed or still under construction, VA allows a small add-on to the fee. Where an appraiser has to physically attend again, a re-inspection fee is allowed — and only where they physically attend. Mileage is allowed only outside the appraiser's assigned coverage area, at the federal rate, approved by VA in advance. Cancellation is capped, and capped lower before the appointment is confirmed than after.

Then there are three charges that may never reach you, and they are worth knowing by name because they turn up on estimates:

a rush or priority fee for a faster appraisal, a late fee, an appraisal ordered by a third party rather than by your lender.

And one rule about who owes the money: the lender that first ordered the appraisal owes payment for it, even if your loan later moves to a different lender.

The one that surprises people at the table

The funding fee can go into the loan. The appraisal fee cannot.

On a purchase or a construction loan, the appraisal fee may not be financed. It is cash, at or before closing. The VA funding fee, on the same loan, may be — and financing it cannot push you past VA's own computed maximum, because the regulation says the fee goes in without regard to that maximum.

On a refinance it flips, and closing costs can go into the loan amount.

The appraisal fee sits on a closed list of charges a VA borrower is permitted to pay, and it is on that list as permissive rather than required — which is the technical way of saying it is negotiable, and that a seller can pay it.

The funding fee itself is federal, identical in every state, and there is nothing Idaho-specific to say about the percentages. They are on the page that does nothing but that chart, along with the two places VA's own published material is out of date about them. What belongs here is only the half that changes with the address, and the fee is not it.

One thing that page covers and this one will not: whether you are exempt from the fee. Veterans receiving compensation for a service-connected disability, surviving spouses in defined circumstances, and active-duty members awarded the Purple Heart evidenced on or before closing are the statutory categories. Whether you are in one of them is VA's determination, and it arrives on your Certificate of Eligibility. It is not mine to make and I will not guess at it on a webpage.

What the appraisal is not

It is not an inspection, and VA says so itself

VA's Buyer's Guide says it in one line: "An appraisal is not a home inspection." The model Notice of Value letter in VA's Lenders Handbook tells the buyer the same thing — "The appraisal must not be considered a building inspection." — and adds that "Neither VA nor the lender can guarantee that the home will be satisfactory to you in all respects or that all equipment will operate properly." And it puts the whole point in capitals: "VA GUARANTEES THE LOAN, NOT THE CONDITION OF THE PROPERTY".

So the appraisal tells VA and your lender what the property is worth against VA's own property requirements. What condition you are actually buying in is a separate professional and a separate fee, and in Idaho that professional is the one the state does not license at all.

The number people come looking for

There is no Idaho VA loan limit on this page, and that is deliberate

`idaho va loan limits` is a real search and it deserves a real answer rather than a figure.

The number people are usually looking for is a county conforming limit — an annual, per-county figure published by somebody other than VA. It is not in this page's registry, and an annual per-county number typed into a page is a number that goes quietly stale while the page still looks maintained. I would rather send you to the current source than be the fourth site quoting last year's.

What actually decides the size of your loan is not that number anyway. It is the entitlement figure on your Certificate of Eligibility, what of it a previous VA loan is still using, and then a coverage requirement most lenders impose on top — VA's own wording for that last one is that most lenders require it, which is the honest way of saying it is a lender's rule rather than VA's. Two lenders can therefore answer the same question differently on the same file, which is the whole argument for having somebody price it across a shelf rather than at one desk.

Send me the COE and the county and we can work out together the number that applies to you, rather than the one that applies to a county.