15. Department of Housing and Urban Development · Notable
Raise the FHA mortgage insurance premium on loans over 20-year terms
Printed page 510 15. Department of Housing and Urban Development
“FHA leadership should increase the mortgage insurance premium (MIP) for all products above 20-year terms and maintain MIP for all products below 20-year terms and all refinances.”
What has happened
- Not started
FHA raised no premium; it cut them. HUD's final notice of 2025-09-23 reduced MIPs to 0.25 percent for all FHA Multifamily Insurance Programs and eliminated the three rate categories created in 2016, citing the President's 2025-01-20 memorandum "Delivering Emergency Price Relief for American Families"; a companion notice of 2025-06-26 removed the Green and Energy Efficient category from Section 232 healthcare mortgages. On the single-family side, where this Quote sits — the paragraph argues for shorter-duration mortgages and faster equity accumulation — no MIP change of any kind was published in the Federal Register in the window, and none of the fourteen FHA Single Family policy changes HUD announced on 2026-06-23 touches the premium. Nothing in the record distinguishes products above and below 20-year terms, and no action moves the premium up. The Mortgagee Letter channel, where single-family MIP is actually set, was enumerated in full on 2026-09-06: every FHA Mortgagee Letter from ML 2025-01 (2025-01-07) to ML 2026-10 (2026-06-23) was retrieved and its subject line read — 34 letters, covering defect taxonomy, boarder rental income, nonprofit approval, servicing and loss mitigation, foreclosure moratoriums, appraisal-policy rescissions, residency requirements, claims without conveyance of title, the Supplemental Consumer Information Form, full-time DE underwriter requirements, the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard, appraisal protocols, pre-endorsement inspections, the Section 232 substantial-rehabilitation definition, 2026 HECM and forward loan limits, appraiser roster management, multifamily middle-income and DSCR/LTV underwriting, beneficial-interest sales, foreclosure bidding, MAP Guide environmental requirements and thresholds, 203(k) draw requests, Form HUD-92900-B, and mortgagee approval and quality control. **Not one changes any FHA single-family mortgage insurance premium**, in either direction or for any term.
- HUD notice: Changes in Mortgage Insurance Premiums Applicable to FHA Multifamily Insurance Programs (MIPs reduced to 0.25% for all multifamily programs)
- HUD press release: HUD Slashes More Red Tape to Lower Costs, Improve Affordability — fourteen FHA Single Family policy changes, none of them a premium change
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
- The multifamily MIP cut is a different product line from the single-family programs this paragraph is about (endnote 40 on printed p. 516 discusses FHA’s adoption of the 30-year mortgage and slow equity accumulation). It is recorded here because it is the only action on the named object — the FHA mortgage insurance premium — inside the window, and it runs the opposite way.
- Single-family MIP is set by Mortgagee Letter, not by rule.
- Corrected 2026-09-06. The earlier note said the Mortgagee Letter index “renders its listing client-side and returns no document links to an automated fetch”. That is wrong twice over. The live address is hud.gov/hudclips/letters/mortgagee (the older hud.gov/program_offices/administration/… form opens to an empty shell), and it is an ordinary web page with a document number, a title and a PDF link per row. It is, however, not a complete inventory — read on 2026-09-06 it lists 2026-01 to 2026-10 and only 2025-02, 2025-03, 2025-11, 2025-20 and 2025-22 to 2025-24 for 2025, omitting fifteen 2025 letters including the appraisal-policy rescissions. The reliable route is to try the PDF addresses directly: hud.gov/sites/dfiles/OCHCO/documents/YYYY-NNhsgml.pdf for 2025-01 through 2025-21 and hud.gov/sites/default/files/hudclips/documents/YYYY-NNhsgml.pdf for 2025-22 onward. Trying both forms for 2025-01…2025-26 and 2026-01…2026-26 finds exactly 2025-01 to 2025-24 (2025-11 is filed as HsngML-25-11.pdf) and 2026-01 to 2026-10, and nothing after ML 2026-10. Each letter’s own first page carries its date and subject.
- Action
- other
- Object
- FHA mortgage insurance premium (MIP)
- ID
- 1424