Home & Property · 10 min read
Rent vs Buy — the honest maths (with opportunity cost)
Your parents will tell you 'rent is wasted money.' That's wrong about 60% of the time in tier-1 metros today. Here's how to actually decide.
Krish Dalal
Founder and editor, PaisaExpert. Master's in Business Management, SP Jain School of Global Management, London. · Last updated 2026-04-05
The middle-class default script for Indian young adults is: rent for a few years, then buy. The maths is usually less obvious than that. In metros where rental yield (annual rent ÷ property price) is under 3%, renting and investing the difference often beats buying — for the same 20-year horizon.