Rental Property in Georgia: What the Numbers Actually Look Like

Georgia is the best-behaved state in this series on the expense side, and it still does not cash flow at the median.

That combination is worth sitting with, because it isolates something important. Georgia's property tax rate is a low 0.78%. Its insurance is $2,453 a year at $300,000 of dwelling coverage — less than a third of Florida's. Its percentage wind deductible applies to only six coastal counties rather than the whole state. Put a Georgia rental through the full analysis and its operating expense ratio lands at 42.53% of collected rent, comfortably inside the healthy band and better than any other state in this comparison.

And the worked example below still loses $633.14 a month.

The reason is not an expense. It is the ratio of rent to price, and it is the thing most rental analyses spend the least time on. Georgia is the cleanest demonstration in this series that you cannot expense-manage your way out of a bad purchase price.

A note before you start: this is general educational information about how rental property arithmetic works in Georgia. It is not investment, tax, insurance, or legal advice, and it is not a recommendation about any property. Georgia property tax is administered county by county with local exemptions that vary considerably; insurance is priced per structure. Georgia is an attorney-closing state, which means a Georgia real estate attorney will be involved in your closing anyway — use them. Talk to a Georgia CPA about tax treatment and a licensed Georgia insurance agent about a real quote.

1. What a rental costs to buy here

The statewide median sale price is $360,000 (Georgia REALTORS Research Department, year-to-date through June 2026, up 0.3% year over year). Other sources read higher — Redfin's June 2026 statewide median is $373,830, and another aggregator reports $389,900 — so the honest range across sources and time windows is roughly $360,000 to $390,000 depending on methodology. This article uses the state Realtor association's figure.

County figures:

• Fulton County (Atlanta): $489,900, effective property tax rate 0.87%, average insurance $2,468
• Gwinnett County: $401,900, effective property tax rate 0.96%

An honest data gap: the site's Gwinnett County file carries no insurance figure. Section 5 substitutes the statewide $2,453 and flags it where it does so.

Price growth is essentially flat: +0.1% year over year in the site's data. An analysis that needs appreciation to rescue the cash flow is not getting help from the last published print.

The cash you actually need

Georgia taxes both the deed and the note, and the two land on different parties:

• Deed transfer tax: approximately 0.1% — statutorily $1.00 for the first $1,000 of consideration plus $0.10 for each additional $100. The seller is the statutory default payer, though the purchase agreement can shift it.
• Intangible recording tax: 0.30% of the loan amount ($1.50 per $500 of the face amount of the note), capped at $25,000 per instrument, per Georgia Department of Revenue and Ga. Comp. R. & Regs. 560-11-8. The lender is nominally liable but it is customarily passed through to the buyer/borrower as part of closing costs. Note there is a short-term-note exemption effective July 1, 2025 for notes of 62 months or less, which will not apply to a 30-year mortgage.
• Closing costs: 2% to 5%. Rocket Mortgage puts Georgia buyers toward the lower end of the typical 3% to 6% national range; ClosingCorp-derived data cites a much narrower ~1.3% average that explicitly excludes origination fees. The site uses 2% to 5% as the more inclusive buyer range; this article takes the 3.5% midpoint.

On the $360,000 statewide median at 25% down:

• Down payment: $360,000 x 0.25 = $90,000
• Loan amount: $270,000
• Closing costs: $360,000 x 3.5% = $12,600
• Intangible recording tax: $270,000 x 0.30% = $810
• Deed transfer tax: $0 by statutory default (seller)
• Total cash in: $103,410

Some closing-cost estimates already fold the intangible tax in; it is broken out here so you can see it, not to be double-counted.

2. The two expenses that decide whether it works

Property tax: genuinely low, with a landlord-specific catch

Georgia's effective property tax rate on owner-occupied housing is 0.78% — the midpoint of WalletHub's 0.77% and the Tax Foundation's 0.79%, which cluster tightly. (Other aggregators cite 0.83% to 1.00% using median-based or per-county-average methodologies rather than an aggregate value-weighted rate.) County effective rates: Fulton 0.87%, Gwinnett 0.96%.

