Most Trusted Home Buyer
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The offer letter came with a start date, and the start date did not ask about your house. That is the whole problem with a work relocation. Every other kind of sale lets you pick your moment. This one hands you a fixed date in another city and leaves you to figure out the mortgage, the furniture and the buyer on your own time, which you no longer have. The good news is that the decisions here are fewer than they look. There are really only four: how fast you need to be out, what the IRS will let you keep, whether you rent it or sell it, and how long you are willing to pay for two places at once. This guide takes them in that order.
You have three honest routes and one expensive habit. Route one: list it, price it for a market with 4.9 months of supply, and accept that a financed buyer sets your closing date, probably after you have already moved. Route two: rent it out, which keeps the asset but starts a tax clock and makes you a landlord from several states away. Route three: sell as-is for cash, where the offer arrives in about a day and the closing lands in as little as two to three weeks, including after you have started the job. The expensive habit is the fourth option that nobody chooses on purpose: leaving the house empty and deciding later, while the mortgage, insurance and utilities keep billing you in two places. Which route is right depends almost entirely on how much slack you have between today and your start date.
Start by writing down the actual date you have to be at the new desk, then count backwards. That number, not the housing market, is what decides your options.
Here is the market you are counting backwards through. In its August 2026 report, the National Association of Realtors put the median existing home price at $429,100, said properties typically stayed on the market 31 days, and counted 1.62 million homes for sale, which is 4.9 months of supply. Mortgage rates are the other half of the picture: Freddie Mac had the 30 year fixed averaging 7.40% in the week of October 8, 2026.
Read those 31 days carefully, because almost everybody reads them wrong. That is the typical time until a house goes under contract. It is not the time until money reaches you. After the contract comes the buyer’s loan application, the appraisal, the underwriting and the insurance binder, and any one of them can add weeks or end the deal and send you back to day one. For a seller with a flexible calendar, that is an inconvenience. For a seller whose employer expects them in another state next month, it is the thing that turns into a vacant house and two housing payments.
The practical test: if your start date is more than about four months out and the house shows well, listing it is reasonable. If it is six weeks out, you are not really choosing between listing and cash. You are choosing between cash and managing a listed house remotely.
Sell short of two years because work moved you, and the IRS has a partial exclusion written for it.
Most people know there is a tax break on a home sale and stop there. The detail that matters to you is the one in the fine print, and it is good news.
Normally, IRS Publication 523 lets you exclude up to $250,000 of gain from the sale of your main home, or $500,000 for a married couple filing jointly, provided you owned the place for at least 24 months of the 5 years before the sale and lived in it as your main home for at least 24 months (730 days) of that same window. Sell at month 18 and the usual answer is that you missed it.
Except the IRS wrote an exception for people in your exact position. If the main reason for the sale is a change in workplace location, you may qualify for a partial exclusion. The distance test is specific: your new work location has to be at least 50 miles farther from the home than your old work location was. Publication 523 gives the example of an old job 15 miles from the house and a new one 65 miles away. If you had no previous work location at all, the test is simply that the new job sits at least 50 miles from the home. The test can be satisfied by you, your spouse, a co-owner, or anyone else who used the house as their residence.
The reduced amount is a fraction, not a cliff. Take the shortest of three periods (how long you lived there in the 5 year window, how long you owned it, or the time since you last used this exclusion on another home), divide it by 24 months, and multiply by $250,000. A single filer who lived in the house twelve months before the transfer came through is at half the clock, so roughly half the cap. Married couples filing jointly run the calculation for each spouse and add the results.
None of that is a reason to rush a sale you do not want. It is a reason not to assume you have lost the break, and not to delay a sale for tax reasons that turn out not to apply. Publication 523 has the worksheets. A tax professional who can see your numbers is worth an hour.
This one has changed, and plenty of advice online is still describing the old rules. According to IRS Publication 15-B, P.L. 119-21 permanently eliminated the exclusion for employer moving expense reimbursements. The exception is a member of the Armed Forces on active duty moving under a military ordered permanent change of station. For everyone else, when your employer pays or reimburses the move, that money is generally treated as wages and taxed like wages.
The deduction side points the same way. IRS Topic 455 says it is members of the Armed Forces on active duty who may deduct unreimbursed moving expenses on a military ordered permanent change of station, and that employees or new appointees of the intelligence community moving in 2026 or later are treated the same way for this purpose. A typical civilian transfer is not on that list.
So when you are deciding how much house trouble you can afford to carry, run the relocation allowance through your own tax rate first. A package that looks like it covers the movers and two months of overlap often covers rather less once it has been through payroll.
It is the most common instinct, and sometimes it is right. Keep the house, let a tenant cover the mortgage, sell in a few years when the market suits you. Before you commit, know the two rules that decide whether that plan is cheap or expensive.
The good news first. Publication 523 defines nonqualified use as a period after 2008 when neither you nor your spouse used the property as a main home, and gain allocated to those periods cannot be excluded. The important carve out is that the stretch of the 5 year window falling after your last day of using the house as your main home does not count as nonqualified use. In plain terms, moving out for the job and renting the place behind you does not by itself poison the exclusion.
The clock is what gets people. You still need 24 months of use inside the 5 years before the sale. Move out, rent it, and once you have been gone more than three years the arithmetic stops working, because there is no longer two years of residence inside that five year window. Plenty of people discover this in year four, when the tenant leaves and they finally decide to sell.
And depreciation never comes back. Gain equal to depreciation allowed or allowable after May 6, 1997 cannot be excluded, even when the rest of your gain can be. Publication 523 works through a case where rental use after the last qualifying use did not count as nonqualified use, and $27,000 of depreciation was still not excludable. Note the words or allowable: that is depreciation you were entitled to take, whether or not you actually claimed it.
Set the tax aside and there is still the job itself. Being a landlord in a state you no longer live in means a property manager’s fee, vacancies, repairs ordered over the phone, and a tenant in the house if you later want to sell. We wrote the full version of that last problem here: selling a rental with tenants in it.
Add the old house and the new one in the same column. That total is the real cost of waiting.
Sit down and total the old house honestly: the mortgage payment, property taxes, homeowners insurance, electricity and water kept on so the house shows and the pipes behave, lawn care so the neighbors and the city stay calm, any HOA dues, and the maintenance that arrives whether or not anybody lives there. Then add what you are paying in the new city, where a rental deposit and first month usually land in the same fortnight as the movers.
Two details catch relocating sellers out. The first is that an empty house is treated differently by insurers: many homeowners policies restrict or exclude coverage once a house has been vacant for a set number of days, and the vacancy endorsement that fixes it is an extra cost. Call your insurer before the house is empty rather than after. The second is that the closing costs you are picturing are the seller’s side, not the buyer’s, and they come out of your proceeds at the end. We broke those down line by line in how much closing costs are for a seller.
Multiply your real monthly figure by the number of months a listed sale could plausibly take in a 4.9 month supply market, and you have the number that should be sitting next to any cash offer you are weighing. Not the offer against the list price. The offer against the list price minus commission, minus concessions, minus the months.
For somebody with a start date on the calendar, the realistic menu looks like this: