A somewhat pervasive myth circulates about mortgages backed by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). It goes: you can only use a VA loan once. 

That’s absolutely not true. You can definitely reuse your VA loan benefits. 

Your certificate of eligibility (COE) shows how much entitlement you have left. And even if it’s a relatively small amount, you can probably still get another VA loan.

Let’s do a full dive into using a VA loan more than once so you can learn your options. 

No holds barred: Restoring full entitlement

Thanks to the Blue Water Navy Vietnam Veterans Act of 2019, VA borrowers with full entitlement don’t have a limit on how much they can borrow with 0% down. Your lender and the VA will set caps based on how much you can afford. Still, there’s technically no ceiling on the dollar amount assuming you look like you can repay it. 

When you’ve never closed on a VA loan before, you have full entitlement. But you can get back to that state even if you’ve had a VA loan in the past. 

You have two options to use a VA loan more than once with full entitlement:

• Fully pay off the previous VA loan and sell the house
• Fully pay off the previous VA loan and use your one-time entitlement restoration

If you want to use a VA loan more than once and still keep the house you bought with the first VA loan, you have one path forward. That’s the VA’s one-time entitlement restoration. 

To request entitlement restoration, you use the same form you used to request your COE. On the bottom of the first page, you’ll check the box that says “ONE-TIME RESTORATION” in box 14D. 

One note here: VA occupancy requirements still apply. That means the new house will need to be your primary residence. You can’t use entitlement restoration to buy a vacation home or one you plan to rent out. 

Getting another VA loan with partial entitlement

If you haven’t fully paid off your previous VA loan, you’re not necessarily out of the running for a second VA loan. You’re just going to be working with partial entitlement. Basically, this is the amount of benefit you have left over from the VA after your first VA loan.

You can find your remaining entitlement amount on your COE. That doesn’t equal the amount of VA loan you can get, though. Instead, you’ll need to do some math (or use our calculator) to figure out what’s available to you.

The calculation of what you can borrow with your remaining entitlement isn’t a set ceiling on your future VA loan amount. Instead, it’s how much you can borrow with 0% down. If you need more than that, you can probably get it with a VA loan — you’ll just need to put up a down payment. 

Calculating your 0% down loan limit

For repeat VA loan borrowers with partial entitlement, the VA follows the lending limits set by the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA). 

For a one-unit property like a single-family home, that’s $832,750 for a lot of the country. The FHFA limit ranges up to $1,249,125 for high-cost areas, though. You can use the Agency’s map to figure out what the ceiling is in the county where you want to buy. 

Your county limit is one piece of figuring out your 0% down VA loan limit. The other variable you need is the amount of entitlement you’ve already used. You’ll find that on your COE in the table titled “Prior loans charged to entitlement.”

Then, you can calculate your remaining entitlement with this calculation (or our calculator): 

(Local FHFA limit × 0.25) – The amount of your entitlement you’ve used

If you’re doing the math yourself, the result is going to be a relatively small number. Don’t worry. That’s your entitlement, not your loan limit. To be eligible for a 0% down payment, you need your entitlement to cover 25% of your VA loan amount. So you can multiply your result by four to figure out your max loan amount with 0% down.

What to do if you need a bigger VA loan

If the VA loan limit you reached won’t cover the house you want to buy, you’re not out of luck. You won’t qualify for a 0% down payment, but you can still use a VA loan to get other benefits like no mortgage insurance and a lower interest rate. 

To get a VA loan that’s bigger than your remaining entitlement allows, you need to put up a down payment to cover the difference. To figure out how much you would need to have, use this equation:

Required down payment = 0.25 × (Purchase price of the house you want to buy – The maximum loan amount you calculated above)

If you can come up with the cash to cover the difference, you can use a VA loan more than once to buy the house you’ve got your eye on.  

You might need to pay a bigger funding fee

One quick note here: using a VA loan more than once might mean paying a bigger funding fee. 

If you’re going to be putting less than 5% down, your VA funding fee will be 3.3% (compared to 2.15% for first-time users). If you can get to more than 5% down, though, the extra you pay as a repeat user disappears. 

TL;DR? You can definitely use a VA loan more than once. If you’re willing to put up a down payment, you can reuse it to buy your next house no matter the price (up to the lender’s affordability limits, of course). 

To start exploring buying your next house with a VA loan, check out current mortgage rates from leading VA lenders today.