On the $360,000 example: $360,000 x 0.78% = $2,808 a year, or $234 a month.

The landlord catch in Georgia is the exemption structure. Georgia's standard homestead exemption requires the owner to occupy the property as a primary residence, and on top of that most Georgia counties and school districts layer local homestead exemptions — some of them large, and several of them with assessment freezes attached. Fulton, Gwinnett, Cobb, DeKalb, and the municipalities inside them each run their own.

A rental gets none of it. And because the local exemptions are frequently much larger than the state one, the gap between a homesteaded owner's bill and a landlord's bill on the same house can be substantial and is entirely county-specific. There is no statewide number for it.

The instruction that follows is simple and important: pull the parcel's actual tax bill from the county tax commissioner and identify every exemption on it, then recompute without them. A Georgia listing's stated tax figure is one of the least reliable numbers you will encounter, precisely because the exemption regime is so local.

Georgia also reassesses annually toward fair market value, and a sale is the event most likely to trigger a reassessment. Do not assume the assessed value stays where the seller had it.

Insurance: cheap today, rising fastest

The reference figure is $2,453 a year at $300,000 of dwelling coverage with a $1,000 deductible. (The site's separate state file carries $3,225 from a different source; the insurance-specific file's coverage-normalized $2,453 is used here.) Fulton County's own average is $2,468 — essentially identical to the statewide figure.

In context, at the same $300,000 coverage level:

• Florida: $8,471 — 3.5x Georgia
• Texas: $4,643 — 1.9x
• North Carolina: $3,634 — 1.5x
• Tennessee: $3,207 — 1.3x
• Georgia: $2,453
• Ohio: $1,943

Only Ohio is cheaper among the states in this series. That is a real advantage and it shows up directly in the expense ratio.

But the trend is the worst in the set: +10% year over year. That is the steepest premium increase of the eight states here, steeper than Ohio's +7.3%, North Carolina's +6.2%, Texas's +3%, and Florida's +2%. Georgia is cheap now and getting less cheap fastest. If you are underwriting a hold of any length, do not model the premium flat.

Together, property tax and insurance are $5,261 on the worked example — 19.93% of gross rent and 21.66% of rent actually collected. Compare:

Georgia is at the good end of that table, and Section 3 shows it is not enough.

A rental is not insured on a homeowners form. You need a landlord policy — a dwelling fire form with loss-of-rents coverage — priced for the specific address.

The percentage deductible: fenced to six counties, and severe inside them

Georgia is one of nineteen states plus DC where hurricane or named-storm deductibles are in use, per the Insurance Information Institute. Where Georgia differs from Florida is that the separate deductible is geographically fenced rather than statewide.

Carrier underwriting rules commonly require the wind/hail deductible to match the all-other-perils deductible everywhere in Georgia except six coastal counties:

• Chatham (Savannah)
• Bryan
• Liberty
• McIntosh
• Glynn (Brunswick, St. Simons)
• Camden

In those six, a different, usually percentage-based wind/hail or named-storm deductible is permitted and is common. Published ranges for coastal policies run 1% to 5% of insured value, with named-storm deductibles clustering at 1% to 3%.

The practical consequence, stated plainly: an Atlanta-metro landlord is generally paying one flat deductible for everything. A Savannah or St. Simons landlord with a 2% deductible on a $300,000 dwelling limit is carrying $6,000 of exposure on the storm most likely to damage the property.

Georgia construction runs about $220 per square foot to rebuild, so a 1,500 square foot house has a replacement cost near $330,000. Against that limit:

• 1% = $3,300
• 2% = $6,600
• 5% = $16,500

Now put those against the property. Section 3 works out that this rental produces $13,958.20 of net operating income in a good year:

• $6,000 (2% of a $300,000 limit) is 43.0% of a full year's NOI
• $6,600 (2% of a $330,000 replacement cost) is 47.3%
• $16,500 (5%) is 118% — more than a full year's NOI

You cannot pass any of that to a tenant. It is not a lease obligation, it is not billable, and it does not wait for rent to accumulate. If you are buying on the Georgia coast, get the deductible percentage in writing and multiply it out before you make the offer.

