Short-Term Rental ROI Calculator India

Financing an STR unit follows the same RBI rules as any home loan

There is no separate RBI category for a short-term-rental property — a bank finances it as an ordinary residential purchase, so the same Master Circular – Housing Finance (February 2022) ceilings apply: up to 90% for a property costing up to ₹30 lakh, up to 80% between ₹30 lakh and ₹75 lakh, and up to 75% above ₹75 lakh, applied to the property's cost only. The same circular tells banks to exclude stamp duty, registration and documentation charges from that cost (except on homes at or below ₹10 lakh) — and furnishing to guest standard sits further outside the loan again, since it is not part of the housing property's cost at all. This calculator's cash-invested figure — down payment, closing costs, furnishing — is therefore almost entirely your own cash, not the bank's, once you're above small-ticket properties.

If the loan is floating-rate, its EMI also isn't fixed for the years you plan to operate the unit. RBI has required since 1 October 2019 that "all new floating rate personal or retail loans...to an external benchmark" such as repo, reset on the lender's schedule whenever the Monetary Policy Committee moves it — RBI held it at 5.25% through every 2026 meeting directly confirmed here, but check the current figure before assuming your modelled debt service holds for the whole operating period. And if a strong tourist season lets you prepay principal, RBI's 2025 Pre-payment Charges Directions bar foreclosure charges on floating-rate loans to individuals for non-business purposes, for loans sanctioned or renewed on or after 1 January 2026 — confirm your own sanction date against that cutoff.

The fixed cost this calculator pulls from your tax notice, not a platform dashboard

The calculator's annual fixed operating cost — property tax, insurance, society charges — is the one cost line an STR operator can't reduce by running the unit harder; municipal property tax is part of it. In Bengaluru, BBMP taxes under a Unit Area Value Self-Assessment Scheme where depreciation applies on a calendar-year basis and is claimable once per block period, and a 5% discount is available for paying by the prescribed early date. That is a formula, not a flat percentage of the property's value — enter the actual figure from your own BBMP notice into the annual fixed-opex field rather than estimating it as a round percentage of ADR revenue.

Why occupancy has no benchmark to check against

No official Indian body — not RBI, not the National Housing Bank's RESIDEX index, not CREDAI, not the Ministry of Statistics — publishes a short-term-rental occupancy or ADR series for Indian cities or tourist markets. There is no government number this calculator's occupancy input can be checked against; whatever occupancy assumption you enter should come from your own comparable-listing research or a platform's own (private, not official) market data, not from a cited government statistic, because none exists.

The one number this calculator does give you without needing an external benchmark is break-even occupancy — the point where ADR × 365 × occupancy, net of the platform fee, management fee, per-turnover cleaning and fixed costs, exactly covers the debt service. That figure is computed from your own inputs, not from a market average, which is exactly why it is the more reliable number to anchor a go/no-go decision on than any occupancy percentage quoted for "the Indian STR market" generally.