A veteran with full entitlement has no VA loan limit in Montgomery County or anywhere else. The VA puts it plainly: no loan limit, as long as you can afford the amount and the appraisal supports the purchase price. That has been true since 1 January 2020, when the Blue Water Navy Vietnam Veterans Act took the ceiling off, and the county’s $832,750 conforming figure has nothing to say about it. What a lender will actually write is a separate question: entitlement is the VA’s, and the loan is subject to lender approval.
Where the county figure does come back
Partial entitlement. If some entitlement is tied up in a VA loan you still hold, or in one that was not restored after a sale, the conforming limit becomes part of the formula again.
VA Circular 26-25-10, dated 1 December 2025, sets it out for loans closed on or after 1 January 2026: for a loan above $144,000 with partial entitlement, the calculation is 25% of the county conforming loan limit, less the entitlement already used and not restored. In Montgomery County that means 25% of $832,750, so $208,187.50 is the most bonus entitlement available here before anything is subtracted.
Below $144,000 the conforming limit is not in the formula at all. And the circular rescinds itself on 1 January 2027, which is the VA’s own way of telling you to check the current one.
Two-unit buildings use the one-unit number
The statute is specific about this — multi-unit entitlement keys off the one-unit limit. So a duplex, triplex or fourplex anywhere in Montgomery County runs the same $832,750 arithmetic that a single house does, even though conventional financing would allow $1,066,250 on two units and $1,288,800 on three. If a second unit is part of the plan, that difference is worth raising with the lender early.
An interest rate reduction refinance sits outside the limit entirely. VA backs a quarter of an IRRRL regardless of what the conforming figure is doing that year.
The Pennsylvania side of the settlement sheet
Realty transfer tax is 2.000% at every address in Montgomery County — 1% to the state, 0.5% to the municipality and 0.5% to the school district — and a VA purchase pays it like any other. The exemptions in the code cover family transfers, wills and intestate succession, sheriff’s sales and transfers to government agencies and nonprofit conservancies. Custom here is half each between buyer and seller, both sides are jointly and severally liable for the whole amount, and the agreement of sale is what settles it, so it is a term you can negotiate.
Every transfer also carries a REV-183 Statement of Value. It is one page and it still manages to be the form people redo.
The tax line changes with the township, as everything does here
Around the Warminster Line end of the county, Horsham Township totals 44.837 mills with Hatboro-Horsham School District doing 36.16 of that. Move to Abington Township and the total is 53.397 — take that one off the township’s own bill, because the county’s millage page lists the school district at 39.8992 mills and leaves out the 1.3738-mill referendum levy for the middle school project. Cheltenham Township is 73.483. Upper Merion is about 36.60.
Those numbers are only readable because Montgomery County last reassessed in 1996 and every parcel still sits on that base, so millage is comparable across municipalities here in a way it is not across county lines. The Common Level Ratio factor for documents dated 1 July 2026 through 30 June 2027 is 3.36: assessed value is roughly market value divided by 3.36. On the county’s own average home, $556,546 of market value carries a $171,193 assessment.
If a purchase price lands well under the market value implied by an assessment, the appeal route is there. Annual filings are due 1 August, the next being 1 August 2027 for tax year 2028, and an interim appeal runs 40 days from the date on a change-of-assessment notice. The fee on a single-family house is $50.
What to do next
Have the township, the price, and a rough idea of whether any entitlement is still committed elsewhere. Call the line, or write it into the form and send it along, and a licensed Pennsylvania mortgage lender calls you back — usually the same working day, and by the end of the next working day at the outside. Ask about the certificate of eligibility on that first call; it is the piece that takes longest to fetch.