Inland Georgia's real exposure is different, and it is not covered by that paragraph. Away from those six counties, Georgia's severe weather is hail and straight-line wind, which fall under the ordinary flat deductible, not a percentage one. That is genuinely better news for an Atlanta-metro landlord. What it does not fix is the roof.

Roof settlement is Georgia's most consequential fine print. Georgia carriers have increasingly attached roof payment schedules or actual-cash-value roof endorsements at renewal — often on policies still marketed as replacement-cost. A typical schedule pays a declining percentage by roof age: roughly 100% when new, about 80% at five years, and as little as 30% at fifteen.

Work that through. A $20,000 roof replacement on a fifteen-year-old roof under a 30% schedule pays $6,000 before the deductible; after a $1,000 deductible, $5,000 against a $20,000 cost. You fund $15,000 of a covered claim. Georgia's hail exposure makes that the single most consequential line item in a Georgia policy, and it is not visible in any premium comparison.

If no carrier will write you, the Georgia Underwriting Association is the residual market. It writes Homeowners, Dwelling (fire and wind/hail), Mobile Home, and Commercial lines, and it is the practical answer for coastal properties private carriers will not write for wind. Reported capacity runs to roughly $2 million of dwelling coverage with up to $100,000 of liability — unusually generous for a FAIR-plan-style entity and notably higher than most states' plans. It only insures risks maintained to minimum safety standards, so a property in poor repair can be declined there too. Contact runs through a licensed Georgia agent.

3. A full worked example

The property. A single-family house at the Georgia statewide median of $360,000.

The rent — read this carefully. This site does not carry rent data. The $2,200 a month used below is an assumption chosen to be plausible for a house at that price. It is not a market observation. Pull three to five real comparable listings for the specific neighborhood and substitute the actual number, because Section 4 shows this is the input the answer is most sensitive to.

The other assumptions:

• Vacancy: 8% of gross rent (roughly one month of turnover a year)
• Property management: 10% of collected rent
• Repairs and maintenance: 5% of gross scheduled rent
• Capital reserve: 5% of gross scheduled rent
• Financing: 25% down, 30-year fixed at 7.00% — the rate is an assumption, not a quote
• No HOA. Many Georgia subdivisions have one; add it if yours does

Step 1 — income

• Gross scheduled rent: $2,200 x 12 = $26,400
• Vacancy loss: $26,400 x 8% = $2,112
• Effective gross income: $26,400 - $2,112 = $24,288

Step 2 — operating expenses

Management is charged on rent actually collected, not scheduled rent:

• Management: $24,288 x 10% = $2,428.80
• Property tax: $360,000 x 0.78% = $2,808
• Insurance: $2,453
• Maintenance: $26,400 x 5% = $1,320
• Capital reserve: $26,400 x 5% = $1,320
• Total operating expenses: $10,329.80

Expense ratio: $10,329.80 / $24,288 = 42.53% of collected rent. That is the best expense ratio of the eight states in this series on identical assumptions, and it is Georgia's genuine advantage.

Step 3 — net operating income and cap rate

• NOI = $24,288 - $10,329.80 = $13,958.20
• Cap rate = $13,958.20 / $360,000 = 3.88%

The mortgage is deliberately absent from that figure. Cap rate exists to compare properties independently of how they are financed; putting debt service into it makes two identical houses look like different investments because one buyer put more down, and it is the most common error in this whole exercise.

Step 4 — debt service and cash flow

Loan: $360,000 x 75% = $270,000. At 7.00% over 30 years, principal and interest is $1,796.32 a month, or $21,555.84 a year.

