Type in rent and a vacancy rate. Watch gross scheduled income turn into the effective number a budget can actually rely on.
Pet rent, parking, storage, laundry, anything besides base rent.
Rent billed but never actually collected, separate from an empty unit.
Income only. Operating costs are not subtracted here.
Effective rental income is gross scheduled income minus vacancy loss and collection loss: on $1,875 a month in rent and other charges at a 7.2% vacancy rate and 1% collection loss, this calculator returns $1,721 a month, or $20,655 a year, as the number a budget can actually rely on. Gross scheduled income is a ceiling, the total a property would bring in if every unit stayed rented at full price for all twelve months and every tenant paid on time. Almost no property hits that ceiling every year, which is exactly why landlords, appraisers and lenders all work from the effective figure instead.
Three inputs decide the gap between gross and effective income. Base rent and any add-on income, pet rent, a reserved parking spot, coin laundry, set the ceiling. Vacancy rate knocks a percentage off for the months a unit sits empty between tenants. Collection loss is a smaller, separate deduction for rent that gets billed but never shows up, a tenant who breaks a lease and skips town, or a payment that never clears.
Vacancy is the input worth checking against real data rather than guessing. According to the U.S. Census Bureau's Housing Vacancy Survey, the national rental vacancy rate stood at 7.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2025. That figure blends every rental market in the country, tight coastal cities and slow rural counties alike, so treat it as a starting reference and lean on local turnover history or comparable listings for the actual number you plug in.
The calculator above loads with a single-family rental listed at $1,800 a month, plus $75 in reserved-parking income, for $1,875 in monthly gross scheduled rent. Here is that figure broken into its pieces:
Change the vacancy field to 5% instead and effective income climbs to roughly $1,780 a month, a reminder that a two-point swing in vacancy assumption moves the annual number by well over $1,000. That is why this figure deserves its own line rather than getting buried inside a bigger spreadsheet.
This is an income calculation only. It does not touch property taxes, insurance, maintenance, management fees or a mortgage payment, all of which come out of effective income before anything counts as cash flow. A property can show strong effective rental income and still lose money once the expense side gets added in. Treat this number as the top line of a bigger statement, not the finish line.
It also assumes a flat, single vacancy rate applied evenly across the year. Real vacancy tends to cluster around lease turnover dates rather than spreading out smoothly, so a property with one long move-out gap can post the same annual vacancy percentage as one with several short ones, even though the cash timing looks very different month to month.
Appraisers doing an income approach on a rental property start from gross scheduled income and apply a vacancy and collection loss factor pulled from local market data, not a landlord's hoped-for occupancy. Lenders underwriting a DSCR loan lean on the same idea in reverse: they want to see that effective income, not gross rent, comfortably covers the mortgage payment before approving a loan. A property that only works on paper at zero vacancy is a property that fails both tests the moment it meets someone whose job is to check the math.
That is one reason sellers sometimes quote gross rent alone in a listing description. It is the larger number, and it is technically true, but it skips the deduction every appraiser and most lenders will apply anyway. Asking for effective income up front, or running the two vacancy and collection loss fields above yourself, closes that gap before it becomes a surprise at underwriting.
Effective income is the top of the statement. Taxes, insurance, maintenance, management and the mortgage payment all come out below it.
Gross scheduled income is the total rent a property would collect in a year if every unit stayed occupied at the listed rent for all twelve months, plus any other recurring income like pet rent, parking or laundry. It is a ceiling figure, not a number any landlord actually banks, because it assumes zero vacancy and zero missed payments.
Take gross scheduled income and subtract a vacancy allowance and a collection loss allowance. Effective rental income is what a landlord can reasonably plan a budget around, since it accounts for the months a unit sits empty and the rent that occasionally never gets collected.
The U.S. Census Bureau reported a national rental vacancy rate of 7.2 percent for the fourth quarter of 2025. That is a national average across all rental housing, not a local figure, so check turnover history for the specific property and current listings in the same submarket before locking in a number.
No. This calculator only totals rental income, before any operating expenses. Utilities, taxes, insurance, maintenance and management fees all come out on the expense side of the ledger, which the cash flow calculator on this site handles separately.
Once effective income is set, the next stop is usually subtracting real operating costs on the cash flow calculator, or checking what that income implies against price on the cap rate calculator. If financing is still an open question, price out the loan payment first on the loan and DSCR calculator. For the full underwriting pass with every metric in one place, the site's rental property calculator ties them all together.
Jessica keeps a running list of listings that quote rent without ever mentioning vacancy, and this calculator is her answer to that habit. She built it to make the gap between advertised rent and collected rent impossible to ignore.
By Jessica Martinez, Contributing Writer, Business & Finance