1. Work out what you can carry, before anyone else does
Cost: nothing. Needs: your last two pay stubs, last year’s W-2 or return, and a list of every monthly debt payment.
Add up what leaves your account each month for car loans, student loans, credit card minimums and child support. That total against your gross monthly income is your back-end ratio, and every underwriter starts there.
Bucks County’s own program is strict about it: 33% front-end and 41% back-end on total household income. Lenders on the open market run looser, and how much looser is theirs to decide. Knowing your ratio now tells you which doors are open before you get attached to a house.
2. Start the counseling, because it is the long pole
Cost: the group webinar is free; the Framework online course carries a fee that is reimbursed at settlement when the county loan closes. Needs: an intake through Bucks County Housing Group.
Nobody tells you this the first time, and it is the one step in the sequence you cannot speed up later. The county contracts its required housing counseling to Bucks County Housing Group, and the order runs free group webinar, then the online course, then individual counseling.
Do it now, while you are still browsing listings on the couch. A buyer who signs an agreement of sale and then starts counseling is asking a seller for weeks the seller did not agree to give.
Picked up day and night, calls recorded. No credit pull, no application.
Wherever you are on this list, say so on the phone and a licensed Pennsylvania lender picks it up from there, no step skipped and nothing sold. One call.
The form takes about a minute and lands in the same place as the call.
3. Get pre-approved, and learn which ceilings apply to you
Cost: usually nothing; some lenders charge for the credit report. Needs: income and asset documents, and permission for a credit pull.
Approval is the lender’s decision, always. What you get out of it is a working price range and clarity on four separate ceilings, which are not the same number:
- Bucks County’s $10,000 program: purchase price at or below $392,000. HUD resets that limit on its own calendar, so confirm it with the county before you write an offer.
- PHFA Keystone Home Loan, for reservations on or after July 1, 2026: price up to $588,800 in Bucks County, household income up to $122,700 for one or two people and $141,100 for three or more.
- FHA, Philadelphia metro, which covers Bucks: $630,200 on a single-family home for 2026. Confirm it with the lender.
- Conforming conventional, 2026: $832,750. Above that is jumbo territory and different rules.
Household income also has to clear the county program’s own limit, which is tied to the HUD median for the Philadelphia region and updated annually. The table on the county’s page is dated 2022, so the current figure comes from Bucks County Housing Group at application.
4. Assemble the cash, and check the reserve rule
Cost: this is the cost. Needs: statements for every account, sourced and seasoned.
For the county’s program, at least 3% of the purchase price plus one month of principal, interest, taxes and insurance has to come from your own funds. VA borrowers are excused from the 3%. A First Front Door award or a lender grant can count toward it.
The rule that catches savers: after closing you cannot hold more than six months of PITI in assets. Employer-sponsored retirement accounts do not count toward that; other retirement money counts up to twice the purchase price. There is no appeal to it, so if you are close, talk it through before you sign anything.
5. Look at houses that fit the ceilings you just learned
Cost: gas, and your Saturdays. Needs: patience with Route 611 at five o’clock.
Median sold prices from Movoto for July 2026 give you the lay of it: Croydon $359,900, the Bristol 19007 area $408,807, the Morrisville area $425,000, Feasterville-Trevose $499,900, Warminster $500,000, Quakertown $550,000, Southampton $569,950, Warrington $635,000, the Langhorne area $667,500. Those are postal areas, not municipal boundaries, so the Morrisville figure reaches into Yardley and the Bristol figure spans borough and township.
Against the county’s $392,000 ceiling, that points county money at Lower Bucks boroughs, twins, and condos and townhomes anywhere. PHFA’s $588,800 opens up most of the middle of the county.
6. Make the offer, with the transfer tax written into it
Cost: your deposit, held in escrow. Needs: an agreement of sale that says who pays what.
Bucks charges 2% realty transfer tax, 1% to the state and 1% split between the municipality and the school district, in every township and borough in the county. Custom is half each, but both parties are jointly liable for all of it, so the split belongs in writing in the agreement.
This is also where a seller assist gets negotiated, as a credit toward your closing costs. Every loan program caps it differently and the lender applies the cap. The assist and the price move together, so raise it while the offer is still being written.
7. Inspections, including the ones only Bucks asks for
Cost: yours, paid to the inspectors directly. Needs: an inspection contingency in the agreement.
A certified home inspection is mandatory if county money is in the deal. Radon testing is optional under those rules and worth doing anyway. Lead disclosure applies to anything built before 1978, which is most of Levittown, most of Warminster’s split-levels and nearly all of Bristol and Morrisville.
Then the local ones. Warminster and Upper Southampton municipal authorities both run private sewer lateral inspection programs. Wrightstown, next to Richboro, adopted a point-of-sale lateral inspection ordinance on August 17, 2026 with a sixty-day repair mandate. And along the Delaware, the Neshaminy or the East Branch Perkiomen, check the FEMA map before you skip a flood quote.
8. The appraisal, ordered by the lender
Cost: yours, often paid up front. Needs: nothing from you but the money.
A state-certified appraiser gives the lender an opinion of value. The county’s program requires a state-certified appraisal too, and caps loan-to-value at 100%, or 103% on a VA loan.
If the number lands under the contract price the deal reopens: renegotiate, cover the gap in cash, or walk under the appraisal contingency. It is not a home inspection and says nothing about the roof.
9. Underwriting, where the file gets tested
Cost: nothing new. Needs: fast answers to document requests.
The county’s rules bite here: the first mortgage has to be fixed-rate with a term of fifteen years or longer, no adjustable rates except USDA 502 Direct, and an escrow account for taxes and insurance is required. Every outcome in this step is subject to lender approval.
Answer document requests the day they arrive. Underwriting stalls are almost always waiting on a person, and the person is usually the buyer.
10. Settlement, and the school tax calendar
Cost: the down payment, your 1% of the transfer tax, the title premium, recording fees, lender fees and prepaids, wired ahead.
Title insurance in Pennsylvania is filed statewide, so the premium is the same at every title company: $2,165 on a $300,000 purchase, $2,450 at $350,000, $2,735 at $400,000, plus about $125 for the closing protection letter. No attorney is required at a Pennsylvania settlement.
Then the proration, which is a date problem. School districts bill July 1 for a year running to the following June 30; the county and municipality bill in late February or early March for the calendar year. Settle in August and you reimburse the seller for nearly a full school year they have already paid — on Bristol Township’s 237.1744 mills that is a bill near $4,743 on the average $20,000 assessment, and eleven-twelfths of it lands in your wire.
11. Two forms, afterward
Cost: $0 for one, $75 for the other. Needs: a calendar reminder.
File the homestead exclusion with the Bucks County Board of Assessment by March 1 for the school year starting that July 1. Settle after March 1 and you wait a year, which is what happens to most spring buyers here.
And if the assessment looks high once you own it, the annual appeal costs $75 per parcel and needs an appraisal or eighteen months of comparable sales. Assessed value times 17.86 is the market value the state’s current factor implies; if your house is worth clearly less than that, the $75 is worth spending.