Military Orders Changed After You Went Under Contract in San Antonio? Your 2026 Exit Options

LAST UPDATED: SEPTEMBER 11, 2026 | BY CHRISTOPHER BEAL, U.S. ARMY VETERAN & REALTOR

Usually yes, but not for the reason most people assume. The standard Texas purchase contract contains no military clause, and the SCRA termination right you have heard about covers leases, not purchases. What actually gets a buyer out is Paragraph 5 of the TREC One to Four Family Residential Contract (Resale), form 20-19: during the option period you negotiated, you may terminate for any reason at all, you get your earnest money back, and you lose the option fee. Three conditions travel with that answer and each one can void it. A dollar amount has to be written in as the option fee and delivered on time, or Paragraph 5 does not give you the unrestricted right to terminate at all. Notice has to be in writing and delivered by 5:00 p.m. local time on the last day of the option period. And once that period ends the door closes, leaving only the financing, appraisal, title and casualty provisions, which are narrower and each carry their own proof requirements.

I am Christopher Beal, a U.S. Army veteran, REALTOR (TREC License #723559) and Owner of Veteran Real Estate San Antonio, brokered by eXp Realty. More about how I work with military buyers. I am a REALTOR, not an attorney, and nothing below is legal advice.

The three sentences that cost military buyers the most money

Every one of these gets repeated confidently, and every one of them is wrong as of the contract forms in use today.

"There is a military clause in the contract." There is not. Paragraph 22 of form 20-19 lists every addendum TREC promulgates for a resale transaction, financial, lease, testing, statutory and other. There is a Third Party Financing Addendum, a Loan Assumption Addendum, an Addendum for Release of Liability on Assumed Loan and/or Restoration of Seller's VA Entitlement, a Short Sale Addendum and a dozen more. There is no military orders addendum anywhere on that list. You can read the full form yourself and check: TREC No. 20-19, dated 05-04-2026.

"The SCRA lets me out." The Servicemembers Civil Relief Act provision people mean is 50 U.S.C. 3955, and its title is the whole answer: "Termination of residential or motor vehicle leases." Subsection (b), "Covered leases," lists exactly two things, a lease of premises occupied or intended to be occupied for a residential, professional, business, agricultural or similar purpose, and a lease of a motor vehicle. A contract to buy a house is neither. The statute is here in full: 50 U.S.C. 3955. If you are renting rather than buying, that law is genuinely powerful and I wrote it up separately: breaking a San Antonio lease on PCS or deployment orders.

"It is Paragraph 23." It was, for years, and that is why the phrase survives in so many San Antonio blog posts and agent scripts. It is not any more. On the current form, Paragraph 23 is "Consult an Attorney Before Signing." The termination option now lives inside Paragraph 5, "Earnest Money and Termination Option," which TREC rewrote so that the option fee and the earnest money are handled in one place. If you are reading guidance that still says Paragraph 23, it predates the form you signed.

What Paragraph 5 actually gives you

Read the paragraph in four parts, because three of them are deadlines and any one of them can quietly cancel your right to walk away.

5A, delivery. Within 3 days after the Effective Date you must deliver the earnest money and the option fee to the escrow agent. They are made payable to the escrow agent and may be paid separately or combined in a single payment. Whatever the escrow agent receives is applied first to the option fee, then to the earnest money, then to any additional earnest money. If that third day lands on a Saturday, Sunday or legal holiday, the deadline rolls to the end of the next day that is not one of those.

5B, the option itself. The seller grants the buyer "the unrestricted right to terminate this contract by giving notice of termination to Seller" within the number of days written into the blank. Unrestricted means what it says: you do not have to give a reason, and changed orders do not need to be the reason. Notice must be given by 5:00 p.m. local time where the property is located, on the date specified. If you terminate in time, the option fee is not refunded and the earnest money is refunded to you.

5D, the trap. "If no dollar amount is stated as the option fee or if Buyer fails to deliver the option fee within the time required, Buyer shall not have the unrestricted right to terminate this contract under this paragraph 5." A blank option fee or a late one does not shorten your option period. It removes it.

5E, strictness. Time is of the essence for the whole paragraph and strict compliance is required. There is no grace period and no rounding in your favor.

What it costs you, stage by stage

The option fee and the earnest money are negotiated between the parties. Texas sets no amount for either, and the ranges below are assumptions I am stating so the arithmetic is checkable, not rules. The purchase price is anchored to a real figure so the example is not floating in the abstract.