• Annual cash flow = $13,958.20 - $21,555.84 = -$7,597.64
• Monthly cash flow = -$633.14
• Debt service coverage ratio = $13,958.20 / $21,555.84 = 0.65

Step 5 — cash-on-cash return

• Cash invested: $103,410 (Section 1)
• Cash-on-cash = -$7,597.64 / $103,410 = -7.35%

Rate sensitivity, since 7.00% was an assumption

• At 6.50%: P&I $1,706.58/mo, annual cash flow -$6,520.76
• At 7.00%: P&I $1,796.32/mo, annual cash flow -$7,597.64
• At 7.50%: P&I $1,887.88/mo, annual cash flow -$8,696.36

The simplest version of the same finding

Add up the four bills a lender escrows:

• Principal and interest: $1,796.32
• Property tax: $2,808 / 12 = $234.00
• Insurance: $2,453 / 12 = $204.42
• Total: $2,234.74 a month

Against $2,200 of assumed rent, that is -$34.74 a month — almost exactly a wash. Georgia passes the naive test to within thirty-five dollars, which is the most dangerous place to be, because it makes the property look like a rounding error away from working. It is not. Section 4 shows the gap is $633 a month, not $35.

4. The expenses people leave out

Vacancy, management, and capital reserves do not arrive as invoices. Nobody bills you for the month between tenants, or for the roof you will need in eleven years, or — if you self-manage — for your own weekends. So they fall out of the mental model, and the property looks better than it is.

Here is the same house with those three removed and everything else identical:

The three omissions are worth $5,860.80 a year — $2,112 of vacancy, $2,428.80 of management, $1,320 of reserve. They flatter the cap rate by 1.63 percentage points and hide 77% of the annual loss.

Notice the 24.93% expense ratio in the left column. Any analysis producing an expense ratio below about 35% of collected rent is telling you something is missing, not that you found an unusually efficient property. That is exactly what the left column is: three real costs deleted.

Vacancy is not optional. Eight percent is roughly one month a year — what a single clean turnover costs between move-out and the next tenant's first full month, assuming nothing goes wrong. Setting it to zero assumes the house is never empty, including between tenants.

Management is a real cost even if you do it yourself. Zeroing it means the return is paying you for your labor, not for the property. Self-managing this house saves $2,428.80 a year, lifting NOI to $16,387 and the cap rate to 4.55%, with cash flow improving to -$430.74 a month. Real saving, does not fix the deal, and stops being free the moment you stop being available.

Capital reserves are certain, not unlikely. Section 2 makes the Georgia-specific case: with roof payment schedules paying as little as 30% at fifteen years, the roof is a cost you will substantially self-fund whether or not you have a claim. Reserve for it as if insurance will not pay, because on an older roof it largely will not.

The 5%-of-rent convention used above is one option. A harsher and equally common convention is 1% of purchase price a year for maintenance and 1% for capital, which here is $3,600 each. Run that way: total operating expenses $14,889.80, expense ratio 61.31%, NOI $9,398.20, cap rate 2.61%, cash flow -$1,013.14 a month, cash-on-cash -11.76%.

The honest cap-rate range for this property is 2.61% to 3.88% depending on which convention you use. Newer Georgia suburban stock argues for the percentage-of-rent convention; older intown Atlanta stock argues for percentage-of-price.

What would actually have to be true

The rent this property needs. For cash flow to reach zero at this price and this financing, gross scheduled rent must reach about $36,836 a year, or $3,069.69 a month — 0.85% of purchase price per month. The assumed $2,200 is 0.61%.

That 0.85% breakeven is notably lower than Texas's 1.04% or Florida's 1.00%, and that is Georgia's low expense burden showing up exactly where you would expect it. Georgia needs less rent per dollar of price than the high-tax and high-insurance states do. It still needs $870 a month more than the example assumes.

The price this rent supports. Hold rent at $2,200 and solve for the price at which cash flow reaches zero with 25% down: about $247,738, which is 69% of the statewide median — a better ratio than Florida's 50% or Texas's 58%, and still well below the median house.

