Rental Property in Louisiana: What the Numbers Actually Look Like

Louisiana has an effective property tax rate of 0.55%. That is not just low, it is one of the lowest in the country — the Tax Foundation, propertytaxrates.org, and TheCenterSquare all land on the same figure, which ranks Louisiana around 39th nationally and 4th lowest in the South. On the statewide median house it works out to $1,431.65 a year, or $119.30 a month.

It is also close to irrelevant to whether a Louisiana rental works, because the insurance bill is 3.73 times larger.

The average Louisiana homeowners premium at $300,000 of dwelling coverage is $5,344 a year. On the property worked through below it consumes 26.2% of gross rent by itself and makes up 50.0% of every operating expense the property has combined. Alongside Florida, Louisiana is one of the two hardest homeowners markets in the United States, and in Jefferson Parish the average premium is $12,549 — a figure that, as Section 5 shows, does not leave a rental with a business.

If you take one thing from this article: in Louisiana, get a bindable landlord quote for the specific address before you make the offer. Not after the inspection. Before.

A note before you start: this is general educational information about how rental property arithmetic works in Louisiana. It is not investment, tax, insurance, or legal advice, and it is not a recommendation about any property. Louisiana insurance is priced per structure — construction, roof age and material, elevation, distance to open water, and fortified-construction credits move it enormously — and property tax is administered parish by parish, with rates ranging from roughly 0.13% in St. Helena and West Carroll parishes to about 0.85% in Orleans. Talk to a Louisiana CPA about tax treatment, a licensed Louisiana insurance agent about a real quote, and a Louisiana attorney about anything contractual.

1. What a rental costs to buy here

The Louisiana statewide median home price is $260,300. That is a genuinely low entry price by national standards, and it is the reason out-of-state investors keep looking at Louisiana. The rest of this article is about why the entry price is the least interesting number on the page.

Louisiana has no state transfer tax. The transferTax field for Louisiana reads hasTransferTax: false, and unlike Florida there is no documentary stamp on the note and no intangible tax on the mortgage. Recording fees are set locally by the clerk of court and are small relative to the transaction. This is one of the few places where Louisiana is cheaper than its neighbors on paper.

Louisiana is an attorney closing state. Expect an attorney's fee in the closing statement rather than only a title company's.

Closing costs run 2% to 5%. This article uses a 3.5% midpoint.

On the $260,300 statewide median at 25% down:

• Down payment: $260,300 x 0.25 = $65,075
• Loan amount: $195,225
• Closing costs: $260,300 x 3.5% = $9,110.50
• Transfer tax: $0
• Total cash in: $74,185.50

On price growth, Louisiana's most recent published appreciation figure is +1.29% a year. That is positive but thin — roughly $3,358 a year on this house, less than half the annual cash loss Section 3 computes. An analysis that needs appreciation to rescue the cash flow is asking a 1.29% number to cover a 10.12% hole.

The homestead exemption you will not get

Louisiana's constitutional homestead exemption removes the first $75,000 of fair market value from parish ad-valorem tax — roughly $7,500 of assessed value, since Louisiana assesses residential property at 10% of fair market value. It is worth roughly $750 to $800 a year to a homeowner, and it does not apply to municipal taxes in most cities.

A rental gets none of it. The owner must own and occupy the property as a primary residence as of January 1 of the tax year. So if you are converting your own home into a rental, the tax bill steps up when the exemption comes off. And if you are buying from an owner-occupant, the tax figure on the listing may be an exempt figure. On a $260,300 house the exemption is worth roughly half the total tax bill, so this is not a rounding error — never underwrite a Louisiana rental from the seller's current tax bill. Compute it from the purchase price at the full rate.

2. The two expenses that decide whether it works

Property tax: the good news, and it is real

At 0.55%, the $260,300 median house owes $1,431.65 a year. Sources agree tightly here; there is no meaningful dispute about the statewide figure.

The dispute is at the parish level, and it is enormous. Rates run from about 0.13% in St. Helena and West Carroll parishes to about 0.85% in Orleans Parish — a spread of more than six to one. Our parish data has East Baton Rouge at 0.70% and Jefferson at 0.52%. Use the parish rate, not the state rate, and remember that Louisiana's assessed value is 10% of fair market value, so the millage rates you will see quoted are applied to a base one-tenth the size of the price.

