You can typically cancel private mortgage insurance once your loan balance drops to 80% of your home's original value, and your lender is legally required to automatically end it once the balance hits 78%. These thresholds come from the Homeowners Protection Act, a federal law that applies to most conventional mortgages on single-family primary residences.
There are two ways this plays out. The first is automatic termination: as you make your regular monthly payments and your loan amortizes down, your servicer must cancel PMI once your balance reaches 78% of the home's original purchase price or appraised value at the time you got the loan, as long as you're current on payments. You don't have to ask—it's required by law.
The second path is requesting cancellation yourself, which can happen sooner. Once your loan balance reaches 80% of the original value, you can submit a written request to your servicer asking them to drop PMI. To qualify, you generally need a good payment history (no late payments in the past year, and no more than one late payment in the past two years), and the lender may require you to show the home hasn't declined in value, sometimes via a new appraisal that you pay for.
You can speed up reaching that 80% mark in a few ways. Making extra principal payments reduces your balance faster, getting you to the threshold ahead of schedule. Home improvements plus a fresh appraisal showing increased value can also help, since the percentage is based on current value in some cancellation requests, not just the original purchase price—though lenders have specific rules about how recently you must have owned the home (often at least two to five years) before they'll consider a value-based request.
It's worth noting that PMI rules differ from mortgage insurance on FHA loans, which is a separate program with its own cancellation rules—often requiring refinancing into a conventional loan to get rid of it, since many FHA loans now carry insurance for the life of the loan.
To actually cancel PMI, contact your loan servicer directly and ask about their specific cancellation process and paperwork. Many servicers list the current loan-to-value ratio and estimated PMI cancellation date on your monthly statement or online account, which is a good starting point. If your servicer denies a legitimate request or seems to be dragging its feet, you can file a complaint with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Keeping track of your home's value and your loan balance over time puts you in control of this process rather than waiting passively for automatic cancellation at 78%. Even a few years of extra principal payments or a strong local housing market can shave meaningful time off how long you're paying for insurance that protects the lender, not you.