Rental Property Tracker

Cap rate calculator

NOI = annual rental income − annual operating expenses
cap rate = NOI ÷ property value × 100

Cap rate is the return a property produces on its own value, before any financing. A property worth $300,000 that collects $30,000 a year in rent and costs $12,000 a year to run has a net operating income of $18,000, and a cap rate of 6.0%.

The deliberate omission is the mortgage. Operating expenses cover taxes, insurance, management, maintenance and vacancy, but not the loan payment, because the point of cap rate is to describe the property rather than the deal you financed it with. That is what makes it comparable: the same building has the same cap rate whether you paid cash or borrowed 80% of it.

Which is also its limit. Cap rate tells you nothing about what actually lands in your account each month, and a leveraged property will usually show a lower cap rate alongside a much higher cash-on-cash return. Read the two together, never one alone. Every property you add here reports both.

How this tracker works

Each property's numbers run through the same math real estate investors use to evaluate a deal. Gross potential rent (monthly rent times 12) is reduced by your vacancy assumption to get effective gross income. Operating expenses, property tax, insurance, maintenance, a management fee if you use one, and HOA dues, are subtracted to get net operating income (NOI), the property's earnings before financing. Subtracting the mortgage payment (principal and interest only) from NOI gives annual cash flow. Cap rate is NOI divided by the property's value; cash-on-cash return is annual cash flow divided by the cash you actually put in.

A worked example, computed from the exact formula this page uses: a $300,000 property bought with $65,000 cash, renting for $2,000 a month at 5% vacancy, with $3,600 in annual property tax, $1,200 in annual insurance, $150 a month in maintenance, an 8% management fee and a $900 monthly mortgage payment, nets $14,376 in annual NOI and $3,576 in annual cash flow after the mortgage. That's a 4.8% cap rate and a 5.5% cash-on-cash return, two genuinely different numbers answering two different questions about the same property.

Why no bank linking, and what this doesn't do

Automated rental-property trackers that pull in bank transactions need you to hand over account credentials to a third party, and they typically require an account and often a paid tier once you're managing more than a couple of units. This tool works the other way: every number is one you type in, updated whenever your rent or expenses actually change, with nothing to link and nothing to sign up for. What it deliberately doesn't do is depreciation or tax-return math, which needs your property's land-versus-building value split and the IRS's 27.5-year residential schedule, precise enough that a wrong assumption has real consequences; that's a distinct, more careful calculation this build doesn't attempt.

For the loan itself, extra payments, payoff timing, refinancing, use the mortgage & real estate payoff tracker alongside this one; tag the loan there under its "rental property" category to track payoff progress next to this tool's cash flow numbers for the same property. A rental property's value is also usually the single largest line in the net worth tracker for anyone who owns one.