If you shopped last year, paused, and are now back in the market in Pittsford, Brighton or Henrietta, you have probably assumed rates are the reason your numbers feel tighter. This post shows you why that is mostly wrong. I am going to run the actual monthly payment on a $308,500 home at both this year's rate and last year's rate, show you the difference in dollars, then separate how much of the change in your budget came from rates and how much came from price. I will also tell you plainly which numbers I do not have.

The two rates, and where they come from

Freddie Mac's Primary Mortgage Market Survey for the week ending August 13, 2026 puts the 30-year fixed at 6.67%. The prior week was 6.69%. One year earlier, the same survey read 6.58%. That is the entire year-over-year move on the 30-year: nine hundredths of a percentage point, in the wrong direction for buyers, but barely.

Two more details from the same release matter for how you read Rochester mortgage rates in August 2026:

• The 6.67% reading ended a streak of five consecutive weekly increases. Rates had been drifting up, then stopped.
• The 15-year fixed came in at 5.96%, down from 6.01% the prior week, but up from 5.71% a year earlier. If you are considering a 15-year note, your year-over-year comparison is worse than the 30-year comparison, not better.

Freddie Mac's chief economist, Sam Khater, described rates as having remained relatively stable, with affordability improved versus a year ago and both purchase and refinance applications increasing. Hold that thought about affordability. The local price data complicates it.

The payment math on $308,500, step by step

The Monroe County median home price was $308,500 in May 2026, per NYSAR data reported by the Rochester Business Journal on June 26, 2026, described as another new high. That is the most recent primary-source county figure I have, and it is the number I am using. It is not a city of Rochester figure, and it is not a Pittsford figure.

Here are my assumptions, stated so you can check my work:

• Purchase price $308,500.
• 30-year fixed, fully amortizing.
• Principal and interest only. No property taxes, no homeowners insurance, no mortgage insurance, no HOA.
• Figures rounded to the nearest dollar.

At 20% down, the monthly payment on $308,500 changed by roughly $15 because of the rate. That is about $177 a year. Over the full 30 years, if you never refinanced and never sold, roughly $5,300 in additional interest. Real money, and also not the thing that moved your budget.

The price did the damage, not the rate

Zillow's home value index for Monroe County read $285,439, up 4.1% year over year, as of the 4/30/2026 update. That is an index of values across the county, not a sale price, and it is several months stale now. Used carefully, it gives us a rough appreciation rate to run the comparison.

If a home priced at $308,500 today was worth about 4.1% less a year ago, call it $296,350. Now run both changes separately, 20% down in each case:

• Last year: $296,350 price, $237,080 loan, 6.58%. Payment $1,511.
• Change the price only to $308,500 at 6.58%: payment $1,573. Up $62.
• Then change the rate to 6.67%: payment $1,588. Up another $15.

Total year-over-year increase: about $77 a month on principal and interest. Roughly $62 of that is price and $15 is rate. Price moved your payment about four times as much as the rate did. That is what a flat rate year looks like when values keep climbing.

It also changes what you should be watching. Waiting for rates to drop a quarter point saves you around forty dollars a month at this loan size. Waiting a year while county values rise another 4% costs you more than that, plus a larger down payment on the same house.

What this means at Pittsford and Brighton price points

Here is my honest limitation: I have no town-level price, days-on-market or inventory data for Pittsford, Brighton, Henrietta, West Henrietta, Mendon, Rush or Honeoye Falls for any period in 2026. None. What I can tell you from being in these houses is that Pittsford, Brighton, Mendon and Honeoye Falls transact above the county median, so the $308,500 math understates your payment.

So treat the following as arithmetic, not as a market report. At a $450,000 purchase with 20% down, a $360,000 loan runs about $2,316 a month at 6.67% and about $2,294 at 6.58%. The rate gap widens to roughly $22 a month. Scale it yourself: every $100,000 of loan is about $6 a month of difference between this year's rate and last year's. When you are weighing Pittsford home affordability against a Henrietta alternative, the rate change is not the variable that decides it. The price gap between the two towns is.

What the payment table leaves out

Principal and interest is the part I can calculate precisely. The rest of your monthly payment is local and specific, and I am not going to invent figures for it:

• Property taxes. These vary by town, village and school district, and in this county the escrow line is often a substantial share of the total payment. I do not have current rate tables in front of me, so I will pull the actual figures for the specific addresses you are considering rather than publishing an average here.
• Homeowners insurance. Quote-dependent.
• Mortgage insurance. Applies below 20% down and is not in the table above. On the 5% and 10% rows, your real payment is higher than shown.
• Your actual rate. 6.67% is a national weekly survey average. Your quote depends on credit, loan size, points and the lender. Get two or three.

Why the headlines feel worse than the math

You have probably read that the Rochester market is cooling. Look closely at where those numbers come from. For July 2026, one aggregator published a 51-day median time on market for the city of Rochester alongside a sale-to-list ratio of 120.57%. Another published 13 days for the same month. One showed sales up about 79% year over year, the other showed sales down, 643 against 707. A market clearing 20% over asking does not also take seven weeks to sell. These pages cannot both be right, and both describe the city, not the suburbs south and southeast of it.

There was also a Realtor.com forecast, published December 19, 2025, ranking Rochester the #2 top U.S. housing market for 2026, projecting 5.3% sales growth and a 10.3% median sale price increase on a median list price of $256,900. That is a forecast from last December, not a result. It gets recycled as if it were news.

The figures I trust for your decision are narrower and duller: Freddie Mac's survey rate, and the county median of $308,500 from May 2026. They point the same direction. Financing costs are flat. Prices are not.

Run your own numbers with me

If you are comparing this year's budget to last year's, bring me the house you almost bought in 2025. I will price what it would sell for now, put the real tax figure on it, and show you the payment side by side with what you were quoted then. That conversation takes about half an hour and it usually ends the guessing.

Schedule a time with me here, and tell me which towns you are looking at.

Khem Kadariya

About this data

The figures in this post were compiled from publicly available sources including Houzeo, Movoto, Redfin, RochesterFirst and Zillow, along with other public market data. Real estate numbers change quickly, and these were accurate as of August 2026. For current figures on a specific home, street, or town, ask me directly rather than relying on a published average.