The down payment this price needs. Keep the $360,000 price and the $2,200 rent and solve for the loan the NOI can service: about $174,835 — roughly $185,165 down, or 51% of the price.

A middle option. At 40% down ($144,000), the loan falls to $216,000, principal and interest to $1,437.05 a month, and cash flow to -$273.87 a month with a DSCR of 0.81. Combine 40% down with self-management and this property is close to breakeven.

The pattern across all four of those calculations is the same: Georgia's expense structure is fine and its price-to-rent ratio is not. The dial that has to move is the purchase price, or the rent, or both — not the operating budget.

5. What actually varies by county here

Two things vary in Georgia, and they are unequal in importance.

Property tax rates vary modestly. Fulton at 0.87%, Gwinnett at 0.96%, against a 0.78% statewide average. Take the identical $360,000 house at $2,200 rent and change only the rate and premium:

That is a $648 a year spread in NOI between statewide and Gwinnett rates, and 0.18 points of cap rate. Real, but small — Georgia's county tax spread is the narrowest of the eight states in this series.

Local homestead exemptions vary enormously, and that is where the real county-level money is. The rates above are effective rates on owner-occupied housing, which already reflect exemptions the property will lose when it becomes a rental. Since Georgia's local homestead exemptions are set county by county and district by district — and several carry assessment freezes — the gap between what a homesteaded neighbor pays and what you will pay is genuinely county-specific and not capturable in any statewide figure. That is the number to go get, and it is on the tax commissioner's website.

Price does more work than tax rate. Run Fulton County at its own median of $489,900 with a $2,700 assumed rent, 0.87% tax, and $2,468 insurance: NOI $16,857.07, cap rate 3.44%, cash flow -$1,039.73 a month, DSCR 0.57. Fulton's higher rent does not keep up with its 36% higher price, and the cap rate falls almost half a point below the statewide example.

And the coastal counties are a different insurance market entirely. Chatham, Bryan, Liberty, McIntosh, Glynn, and Camden carry the percentage wind/hail deductible described in Section 2, and premiums there are not represented by the statewide $2,453. If you are looking at Savannah, Brunswick, or St. Simons, get a real coastal quote before you underwrite anything — a coastal premium and a percentage deductible are a different asset from an Atlanta-metro rental, whatever the price per square foot suggests.

6. Financing a rental is not financing a home

These are standard mechanisms across the mortgage market. Any specific rate or overlay is your lender's, not this article's.

Down payment. Conventional financing on a non-owner-occupied one-unit property generally requires more equity than an owner-occupied purchase — 20% is usually the floor and 25% the common expectation, which is why this article models 25%. FHA and VA are not available for a property you do not occupy. The real exception is house hacking: a two-to-four-unit property you live in one unit of qualifies for owner-occupied programs.

Rate. Investment-property loans price above owner-occupied loans. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac apply loan-level price adjustments for investment occupancy that scale with loan-to-value and credit score, and lenders pass those through as a higher rate or points.

Reserves. Lenders typically require post-closing reserves — months of principal, interest, taxes, and insurance held in liquid assets — scaling with the number of financed properties you own. This is on top of the down payment and closing costs.

Rental income counting. Lenders credit a portion of market or lease rent toward qualifying, not all of it. Ask what percentage yours uses and whether they need an appraiser's rent schedule.

DSCR loans. A debt service coverage ratio loan qualifies the property rather than the borrower, comparing property income to debt service and largely skipping personal income documentation. The trade is a higher rate, a larger down payment, frequent prepayment penalties, and a minimum DSCR the property must clear — commonly stated at or above 1.0 and often above 1.2.

Section 3's example has a DSCR of 0.65. Even stripped of vacancy, management, and reserves it is 0.92, still below 1.0. The underwriting is telling you the same thing the cash flow line is.

Georgia is an attorney-closing state. A licensed Georgia attorney conducts the closing. That is a cost, and it is also an opportunity — you have a lawyer at the table anyway, so use them on the title work and on anything unusual in the contract.

