How to Split a Mortgage When You're Not Married: By Ownership Share, Income, or a Custom Split

If you and your co-buyer hold 60% and 40% ownership respectively—as determined by your down-payment contributions or a co-ownership agreement—the cleanest approach is to split every housing cost by that same ratio. On a $2,200 monthly mortgage, that's $1,320 for the 60% owner and $880 for the 40% owner.

The logic: you each get proportional equity per dollar paid. The person paying more is building more equity faster, which matches what they put in at purchase. This approach is easy to defend to each other and to a mediator or attorney if the relationship ever ends.

In Make It Even, create a group (e.g., 'Oak Street House'), add a recurring monthly expense called 'Mortgage – Principal + Interest' for $2,200, and set the split type to Percentage: 60 and 40. Once saved and marked recurring, it generates automatically every month on whatever day the payment is due. You log it once; the ledger does the rest.

Some co-buyers prefer to anchor the split to current income rather than the original down payment—especially if one person contributed more cash at purchase because of an inheritance or gift, but both partners earn roughly proportional incomes going forward.

Say Partner A earns $85,000 a year and Partner B earns $65,000. Combined income is $150,000. Partner A's income share is 56.7% and Partner B's is 43.3%. On the $2,200 mortgage, that works out to $1,247 and $953 respectively. Rounded to the nearest dollar, those sum to exactly $2,200.

Income-based splits have an obvious downside: incomes change. If one partner gets a raise or takes a career break, you should revisit the split. Build in a review clause—'we'll recalculate every January'—so the conversation is expected rather than fraught. Log any adjustment in Make It Even as a new expense split configuration; the history of old splits stays on record.

Alex and Sam buy a house together. Alex contributed $60,000 of the $100,000 down payment (60%); Sam contributed $40,000 (40%). The monthly PITI (principal, interest, taxes, insurance) comes to $2,750, but taxes and insurance are billed separately. The base mortgage payment is $2,200.

They agree to split all housing costs at 60/40. Here's what a typical month looks like:

Mortgage P+I: $2,200 → Alex $1,320 / Sam $880. Property tax escrow (billed separately in their case): $310 → Alex $186 / Sam $124. Homeowner's insurance: $95 → Alex $57 / Sam $38. Total monthly housing: $2,605 → Alex $1,563 / Sam $1,042.

Then the furnace filter needs replacing: $28. They split that 60/40 too—Alex $16.80, Sam $11.20. A plumber visit for a leaky faucet costs $185: Alex $111, Sam $74. Make It Even tracks each of these as separate line items in the 'Oak Street House' group. At month's end, the debt simplification feature finds the single most efficient payment between them rather than netting multiple transactions. Sam sends Alex one payment via Venmo link generated right inside the app.

Repairs are where the ledger earns its keep. They're unpredictable, often large, and easy to handle inequitably if you're not tracking them. The general rule: split repairs by the same ownership percentage as the mortgage, since both owners benefit from a maintained asset.

Draw a line, though, between repairs and improvements. Replacing a broken water heater is maintenance—split it. Installing a hot tub because one partner wants one is an improvement that primarily benefits that person. You might split improvements by who initiated them or by a separate agreement. The point is to decide the rule before the bill arrives, not after.

Log every repair in Make It Even under the house group. Over a year you'll have a clear picture of actual maintenance costs—useful for budgeting and, practically, useful if one co-owner ever wants to sell and someone claims they paid 'way more' toward upkeep.

Electricity, gas, water, internet—these typically split 50/50 regardless of ownership share, because consumption is roughly equal. If one partner works from home full-time and the other is rarely there, an argument for a 60/40 utility split isn't absurd, but most couples find the administrative overhead not worth it for a $140 electric bill.

Add each utility as its own recurring expense in the house group. Internet at $80/month: equal split, $40 each. Gas at $65/month: equal split, $32.50 each. Make It Even rounds fractional cents using a remainder algorithm so the split always sums exactly to the total—no penny gaps that accumulate quietly over months.

Set a group monthly budget for the total household outlay. If mortgage plus utilities plus average maintenance runs about $3,100/month, put that as the group budget. The tracker shows you mid-month whether you're on pace or running over, which is useful when a big repair hits in the same month as a high utility bill.

One thing that catches people off guard: if you're splitting the mortgage monthly but one partner covers several expenses in a row—say, they pay the insurance renewal, an unexpected repair, and a month's mortgage when the other partner was short on cash—the running balance can drift significantly before anyone settles.

Make It Even's debt simplification feature condenses those accumulated debts into the fewest possible transfers. Instead of Sam owing Alex for three separate things and Alex owing Sam for one, the app nets it to a single amount and direction. This is especially valuable when you have a mix of the large recurring mortgage and smaller irregular expenses in the same group.

Settle monthly. It keeps the numbers manageable and prevents the psychological weight of a large outstanding balance from creating friction in the relationship. Use the PayPal, Venmo, or Cash App settle-up links built into the app—no need to manually calculate or copy account details.