Illustrative worked example, not a quote and not a rule. Assumptions: a $290,000 purchase price, an option fee of $400, and earnest money of 1 percent of the price ($2,900). The price is the median closed sale price across all 5,743 Bexar County residential closings (PropertyType RE, status SLD) with a close date from 2026-06-13 through 2026-09-11, pulled from SABOR/LERA on 2026-09-11 with complete coverage confirmed by paginating past the 1,000-record cap. The same window read through the curated county tool returned $279,450 on a capped 1,000-record sample, which is why the full pull matters. Your own option fee, earnest money and out-of-pocket costs are whatever your contract and your receipts say.

Three doors that stay open after the option period

Losing the option period is not the end of the contract, but what is left is narrower and every one of these requires you to prove something.

The Third Party Financing Addendum. This is the addendum attached to almost every VA, FHA, conventional or Texas Veterans Land Board purchase, currently TREC form 40-11, effective 01/03/2025. It has two separate outs. Under Buyer Approval, if you cannot obtain approval, you may give the seller written notice within the number of days written into the blank, and as of the January 2025 revision that notice must be accompanied by a copy of a written statement of the lender's determination. Under Property Approval, if your lender determines the property does not satisfy its underwriting requirements, including appraisal, insurability or lender required repairs, you may terminate not later than 3 days before the Closing Date by giving the seller notice of termination and a copy of the lender's written statement setting out the reasons. In both cases the earnest money is refunded. The form is here: TREC Third Party Financing Addendum.

This one matters more than usual for a servicemember whose orders changed, because a PCS can change the facts your loan was approved on. A new duty station means your lender has to re-examine the occupancy representation you made, and a separation or retirement changes the income the file was underwritten to. That is a lender conversation to have immediately, not a reason to assume you are covered.

The VA escape clause. If you are financing with a VA loan, federal regulation requires this language in the contract, and VA will not guarantee the loan without it. It reads: "the purchaser shall not incur any penalty by forfeiture of earnest money or otherwise be obligated to complete the purchase of the property described herein, if the contract purchase price or cost exceeds the reasonable value of the property established by the Department of Veterans Affairs." Read the condition carefully, because it is the entire clause. The escape clause protects you when VA's reasonable value comes in below your contract price. VA states plainly that it "may not be used to cancel a loan purchase contract for any reason other than in response to the reasonable value established by VA being lower than the contract price." Changed orders are not that reason. Sources: VA Escape Clause, page updated January 14, 2026, and 38 CFR 36.4303.

The ordinary contract outs. Paragraph 6D lets you terminate if timely title objections are not cured within the cure period. Paragraph 7B lets you terminate if the seller never delivered the Seller's Disclosure Notice, at any time before closing. Paragraph 7E lets you terminate if lender required repairs and treatments exceed 5 percent of the sales price. Paragraph 14 covers casualty loss before closing. Each returns the earnest money. None of them is about you.

What happens if you simply stop

Paragraph 15 is short and worth reading in full before anyone tells you to just walk. If the buyer fails to comply with the contract, the buyer is in default, and the seller may either enforce specific performance and seek other relief provided by law, or terminate the contract and receive the earnest money as liquidated damages. Most San Antonio sellers take the earnest money and move on, because that is the fast path. That is a practical observation about how these usually resolve, not a right you have, and specific performance stays on the table.

The one thing your agent cannot do for you

People ask me to write a military termination clause into Paragraph 11, Special Provisions. I cannot, and neither can any other Texas license holder. The paragraph says so in its own text: real estate brokers and sales agents are prohibited from practicing law and shall not add to, delete or modify any provision of the contract unless it is drafted by a party to the contract or a party's attorney. Special Provisions is for informational items, filling a blank, disclosing a fact, giving an instruction.

That does not mean the clause is impossible. It means it has to be drafted by an attorney or by a party, and it has to be negotiated into the deal before both sides sign, not after your orders change. If you are early enough in the process to ask for one, ask. If you already have a contract in hand, the JBSA legal assistance office provides free legal assistance to eligible servicemembers, and that is the right first call for a contract question no REALTOR is allowed to answer.

