The lines that cannot move
Three of them are set outside your control, which makes them the easy part of the budget.
Your half of the transfer tax is 1% of the purchase price. Bucks charges 2% total, 1% to Pennsylvania and 1% split between the municipality and the school district, and no township or borough in the county charges more. Custom is a half each, both parties are jointly liable for all of it, and the split lives in the agreement of sale. That is covered in full in the transfer tax guide.
Title insurance is filed with the Title Insurance Rating Bureau of Pennsylvania and is identical at every title company in the state, search included. Under the current manual an owner’s policy runs $2,165 on a $300,000 purchase, $2,450 at $350,000 and $2,735 at $400,000. Add roughly $125 for the closing protection letter and about $100 for each Pennsylvania 100 or 300 endorsement your lender asks for. If the seller already holds an owner’s policy, ask the title company whether a reissue rate applies, because the manual discounts the premium when there is a prior policy.
Recording fees are set by the county and go to the Recorder of Deeds in Doylestown along with the deed and the mortgage.
The lender’s fees, then the appraisal and the inspections
Origination, underwriting, processing, the credit report, the tax service, the flood certification. Every lender assembles these differently and the total is genuinely different from one to the next, so no honest page prints a number here.
What you do get is a Loan Estimate within three business days of applying, on a standard form, with those fees in one box. That form exists so you can lay two lenders side by side and compare like with like.
The appraisal is ordered by the lender from a state-certified appraiser and you pay for it, usually up front. It is the lender’s opinion of value, not a condition report, and it is required for the county’s first-time buyer program as well as for the loan.
Inspections are yours to choose, with exceptions. A certified home inspection is mandatory if you are using the county’s $10,000 loan. Radon testing is optional under those same rules and plenty of buyers do it anyway. Lead disclosure applies to anything built before 1978, which covers most of Levittown, most of the Warminster split-levels and effectively all of Bristol and Morrisville.
Then there are the local ones. Warminster Municipal Authority and Upper Southampton Municipal Authority both run private sewer lateral inspection programs. Wrightstown, next door to Richboro, passed a point-of-sale lateral inspection ordinance on August 17, 2026 with a sixty-day repair mandate attached. And anything near the Delaware, the Neshaminy or the East Branch Perkiomen needs a look at the FEMA map before you waive a flood quote.
Picked up day and night, calls recorded. No credit pull, no application.
Give us the price, the town and roughly when you want to settle, and a licensed Pennsylvania lender calls you back with a cash-to-close figure in dollars. A phone call is quicker than a spreadsheet.
The form takes about a minute and lands in the same place as the call.
Prepaid taxes, insurance, and setting up escrow
Prepaids are not fees. They are your own money, paid early, and they are the part first-time buyers underestimate most.
A year of homeowners insurance is normally paid at or before settlement. Interest is prepaid from your closing date to the end of that month. And your escrow account gets seeded with a few months of property tax and insurance so it never runs dry, which the county’s program requires anyway.
How much lands in escrow depends entirely on when the next bills fall, and in Bucks County the bills fall on two different calendars.
The school tax proration, which is a Bucks County date problem
Municipal and county bills go out in late February or early March for the calendar year, with a 2% discount if you pay by April 30, face value through June 30, and a 10% penalty after that. School bills go out July 1 for a year that runs to the following June 30, with a 2% discount to August 31, face through October 31, and a 10% penalty from November 1.
So the month you settle decides who reimburses whom, and for how much. Close in August and the seller has just paid a full school year in advance at the discount, and you reimburse them for almost all of it in cash at the table. Close in May and you reimburse a month or so of school tax, but you owe the seller most of the calendar year on the county and municipal bill instead.
The dollars behind that depend on your district. Bristol Township adopted 237.1744 mills for 2026-27, and on the township’s average $20,000 assessment that is roughly $4,743 of school tax for the year, an estimate from the district’s own rate. Morrisville Borough went to 279.8613 mills, the highest in the county. Pennridge sits at 144.3949 and Council Rock at 149.9692. Eleven-twelfths of a Morrisville bill handed over in August is a different conversation from one-twelfth of it handed over in May, and neither one is optional.
Seller assist, and what it can reach
A seller assist is a credit toward your closing costs, negotiated into the agreement of sale and paid out of the seller’s proceeds. It is ordinary in this county. Each loan program caps it at a different share of the price, the lender applies that cap, and the outcome is subject to lender approval.
Worth knowing: the assist and the price get negotiated as one thing. A seller who agrees to $10,000 in help on a Feasterville ranch is generally agreeing to it inside the price, and your appraisal still has to support the number.
What to expect in total, and what to ignore
Bankrate put Pennsylvania’s average buyer closing costs at $8,259, about 2.36% of the price, taxes included, as of August 2025. That is a statewide average across every price point, so treat it as a sanity check. Your transfer tax half alone is 1% of it.
The honest split is this. Transfer tax, title premium and recording fees you can pin down today. Lender fees you compare on the Loan Estimate. Appraisal and inspections you can call and price. Prepaids move with the closing date and the district, which is why two identical houses in Warminster and Morrisville produce very different cash-to-close numbers.