How much comes out
A cash-out refinance replaces your mortgage with a bigger one and hands you the difference. The ceiling on a one-unit home is 80% of the appraised value on both conventional and FHA loans, and you need twelve months of ownership behind you.
The arithmetic is unforgiving and worth doing on paper before you start. On a $500,000 appraisal, 80% is $400,000. Take off the existing balance, the closing costs, and any second lien that has to be paid off, and what’s left is the check. Two to four unit properties are held to lower ceilings and the figures move by investor, so get yours from the lender in writing.
Everything here is subject to the lender’s underwriting and to an appraisal that supports the value.
The county’s $10,000 comes due
If you bought with Bucks County’s first-time buyer program, this is the section that matters most. That $10,000 sits behind your mortgage at 0% with nothing due monthly, and its terms call the principal in on a sale, a transfer of title, a refinance that takes on additional debt, or the day the house stops being your principal residence.
A cash-out refinance is a refinance that takes on additional debt by definition. The county will not be subordinating to it. Put the $10,000 in the payoff column at the start, alongside anything owed on a PHFA second, and work out what comes out after that. People discover this at the title company, and it is a bad place to discover it.
Picked up day and night, calls recorded. No credit pull, no application.
Four answers do it: what the house is worth, what you owe, what the money is for, and whether a lien sits behind it. A licensed Pennsylvania lender calls you back with what actually comes out. Ring any hour.
The form takes about a minute and lands in the same place as the call.
What it costs to close
Less than a purchase, because Pennsylvania taxes deeds and not mortgages. There is no transfer tax on a refinance of any kind and no state mortgage tax, so the bill is recording fees, the appraisal, the lender’s costs and title work.
Title insurance runs off Pennsylvania’s statewide refinance schedule, which starts at $512 and rises with the loan amount. If you have an owner’s policy from when you bought, bring it — there is a reissue discount and the title company will price it if you ask. Nobody asks on your behalf.
The VA exception
Veterans have more room. The VA’s own rules allow a cash-out to 100% of value, though most lenders stop at 90%, and there is no monthly mortgage insurance on the new loan. The funding fee is 2.15% on a first use of the benefit and 3.3% after that, and it is waived entirely for veterans receiving compensation for a service-connected disability, surviving spouses receiving dependency and indemnity compensation, and Purple Heart recipients on active duty.
If the goal is only a lower rate or a shorter term with no money out, the IRRRL is a cheaper instrument, at a 0.5% funding fee and 210 days plus six payments of seasoning.
What Bucks owners use it for
Two uses come up constantly in this county and both are about houses that have been standing a long time.
The first is water. Bristol’s waterfront lots flood on a high tide plus a river rise, Ida put water across the wharf in September 2021, and Morrisville sits behind a levee finished in 1939 that the borough is now working to restore. Perkasie lost the deck of its covered bridge under 18 inches of water in the same storm, and Quakertown declared a flood emergency on July 28, 2026 after three to five inches fell in an evening. Owners in those pockets refinance to raise mechanicals, regrade, replace sump systems and fix what the last storm found.
The second is the age of the stock itself. Bristol Township holds 17,311 Levitt houses built between 1952 and 1958, and Warminster and Southampton are full of 1950s and 1960s ranchers and split-levels. Roofs, service panels, oil-to-gas conversions and kitchens that have not been touched since the Warminster base was still open.
The part worth sitting with
A cash-out moves debt onto your house. That is the whole mechanism, and it is why the rules make you wait twelve months and cap you at 80%. Unsecured debt that moves onto a mortgage is secured by the roof over your head, and the term usually resets to thirty years, which can cost more in total even when the monthly number improves.
None of that makes it a bad move. It makes it a move worth seeing written out, both ways, before you sign. Ask the lender for the comparison, and ask what the loan looks like if you keep the current payment and let the term run short.