One spouse has a green card, the other does not: buying and financing a U.S. home

Can a family buy a U.S. home when one parent has no green card?

Yes. U.S. law sets no immigration requirement for owning property. Someone with no green card, no visa and who has never set foot in the country can still hold U.S. real estate. What stops people is paperwork and process, never status itself. Most articles on this question describe the case where nobody in the couple has status. That is a different situation, and usually a harder one, than a household where one spouse has a green card and the other does not.

Can the family get a mortgage, and whose name does it go in?

Yes. The way our team handles these: either spouse can be the applicant, but the two cannot apply jointly. One applicant is enough. So the first decision is not whether financing is possible, it is which spouse applies. Which route works out better depends on where the income is, where the tax returns are filed, and which spouse has the U.S. credit history. If the green-card spouse earns and banks in the United States, applying in that name is usually simplest. If the household's income and tax filings are overseas, the foreign-national route is often easier.

If the green-card spouse applies, is anything different from a U.S. buyer?

No. A green-card holder is a U.S. borrower for lending purposes, with the same programs, the same underwriting standards and the same pricing.

And if the spouse without status applies? Is the rate much worse?

That route uses a foreign-national program, with a 30% minimum down payment and its own document list. The larger down payment is the real cost of this route. On pricing, though, the common assumption is out of date: foreign-national rates now sit close to conventional pricing and are sometimes below it. Do not start from the premise that no status means an expensive loan: the down payment is higher, the rate is not necessarily. Current figures are in the representative example near the top of this page.

Can both names go on title? Does that affect the loan?

Both names are fine and it does not affect the loan. The mortgage and the title are two separate things. The worry that a single-borrower loan somehow makes the home one person's property is misplaced.

Does the spouse who is not on the loan have to sign anything away?

Not if that spouse is on title. It is the other way round: signing away an interest is what comes up when a spouse is left off title. California is a community property state, and how a spouse's interest is arranged on title is a choice, not something the loan dictates.

Can a spouse be added to title later? Is there tax on that?

Yes, and in California it costs less than most people expect. Revenue and Taxation Code section 63 is explicit: a transfer between spouses is not a change in ownership. Adding a name, removing one, moving the home into a trust, a death, a divorce settlement are all covered, so the property tax base year value carries on unchanged.

Federal gift tax is where a point catches exactly this kind of family. The unlimited marital deduction applies only when the receiving spouse is a U.S. citizen, and a green card is not citizenship. When the recipient spouse is not a citizen, the 2026 annual limit is $194,000, against $19,000 per recipient for gifts to anyone else. Going over the limit does not mean tax is owed: the excess is reported on Form 709 and drawn against the lifetime exemption, which is $15,000,000 per person in 2026. The part that matters is filing it.

The child is a U.S. citizen and the parents have no status. Can the home go in the child's name?

Yes, a home can be held in the child's name. If the plan is instead to buy in the parents' names now and transfer to the child later, California's Proposition 19, effective February 16, 2021, changed those rules. See below.

Can the down payment be a gift from parents or a spouse?

Yes, gift funds for a down payment are common, from parents to a child or between spouses. What has to be prepared is a gift letter and proof of where the money came from: which account it left, and how it reached the buyer.

If the home is transferred to a child later, is the property tax recalculated?

Proposition 19 tightened this. Four things to keep in mind. Only a family home or family farm can be excluded from reassessment; the old exclusion covering other property is gone. The child must make it their own principal residence and claim the homeowners' exemption within one year of the transfer. Even when it qualifies, the exclusion stops at the base year value plus $1,044,586, a figure adjusted every two years, and anything above that is added to the assessed value. Form BOE-19-P must be filed within three years of the transfer or before the home is sold to a third party, whichever comes first.

In plain terms: passing a home to a child and keeping its property tax with it used to be straightforward. Now the child has to actually live there, and a large gap between the old base and today's value still gets reassessed. This is worth planning ahead of time.

What about other situations: students, H-1B, a tourist visa, ITIN only?

All workable. An F-1 student can buy and can finance. H-1B uses the same programs as a local buyer. A buyer with only a tourist visa, still living abroad, can buy and can finance. Someone with an ITIN and no Social Security number can finance. No U.S. credit history at all is also workable: one FICO score is usually enough, and there are options with no score.