Short answer: PMI is a charge your lender adds to a conventional loan when you buy with less than 20% down. You pay it; it protects the lender. It is also temporary, and federal law writes down exactly when it ends. The only number that decides your case is a ratio — what you owe against what your home is worth — and here is how that ratio's exits work.
Private mortgage insurance is a policy from a private insurer that your lender requires when your down payment is under 20% of the price, meaning you begin the loan owing more than 80% of the home's value. The premium rides inside your monthly payment. If you default, the policy pays the lender — that is the entire product. It does not insure your home, your equity or your payments, and it is not a penalty: it is how a lender agrees to a loan with a thin equity cushion at the start. Government-backed loans run their own versions — FHA loans charge MIP, a mortgage insurance premium under different rules — while PMI proper belongs to conventional loans, and conventional PMI is the kind that ends.
The Homeowners Protection Act sets the exits for most conventional loans on a primary residence, all measured against the home's original value — for a purchase, the lower of the price you paid or the value appraised at the time. First, at 80% owed you may request cancellation in writing: you generally must be current on payments, with a good payment history, no junior liens, and the servicer may require proof the value has not declined. Second, at 78% owed on the original payment schedule, the servicer must terminate PMI automatically if you are current — no request needed, but it arrives later than asking at 80%. Third, the backstop: at the midpoint of the loan's term — year 15 of a 30-year loan — PMI must end the following month even if the balance tests have not triggered. Every extra principal payment you make pulls the first exit closer, because it is your balance, not the calendar alone, that crosses the line.
The federal exits use the original value, which ignores the years when your home gains value. Many servicers and loan investors also allow cancellation based on the current value once you owe 80% or less of what the home is worth now — sometimes with stricter percentages on younger loans. That route is never automatic and never free of proof: expect to request it in writing and to pay for a new appraisal the servicer orders or accepts, and expect the exact thresholds to follow the investor's rules rather than the statute. It is also the route where preparation matters most — walking in with a tracked value history and your own agent's read of the local market will not substitute for the appraisal, but it tells you whether the appraisal is worth ordering at all.
PMI removal is an equity event, so it belongs on the same page as the rest of your equity decisions — it interacts with refinancing (a new loan at 80% or less of the appraised value carries no PMI), and it is one of the few monthly charges that can simply stop. In Homeowner HQ, your record already holds both sides of the ratio: your home's current tracked value, refreshed monthly by your own agent, and everything you owe against it. The trend shows the 80% line approaching instead of arriving as a surprise in a servicer letter, and if the appreciation route looks close, your agent is the natural person to pressure-test the number before you pay for an appraisal. Ask the servicer, in writing, which value and which threshold they will apply to your loan — servicers' answers differ, and the written answer is the one you can hold them to.
A Homeowner HQ estimate is not an appraisal.
Your own agent sends a monthly value update from Homeowner HQ — the estimate, labeled as an estimate, with your equity beside it — and HQ runs on Amazon AWS. Realtors and lenders use the same HQ together: homeowners stay connected to their own agent, and the monthly trend is the honest way to watch what is moving the number.
Homeowners are always free. Realtors pay $25/mo to join and lenders join at the $5/mo founding rate, at any book size, with no setup fee; sending messages inside HQ is a $100/mo unlock ($125/mo total for realtors, $105/mo total for lenders). A lender-sponsored realtor joins for $0.
Homeowner HQ is an AI-powered marketing department for agents and lenders — a relationship and revenue engine, not a homeowner database. A homeowner's record routes them back to their own agent; it is never sold and never shown to lenders.