Insurance: the number that decides everything

The reference figure is $5,344 a year at $300,000 of dwelling coverage with a $1,000 typical all-perils deductible.

Sources disagree materially here and you should know the range. Insure.com's August 2026 read at $300,000 dwelling / $100,000 liability puts Louisiana at $5,937. NerdWallet's figure at a larger $500,000 dwelling limit comes in far lower at $2,430, which is difficult to reconcile with the rest of the market and with the parish-level figures below. The honest statement is that credible Louisiana averages span roughly $2,430 to $5,937, that the higher figures are more consistent with what the parish data and the residual market show, and that a statewide average is a poor substitute for a quote in a state this stratified. This article uses $5,344 and shows what happens across the range.

At $5,344, the premium is $445.33 a month — 3.73 times the property tax, and 26.2% of the $20,400 of gross rent in Section 3's example.

Here is the cleanest way to see what it does. Take the identical $260,300 house at the identical rent and the identical 0.55% tax rate, and change only the insurance premium:

Insurance alone is worth 3.59 percentage points of cap rate across that range and $777.58 a month of cash flow. To put that in perspective, Section 3 shows that a full percentage point of mortgage rate is worth about $1,573 a year. The insurance spread inside this one state is worth $9,331 a year — roughly six points of rate.

Louisiana's premium trend is currently flat (0% year over year in our data), which after the post-Ida years is genuinely good news. It does not change the level. $5,344 is still $5,344.

Finally, 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 figures above are the right anchor for the level of cost in this state. They are not your quote.

The named storm deductible, and why it is a landlord's problem specifically

This is the single most important number on a Louisiana policy, and it is the one most likely to be skimmed.

Three distinct deductibles can appear on a Louisiana declarations page, and they are not interchangeable:

• A named storm deductible triggers as soon as the National Hurricane Center names a system that has reached tropical storm strength — 39 mph.
• A hurricane deductible triggers only at hurricane strength — 74 mph.
• A wind and hail deductible applies to wind damage from any source, named or not.

Named storm is the broadest trigger and therefore the most expensive to hold. All three are expressed as a percentage of the insured value of the dwelling, not of the damage. Typical settings run 2% to 5%.

On a $300,000 dwelling limit:

• 2% = $6,000
• 5% = $15,000
• 10% = $30,000

Louisiana construction runs about $210 per square foot to rebuild, so a 1,500 square foot house has a replacement cost near $315,000, on which those percentages become $6,300, $15,750, and $31,500.

Now put those against the property. Section 3 works out that this rental produces $8,075.55 of net operating income in a good year:

• A 2% deductible ($6,000) is 74.3% of a full year's NOI
• A 5% deductible ($15,000) is 185.8% of NOI — 1.86 years
• A 10% deductible ($30,000) is 371.5% of NOI — 3.71 years

You cannot pass any of it to a tenant. It is not a lease obligation, it is not billable, and it does not wait for rent to accumulate. Meanwhile the property is likely uninhabitable, so rent stops at the same moment the deductible comes due. That is exactly what loss-of-rents coverage exists for, and exactly why you should confirm you have it and how many months it pays.

Two statutory protections in your favor, both worth knowing:

1. An insurer generally cannot increase the named storm or hurricane deductible on a homeowners policy that has been in force more than three years.
2. A policyholder is subject to only one such deductible per hurricane season, not one per storm. In a season with two landfalls that is the difference between $6,000 and $12,000.

Under La. R.S. 22:1337 the Commissioner of Insurance prescribes a separate disclosure form for named storm, hurricane, and wind and hail deductibles, and for new policies effective after January 1, 2023 the insurer must provide that form and request the named insured's signature. If you are buying a Louisiana rental, that signed form is the document that tells you which of the three deductibles you actually have. Read it.

Two more Louisiana mechanics

Roof settlement. No Louisiana statute fixes whether a roof claim settles at replacement cost or actual cash value — roof age and the endorsement decide it, and in a market still absorbing the post-Ida carrier insolvencies, roof-age restrictions are aggressive. Replacement cost is standard on newer roofs; carriers commonly move roofs past roughly 15 years to actual cash value or to a roof payment schedule paying a declining percentage by age.

