Heads up homeowners: Mortgage interest deduction on Trumps chopping block [View all]

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Heads up homeowners: Mortgage interest deduction on Trump’s chopping block

by Diana Olick at Reality Check

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/01/heads-up-homeowners-mortgage-interest-deduction-on-trumps-chopping-block.html

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For more than a century, homeownership has come with a small bonus: The mortgage interest deduction.

It allows borrowers to deduct the interest paid on their home loans from their income taxes. Real estate agents, homebuilders and mortgage lenders have long used it as a selling point. Every so often it comes up in debate, but it is so popular that lawmakers are more than a little bit afraid to touch it. The future Trump administration apparently is not.

"We'll cap the mortgage interest, but we'll allow some deductibility," said Steve Mnuchin on CNBC Wednesday after confirming that has been asked by President-elect Donald Trump to head the Treasury Department.

The mortgage interest deduction is already capped at loans up to $1 million if you're married and filing jointly, and at $500,000 if you file separately. That said, the median price of a home in the United States is just more than $200,000, so not a lot of people make it to that cap. The vast majority of those who do benefit earn more than $100,000 a year and are not the most cost-burdened homeowners.

The deduction is very popular, but it benefits far fewer taxpayers than one might think. The current homeownership rate is around 62 percent, but of those homeowners, one-third do not have a mortgage. They own their homes outright, so the deduction would not apply to them.


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