Average Cap Rate in Tampa

At 4.75–5.25%, Tampa sits above the US average core multifamily going-in cap rate of 4.73% (CBRE, Q3 2025). That points to a more income-oriented market: prices are lower relative to rents, so the property has a real chance of producing monthly cash flow rather than a monthly deficit. Put the cap rate next to your mortgage rate — if the cap rate is higher you have positive leverage and borrowing amplifies your return; if it is lower you have negative leverage and every borrowed dollar drags the return down.

The ranking is really about prices, not rents. Cap rate is income over price, so the markets at the bottom of the table are the ones where capital has competed hardest — Dallas and Austin sit at 4.25–4.75% despite Sunbelt pricing, while Pittsburgh reaches 5.5–6.5% and Detroit 5.5–6.25%. You cannot have both cheap entry and violent appreciation in the same asset. A high cap rate is not a free lunch; it is the market pricing a different set of risks and a different growth expectation, and it can equally flag weaker tenant demand, older stock with heavier CapEx, or slower population growth.

Treat this as the start of the analysis, not the end. These are institutional Class A apartment benchmarks — your specific property, class, and submarket will differ, sometimes a lot. Confirm the actual rent against local comparables, get the real tax bill, and reserve honestly for maintenance and capital expenditure. Then check your financed position with cash-on-cash return, whether a lender agrees using DSCR, and the whole hold with the rental property ROI calculator.

A cap rate is a claim about the trade between income today and growth later. That second half is usually asserted rather than measured, so here it is measured. The FHFA House Price Index for Tampa, FL (MSAD) moved from 511.17 a year earlier to 516.64 in 2026 Q2 — a change of +1.07% year over year.

That is close to flat. A low-cap-rate market is one where the return thesis leans on price growth, and a year in the low single digits does not do much of that work. A high-cap-rate market with the same reading is behaving exactly as advertised — you are being paid in income instead.

What this figure is, precisely. The FHFA index tracks repeat sales and refinances of the same properties over time, which is what makes it a cleaner measure of price movement than an average sale price — it is not distorted by a change in the mix of what happened to sell. It is an index, not a dollar amount: 516.64 is not a price, and the only number here that means anything to you is the percentage change. It also covers single-family homes with conforming mortgages, while the cap rate above is institutional multifamily. They describe the same metro, not the same asset.

Cap rate is net operating income over price, so everything depends on the NOI being real. The most common way it is not real is vacancy: a pro-forma built on twelve months of rent describes a building that never turns over, and no building does.

For scale, the Census Bureau's Housing Vacancy Survey put the national rental vacancy rate at 7.3% in Q2 2026, with a homeownership rate of 65.0% and a median asking rent of $1,531. That national rate is not Tampa's rate, and the survey does not publish one this page can quote for a single metro — but it establishes that a zero-vacancy assumption is not conservative, it is wrong.

The arithmetic is unforgiving because it hits the numerator. Assume full occupancy on a property whose true vacancy is one month a year and you have overstated NOI by roughly 8% — which, at these cap rates, overstates what the building is worth to you by roughly the same proportion. Two other line items fail the same way: maintenance, which is lumpy and therefore easy to under-reserve, and capital expenditure, which is not an operating expense at all and so is frequently left out of NOI entirely and then never budgeted anywhere else.

Note also what a cap rate deliberately excludes: your mortgage. It describes the property unlevered, which is what makes it comparable across buyers. Your actual return depends on financing, and at the Freddie Mac 30-year average of 6.71% for the week ending September 3, 2026, a cap rate below that figure means borrowing costs more than the asset earns. Check the financed position with cash-on-cash return rather than inferring it from the cap rate.

One last input worth grounding rather than guessing: rent growth. The Bureau of Labor Statistics measured rent of primary residence rising 2.9% in the twelve months to July 2026. That is a CPI component covering the whole national rental stock, not a market survey of Tampa asking rents, so treat it as a reality check on an escalation assumption rather than as this metro's number. If your model compounds rent faster than that indefinitely, the model is doing the work rather than the building.

The cap rates on this site come from two different kinds of measurement, and putting them in one column without saying so would misrepresent a methodology gap as a market gap. This page's figure is scoped as: CBRE Class A stabilized, infill, H2 2025.

CBRE Class A stabilised figures describe institutional-quality apartment assets that are already leased up, in infill locations. They are a narrow, consistent slice, which is what makes them comparable to each other. All-class market averagescover everything trading in a metro — older stock, secondary submarkets, smaller deals — and they sit structurally higher for that reason alone. A 7% all-class average and a 5% Class A figure do not mean the first market pays two points more for the same asset.

So compare like with like. Ranking the Class A markets against each other is meaningful. Ranking a Class A market against an all-class one tells you mostly about which survey you are reading. The comparison table below is drawn from the same source set, and every row carries its own scope for exactly this reason.

The same caution applies to your own deal. A single small multifamily building bought from a private seller is not a stabilised Class A asset, and it should not be underwritten at a Class A cap rate. If your property is older, smaller, or outside the core submarket, expect to buy at a higher cap rate than this page shows — and if a broker is quoting you one at or below it, that is a question worth asking out loud.

The number most often wrong in an investor's spreadsheet is the rent, because it is usually taken from a listing rather than from a transaction. One public benchmark worth knowing: HUD's Fair Market Rent for a two-bedroom in the Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, FL MSA is $1,917 for FY2027.

Read that with its definition attached. Fair Market Rent is not a market median and not an average asking rent. It is the 40th-percentile gross rent HUD uses to set Housing Choice Voucher payment standards — deliberately set below the middle of the market, and gross, meaning it is intended to cover rent plus tenant-paid utilities. Quoting it as “average rent in Tampa” would be wrong, and you will see that done.

Used properly it is a useful floor rather than a target. If your underwriting assumes a two-bedroom rent far below $1,917, you are probably being too conservative or looking at a weak submarket. If it assumes far above, you are claiming a materially above-median unit and should be able to say why — location, condition, or amenity. Either way it is a number that comes from a federal programme file rather than from a listing site, and it is refreshed annually.

One thing not to do: do not divide this rent by the index figure above to produce a yield or a price-to-rent ratio. The index is not a price, the FMR is not a market rent, and the two cover different property types. They are two independent sanity checks, not two halves of a calculation.