Can I buy a million-dollar house with a VA loan and zero down?

The single most valuable feature of the VA loan is the one most people have never heard of. The Blue Water Navy Vietnam Veterans Act of 2019 removed the VA loan limit for any borrower with full entitlement, effective January 1, 2020. From that date, VA guarantees 25% of the loan amount no matter how large the loan is. The old "VA limit" — the county conforming figure — no longer applies to you unless you are using remaining entitlement on a second VA loan.

What that means in a high-cost market:

• Down payment: zero, at any price the home appraises for and your income and residual income support. A conventional borrower at the same price puts down 20% or pays for a jumbo structure; an FHA borrower cannot reach it at all.
• No mortgage insurance, at any loan size.
• One funding fee, the same percentage as any purchase — waived entirely with a compensable disability rating. On a large loan the dollar figure is large; the funding fee estimator shows it for your numbers.

Where lenders draw their own lines

VA sets no ceiling, but lenders sell these loans to investors, and above certain amounts most add overlays: a credit-score floor, a few months of reserves after closing, sometimes a modest down payment above a threshold. These vary widely between lenders — one lender's overlay at a given size is another's ordinary file — which is why pricing a large VA loan with more than one lender is worth the hour. The above-the-conforming-limit page covers the practical side.

The one case where a limit comes back

If you already have a VA loan open — the house at the last duty station, kept as a rental — you are working with remaining entitlement, and the county conforming limit re-enters the math. In San Diego and Orange County that limit is the high-cost figure, which helps, but a large purchase on remaining entitlement usually carries a down payment of 25% of the amount above your no-down maximum. The entitlement calculator does the arithmetic; the second-tier page explains it. Selling the old house first restores full entitlement and removes the limit again.

What it takes to qualify

The same things as any VA loan, at scale: income and allowances that carry the payment on the debt-to-income ratio and VA's residual-income test, credit that clears the lender's overlay, and an appraisal that supports the price — and in a thin high-end market, the Tidewater process comes up more often. The VA loan guidelines page covers what VA sets versus what the lender sets. For the markets where this matters most on this site, see the Naval Base San Diego and Camp Pendleton guides; Orange County buyers commuting to Pendleton's northern gates are in the same position.