Rental Yield Calculator

Two numbers, one denominator, very different amounts of work

Gross yield = annual rent ÷ property value. That's the entire calculation — twelve months of rent, divided by what the property is worth or what you're paying for it. Nothing else moves it. Net yield = (annual rent − annual running costs) ÷ property value. The calculator either takes your own annual cost figure or estimates it as a percentage of gross rent — 22% by default — covering tax, insurance, maintenance, management and repairs, but never the mortgage.

Gross yield exists to be fast. It's the number you can compute from a listing in five seconds, before you know a single thing about the property's actual expenses, which is exactly why it's a screening tool rather than a decision tool — good for ranking twenty listings against each other, bad for deciding whether any one of them is actually a good deal.

Worked example — the calculator's own $350,000 / $2,500 prefill

The gap between the two — 8.57% down to 6.69% — is 22% of the gross figure, which is not a coincidence: it's the exact cost assumption that produced it. If you swap in your property's real operating costs instead of the 22% estimate, the gap moves with them, wider for an older building with more maintenance, narrower for a newer one under a self-managed landlord.

The one thing rental yield never subtracts

Every other calculator in this group — cap rate, cash-on-cash, DSCR — starts net operating income with a vacancy allowance: gross rent times (1 minus vacancy percent) before anything else happens. Rental yield's module has no vacancy input at all. Gross yield divides full potential rent by value with no allowance for empty months; net yield subtracts running costs from that same full-occupancy rent. Both assume the unit is rented 100% of the year.

That is a real and material difference, not a rounding matter. The Census Bureau's Housing Vacancy Survey put the national rental vacancy rate at 7.3% for Q2 2026 — apply that to the worked example above and effective annual rent falls to $27,810 before you even get to costs, which would push a net figure closer to 6.2% than 6.69%. Yield, as this calculator computes it, is a best-case, full-occupancy number by construction. Treat it as a ceiling on what the property can produce, not a promise.

Is net yield just cap rate under a different name?

It's close enough that the question deserves a direct answer, because both divide an income figure by a price. Run the identical $350,000 / $2,500 property through both calculators: net rental yield comes out at 6.69% (rent minus a 22%-of-rent cost estimate, no vacancy deducted). Cap rate, in manual mode with this same property's actual $9,000 in annual operating expenses and a 5% vacancy allowance, comes out at 5.57%. Those are not the same number, and the gap is not noise — it's two structural differences: cap rate subtracts vacancy and net yield doesn't, and cap rate's cost figure is meant to be your property's real operating expenses while net yield's default is a flat percentage of rent.

So: related, not identical, and not interchangeable. Net yield is a faster, rougher version of the same idea — useful for a first pass across many listings before you know real expense numbers, while cap rate is the version you switch to once you have them. If you enter your exact operating costs into both and this calculator's rental yield tool gains a vacancy field in the future, the two would converge; as shipped today, they don't, and a reader comparing a property's advertised "yield" against a market "cap rate" benchmark is not comparing like with like.

How to read a yield figure on a listing

1. Confirm whether it's gross or net. Listings routinely advertise gross yield without saying so, because it's always the larger, more flattering number.
2. Ask what rent it assumes. An "achievable" or "market" rent inflates yield versus the rent a current tenant is actually paying — check the lease, not the listing copy.
3. Remember it assumes full occupancy. Nothing in a standard yield calculation — gross or net — reserves anything for vacancy, so a quoted yield is the property's ceiling, not its likely average.

For context on what actually gets paid in the broader market, the same Census survey put the national median asking rent at $1,531 for Q2 2026 — a figure worth having in mind as a sanity check on any rent input, gross or net, though local comps will always beat a national median for a specific property.

A snapshot, not a trend line

Both figures this calculator produces describe today's rent against today's price — they say nothing about direction. The BLS Consumer Price Index for rent of primary residence rose 2.9% over the 12 months to July 2026. That index tracks what existing tenants pay nationally, not a market-rent survey and not a forecast for any specific property, but it's a reasonable sense check on a proposed rent increase: a yield calculation built on a rent bump well above 2.9% year over year deserves a harder look at whether the market actually supports it.

Gross or net — and which one to quote

This page can produce two numbers and they are not interchangeable. Gross yield is annual rent over price. Net yield subtracts operating costs first. The gap between them is where most disappointing rental investments live.

Quote gross when you are screening. It is fast, it needs two inputs you can get from a listing, and it is fair for ranking properties against each other because the same omission applies to all of them.

Quote net when you are deciding. Operating costs are not a small adjustment — taxes, insurance, management, maintenance and reserves routinely consume a substantial share of gross rent, and they vary far more between properties than rent does. Two properties with identical gross yields can have materially different net yields, and the net one is the number that pays you.

The trap is quoting gross and thinking net. If a seller or a listing advertises a yield without saying which it is, assume gross, and assume it is calculated on the asking price rather than on what you will actually pay including costs of purchase.