Enter a purchase price, financing terms, rent, and operating expenses to calculate cap rate, cash-on-cash return, and monthly cash flow.
How to Use the Rental Property Calculator
Eight fields cover the deal end to end — price, financing, and operating numbers. Fill them in any order; both headline results stay at zero until the full set is in, since each one draws on fields from every section.
Cap rate and cash-on-cash return get used almost interchangeably in casual conversation about rental properties, but they answer different questions and can point in different directions on the same deal.
Cap Rate = Annual Net Operating Income ÷ Purchase Price
Cash-on-Cash = Annual Cash Flow ÷ Total Cash InvestedCap rate ignores financing entirely — it measures the property's return as if bought with all cash, which makes it useful for comparing properties on a level playing field regardless of how each one is financed. Cash-on-cash does the opposite: it measures return specifically on the cash actually put in — the down payment plus closing costs — after the mortgage payment is subtracted out. A heavily leveraged deal can post an excellent cash-on-cash return with a mediocre cap rate, or vice versa.
Net operating income here is rent (reduced for vacancy) minus operating expenses, before the mortgage payment — that's the standard definition, and it's why cap rate on its own says nothing about whether the mortgage payment actually fits.