Start with a common misunderstanding: mortgage insurance protects the lender against loss if you default, so a missing PMI line item was never protecting you in the first place. How these 1%-down programs actually work, on the versions the big lenders offer (Rocket and UWM are the ones usually referenced): you put down 1% and the lender contributes another 2%, so you reach a 3%-down position. They are underwritten to the conventional low-down-payment programs, HomeReady and Home Possible, which require qualifying income at or below 80% of the area median income. Confirm current program limits before counting on one. Those loans do carry mortgage insurance. It is built in with reduced coverage and reduced pricing adjustments rather than eliminated. The lender is covering two of your three percent down, and the insurance is still there. If a program genuinely carried no mortgage insurance at all on a high-loan-to-value loan, the lender itself would be absorbing the uninsured risk, which is unusual and worth reading closely. As for any claim that a lender also pays the mortgage insurance on top of the 2% contribution, treat it with healthy skepticism and get it in writing. Offers like that, where they exist, tend to live in a retail channel that carries worse overall pricing than going through a broker. The way to judge any of these: run the full cost, the rate, the mortgage insurance, and any lender credit together, against a standard low-down-payment loan. The total monthly payment and long-run cost tell you more than the label. That quick side-by-side is exactly what the free Roadmap conversation covers, about 20 minutes, where we run your real numbers.