The intangible recording tax is a real closing line. At 0.30% of the loan, it scales with how much you borrow. It is one of the few costs that actually falls if you put more down.

7. What to check before you buy in this state

The tax bill, on the parcel, from the county tax commissioner.

1. Pull the actual bill and list every exemption on it — state homestead, local homestead, school-district exemptions, and any assessment freeze. You will lose all of them.
2. Recompute the tax at fair market value with no exemptions.
3. Check whether the county reassesses on sale and what the current assessment ratio is.
4. Confirm the city millage separately from the county's if the property is inside municipal limits.

Insurance, before your due-diligence period ends.

1. Get a bindable landlord policy quote for the specific address, with loss of rents coverage, and check how many months it pays.
2. Ask specifically about the roof payment schedule. Get the roof's age in writing, and ask the carrier what percentage of replacement cost the policy would pay at that age. Section 2 explains why this is Georgia's most consequential clause.
3. If the property is in Chatham, Bryan, Liberty, McIntosh, Glynn, or Camden, find the percentage wind/hail or named-storm deductible on the quote and multiply it into dollars. If it is anywhere else in Georgia, confirm in writing that the wind/hail deductible matches the all-perils deductible.
4. Model the premium rising, not flat. Georgia's trend is +10%.
5. Price flood separately. No property policy anywhere covers flood, and a large share of national flood claims come from outside mapped high-risk zones.

The rent, from the market.

1. Pull three to five genuine comparable rentals for the specific neighborhood and note how long they sat.
2. Divide monthly rent by purchase price. Section 4's breakeven for this example was 0.85%. Knowing where you sit against that tells you immediately whether you are buying cash flow or betting on appreciation — and Georgia's last published appreciation figure was +0.1%.

The law, from the statute rather than from an article.

1. Do not take eviction timelines, notice periods, security-deposit rules, or late-fee limits from a blog — including this one. Georgia landlord-tenant law lives in O.C.G.A. Title 44, Chapter 7. Read it through the Georgia General Assembly's own site, https://www.legis.ga.gov/, and see the Georgia Department of Community Affairs' landlord-tenant guidance at https://dca.georgia.gov/. Better still, ask the closing attorney you are already paying. These rules are genuinely state-specific and they change.
2. Check the city and county separately: rental registration, inspection requirements, and short-term rental rules are local, and Atlanta, Savannah, and the suburban counties each have their own.

The building.

1. Get the age of the roof, HVAC, water heater, and electrical panel in writing. In Georgia the roof age is not just a maintenance question — it directly determines what a hail claim pays.

The money.

1. Size cash reserves against the roof replacement cost you will substantially self-fund, and if you are coastal, against the percentage deductible in dollars.
2. Ask a Georgia CPA about depreciation, passive activity loss rules, Georgia state income tax on rental income, and what happens on sale.

What to do next

Every figure above came from a data file or was computed in front of you. Re-run all of it with your own numbers.

The Georgia rental analysis calculator does exactly the work in Sections 3 and 4 — enter your price, your real local rent, and your own vacancy, management, and reserve assumptions, and it produces NOI, cap rate, cash flow, cash-on-cash, and DSCR. Given Section 4's finding that Georgia's expense ratio looks fine while the deal still loses money, the useful move is to vary the rent and the price rather than the expenses.

The Georgia insurance premium estimator gets you closer to a real figure for a specific dwelling limit than the $2,453 statewide average — worth doing especially in the six coastal counties, where the statewide average does not describe the market at all.

The Georgia mortgage payment calculator gives you the principal and interest figure for the rate you are actually quoted.

This article is general educational information about rental property arithmetic in Georgia, based on figures current as of August 2026. It is not investment, tax, insurance, or legal advice. The rent figures in the worked examples are stated assumptions, not market data. Georgia's statewide median home price varies across sources from roughly $360,000 to $390,000 depending on methodology. Property tax exemptions are set locally and vary considerably by county and school district. Consult a Georgia CPA, a licensed Georgia insurance agent, and a Georgia real estate attorney before buying.