Montana Veterans’ Home Loan Mortgage Program

This is the largest Montana-only veteran benefit in the catalog and the one most often missing from summaries of the state. Title 90, chapter 6, part 6 creates a mortgage program run by the Board of Housing that buys loans originated by participating lenders and prices them one percent below the Board's own Regular Bond Loan Program rate, for a fixed thirty-year term. Section 90-6-603(3) sets the rate as the lower of one percent below the Fannie Mae delivery rate or one percent below the lowest rate the Board charges on its other home loan programs. The Board is not allowed to lend directly to a veteran, so the loan comes from a participating lender and is then bought and serviced by the Board. Who is an eligible veteran here is much wider than under Montana's general veteran definition. Section 90-6-602(3) reaches a Montana resident who is or has been a member of the Montana National Guard, is or has been a member of the federal reserve forces serving under Title 10, is serving or has served on Title 10 federal active duty, or is the unremarried spouse of someone who would have been eligible and was killed in the line of duty. A serving Guard member who has never deployed qualifies. And subsection (9) defines "under honorable conditions" to include a general discharge, so a general discharge that would fail the veterans' home and cemetery test passes here. There is no income limit, no asset limit and no purchase price limit. Section 90-6-604(5) says so in terms. There is a loan cap instead: the Board's published maximum loan amount was $538,036 as of July 24, 2026. The conditions that disqualify people are all on the buyer side. The borrower must be a true first-time home buyer who has never owned a primary residence, and the Board applies that strictly: the ordinary three-year rule and the targeted-area exception used elsewhere in Board programs do not apply here. A first-time home buyer education class is required by statute. A minimum $2,500 of the borrower's own money must go into the deal, though it may be spent on closing costs. Condominiums are not eligible. The funding source changed in 2025. The program was built on the principal of the coal tax trust fund, and House Bill 924 moved it into a newly created Montana Housing Trust. The mechanics for a borrower are unchanged; the significance is that anything written before 2025 describing this as a coal trust program is describing a structure that no longer exists. The practical constraint is availability. This is a revolving fund: principal repayments go back into the trust and are lent again, so at any given moment the money either is there or is not. A lender checks available funds before quoting it. Nothing about being an eligible veteran reserves a place in the queue. This program is separate from the federal VA home loan guaranty and does not replace it. A veteran eligible for both should have a lender price them against each other, because the VA loan's zero down payment and the absence of mortgage insurance may beat a one percent rate cut on a loan that still requires a government guaranty or conventional mortgage insurance.