The first 24 hours after your orders change

1. Get the amended or revoked orders in writing. A verbal from your shop is not a document you can act on, and every downstream step wants a copy.
2. Pull the executed contract and find the Effective Date, the option period days, the option fee amount, and the day count in Paragraph 2A of your financing addendum.
3. Map those against today's date. If you are still inside the option period, you have the clean exit and you should decide before 5:00 p.m. on the deadline, not on the deadline.
4. Call your loan officer the same day and tell them exactly what changed. Occupancy, duty station and income are all underwriting facts.
5. Tell your agent to notify the listing side in writing. Termination is a written notice delivered by the deadline, not a phone call and not a text saying you are out.
6. If the option period has passed, call JBSA legal assistance before you decide anything. What is left is contract law, not real estate practice.

Before you sign the next one

If your orders are unsettled and you are about to go under contract in San Antonio, the only real protection is bought at the front end. Negotiate a longer option period and pay for it. An option fee is a small, known cost, and under Paragraph 5A it is credited to the sales price if you do close. Ten days of option on a house you might have to abandon is cheaper than any argument you will have afterward. If you are early in a move, my PCS relocation guide for San Antonio covers the timeline, and my breakdown of earnest money and the option period in Texas covers the mechanics in more depth.

About the Author

Christopher Beal is a U.S. Army veteran and the Owner of Veteran Real Estate San Antonio, a Beal Group practice brokered by eXp Realty (TREC License #723559). A Military Relocation Professional (MRP) and VAREP member, he is a 7-time eXp Realty ICON agent, winner of Best Real Estate Agency in the 2026 Best of San Antonio Readers' Choice (San Antonio Current, 100,000+ voters), and a 3x San Antonio Business Journal Top 25 Individual Agent (#13 in 2024, #14 in 2025, #20 in 2026). His recognition also includes 3x Platinum Top 50, 2x RateMyAgent Agent of the Year, 2x Real Producers Top 100, Five Star Professional (2026), and a RealTrends 2026 ranking. He has helped 325+ families, closed more than $125M in career volume, and holds 5.0 stars across 370+ verified reviews, working almost exclusively with military and veteran buyers and sellers across Bexar, Comal, Kendall, Medina, and Bandera counties, with a focus on VA loans, PCS moves, and homebuying near JBSA-Lackland, JBSA-Randolph, and Fort Sam Houston. Contracts that have to survive a change of orders are a normal week here, and the deadlines are the part that decides how they end. He can be reached at (210) 882-8583.

Questions I get asked

Do my PCS orders automatically cancel my home purchase contract in Texas?

No. No Texas statute and no promulgated TREC form cancels a residential purchase contract because a buyer's military orders changed. The SCRA right at 50 U.S.C. 3955 is limited by its own subsection (b) to leases of premises and motor vehicle leases. Your exit comes from the contract itself, and inside the option period that exit is complete and needs no reason.

I am past my option period. Is there really nothing?

There is something, but it has to be true on its own terms. The financing addendum outs require your lender's written determination. The VA escape clause requires VA's reasonable value to come in below the contract price. The title, disclosure, repair and casualty provisions require those specific facts. If none of them applies, you are negotiating with the seller rather than exercising a right, and a seller who is also relocating is often more willing to release than people expect. Ask before you assume.

Will I lose my VA loan eligibility if I terminate?

Terminating a purchase contract does not consume VA entitlement. Entitlement is used when a VA-guaranteed loan actually closes. What a termination can cost you is the appraisal fee, the inspection fee and any other out-of-pocket amounts already spent, plus the option fee. Confirm your own entitlement position with your lender and your Certificate of Eligibility rather than assuming it from a general rule.

Who decides whether my earnest money comes back?

The escrow agent follows the contract, and in practice the release of earnest money usually requires both parties to sign. Paragraph 18 sets out the demand process, including the 15-day window a party has to object after the escrow agent forwards a written demand, and Paragraph 18D makes a party who wrongfully refuses to sign a release within 7 days liable for damages, the earnest money, attorney's fees and costs. That is why a clean, timely, written termination inside the option period is worth so much more than a good reason delivered late.

Can I ask the seller for a military clause in my next contract?

You can ask, and in a slower market some sellers will take it. It has to be drafted by an attorney or a party, negotiated before signing, and it has to be specific about what triggers it and what happens to the money. A longer option period does most of the same work with no drafting, no argument and no attorney fee, which is why I usually steer people there first.

What to do next

If your orders changed and you are already under contract, send me the executed contract and the amended orders and I will map every deadline in it against the calendar so you can see exactly which doors are still open and when they close. That is a same-day answer, not a listing appointment. If you are earlier than that and just want the move planned properly, start with my military relocation page or call me directly at (210) 882-8583.