The whole chart is below — and the first thing worth knowing about it is that the row most people are still hunting for, the higher one for the National Guard and Reserve, hasn't existed for six years.

If you served in the Guard or the Reserve, you have almost certainly read that you pay a little more than regular service does. You don't. For any loan closed on or after 1 January 2020, there is one set of rates and it covers everyone — Veterans, active duty, Guard, Reserve. The old split, where Reservists paid 2.40% against 2.15% at the bottom band, applies only to loans that closed before that date.

The reason you keep reading otherwise is that VA's own site still says it. There is a page there, live today, telling Guard and Reserve members they pay "a slightly higher percentage." It has been wrong for six years, and it is the sentence most of the consumer pages you'll find on this question quietly copied. If anyone quotes you a Guard or Reserve rate, they are reading a retired chart.

The chart

Every figure below is a percentage of the loan amount. Three things move it: how much you put down, whether you've used a VA loan before, and what kind of loan it is. Nothing else — not your branch, not your rank, not your credit.

Buying a home

Everything else

Every rate above is set by 38 U.S.C. § 3729 — the statute itself, not a summary of it, and the place to look if you'd rather check than take my word.

The counter-intuitive one

Using the benefit a second time only costs more in one band

Look down the purchase columns again. At less than 5% down, a repeat user pays 3.3% instead of 2.15%. At 5% down, first-time and repeat are both 1.5%. At 10% down, both are 1.25%.

That isn't a coincidence in the rounding. The statute has no separate repeat-use rows for those two bands — they don't exist, because there is nothing to charge. So the surcharge for reusing your entitlement is not a fact about you. It is a fact about one band, and it stops applying the moment you cross into the next one.

Which makes the first 5% do unusual work on a second VA loan. The gap between the two bottom rows is 1.8% of the loan — on a round $400,000, $7,200 — and it closes entirely at a threshold most people are already close to. Round numbers, chosen because they divide cleanly; yours will not look like that.

Where VA's arithmetic goes wrong

The band is measured against the price, not against the loan

VA's page says the down payment and the fee are both a percentage of the total loan amount. Only the second half of that is true. The fee is a percentage of the loan. The down-payment bands are set against the purchase price, or the construction cost if you're building — which is a different number, and always a larger one.

VA's own worked example gives it away: it takes a $200,000 purchase price and calls it "the $200,000 loan," which only works if the borrower put nothing down.

Small distinction, and it moves people across the line. Put $24,000 down on a $500,000 house and you have put down 4.8% of the price — the bottom band, 2.15%. Measure the same $24,000 against the $476,000 loan and it reads as 5.04%, which looks like the middle band and 1.5%. Same money, same house, two different answers, and the cheaper one is the wrong one. Again, round figures for the arithmetic's sake and nothing more.

The part that matters more than the chart

If you're exempt, none of the above is about you

Veterans receiving compensation for a service-connected disability pay no funding fee at all. Neither do veterans who would be entitled to that compensation but for the fact that they're receiving retirement pay or active-duty pay instead — the clause that gets missed most often, because the person it describes isn't receiving a disability payment and reasonably assumes the exemption isn't theirs.

Surviving spouses are exempt where the veteran died from a service-connected disability, or died in service. Active-duty members awarded the Purple Heart are exempt too, provided the evidence is in hand on or before closing. A pre-discharge rating or a memorandum rating counts from the date of the rating.

Then the part almost nobody says out loud, and it is the one that costs people money. If compensation is later awarded and made retroactive to a date before your closing, the fee comes back. If the rating arrives after closing and isn't backdated past it, it doesn't. Same veteran, same disability, same paperwork — and the refund turns on which side of a closing date the effective date lands.

Whether a claim of yours is likely to be rated, or backdated, is a question for VA and for whoever is helping you with it. Not for me, and not for any lender's website. What I can tell you is that the closing date is a variable in that arithmetic, which is not obvious from anywhere in the chart above.

If you're buying in Idaho

The funding fee is a line on a settlement statement, and I've done that one county by county

Everything above is national — the fee is federal and identical in every state. What isn't identical is the rest of the page it lands on. For one state I can be far more specific, because I went and looked: filed escrow rates by county, statutory recording fees, the transfer-tax position under the code, and who customarily pays what. The rest of what an Idaho buyer pays at closing is on its own page, line by line — the statement your funding fee is going to sit on.

Tell me which row you're in and I'll tell you what it costs

Send me the down payment you're planning, whether you've used the benefit before, and whether you think an exemption might apply. I'll tell you which row of that chart you're actually in and what the figure works out to on your number — and if I think you're exempt and don't know it, I'll say so. No credit pull, no application, nothing to sign to get an answer.

Anything about your disability rating itself I'll hand back to VA, because that's where it belongs.