Louisiana has adjacent law worth naming but easy to overstate. La. R.S. 22:695(B) requires an insurer to restore fire-damaged property to its original condition, and Louisiana courts have used it to define what a replacement-cost policy owes generally — in Holloway v. Liberty Mutual Fire Ins. Co., 290 So.2d 791 (La. App. 1st Cir. 1974), the insurer had to replace an entire carpet rather than the damaged section. That is the nearest thing Louisiana has to a matching rule, and it is a fire statute stretched by caselaw, not a matching statute. Do not plan around it.

Nationally, in March 2026 the Federal Housing Finance Agency relaxed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac requirements so that ACV roof coverage can satisfy a lender rather than replacement cost being required — removing a constraint that had protected borrowers by default.

Louisiana pays you to harden the roof, and this is the most actionable lever in the state. La. R.S. 22:1483.2 requires a mandatory offer of a fortified roof endorsement. Department of Insurance Regulation 136 requires every property insurer to discount the hurricane portion of the premium by roughly 20% to 30% once a home is FORTIFIED, for policies issued or renewed from January 1, 2027. The Louisiana Fortify Homes Program pays grants of up to $10,000, and the state income tax deduction for voluntary retrofits was raised in 2025 to 50% of cost up to $10,000. More than 11,000 fortified roofs have been installed statewide, over 4,100 through that program. On a $5,344 premium, a 25% hurricane-portion discount is real money against the only expense line that matters here.

Flood is separate, always. No property policy anywhere in the United States covers flood. In Louisiana this is not a technicality — wind damage is a named-storm claim, storm surge and rising water are a flood claim, one storm routinely does both, and holding only one policy leaves half the loss uncovered. Being outside a mapped high-risk zone is a statement about a flood map, not about whether water can reach the house.

3. A full worked example

The property. A single-family house at the Louisiana statewide median of $260,300.

The rent — read this carefully. This site does not carry rent data. The $1,700 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 how sensitive the answer is to it.

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

Step 1 — income

• Gross scheduled rent: $1,700 x 12 = $20,400
• Vacancy loss: $20,400 x 8% = $1,632
• Effective gross income: $20,400 - $1,632 = $18,768

Step 2 — operating expenses

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

• Management: $18,768 x 10% = $1,876.80
• Property tax: $260,300 x 0.55% = $1,431.65
• Insurance: $5,344
• Maintenance: $20,400 x 5% = $1,020
• Capital reserve: $20,400 x 5% = $1,020
• Total operating expenses: $10,692.45

Expense ratio: $10,692.45 / $18,768 = 56.97% of collected rent — just above the 35% to 55% band most rentals land in. Insurance is 50.0% of that entire expense line. Half of everything this property spends is one bill.

Step 3 — net operating income and cap rate

• NOI = $18,768 - $10,692.45 = $8,075.55
• Cap rate = $8,075.55 / $260,300 = 3.10%

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 is the most common error in this whole exercise, and it makes two identical houses look like different investments because one buyer put more down.

Step 4 — debt service and cash flow

Loan: $260,300 x 75% = $195,225. At 7.00% over 30 years, principal and interest is $1,298.84 a month, or $15,586.08 a year.

• Annual cash flow = $8,075.55 - $15,586.08 = -$7,510.53
• Monthly cash flow = -$625.88
• Debt service coverage ratio = $8,075.55 / $15,586.08 = 0.52

Step 5 — cash-on-cash return

• Cash invested: $74,185.50 (Section 1)
• Cash-on-cash = -$7,510.53 / $74,185.50 = -10.12%

Rate sensitivity, since 7.00% was an assumption

• At 6.50%: P&I $1,233.95/mo, annual cash flow -$6,731.85
• At 7.00%: P&I $1,298.84/mo, annual cash flow -$7,510.53
• At 7.50%: P&I $1,365.04/mo, annual cash flow -$8,304.93

A full point of rate is worth about $1,573 a year. The insurance spread inside Louisiana is worth six times that.

The simplest version of the same finding

Add up the three bills a lender escrows:

• Principal and interest: $1,298.84
• Property tax: $1,431.65 / 12 = $119.30
• Insurance: $5,344 / 12 = $445.33
• Total: $1,863.47 a month

Against $1,700 of assumed rent, that is -$163.47 a month before vacancy, management, or a single repair. In Louisiana the naive "does the rent cover the mortgage" check already fails, and the reason it fails is that $445.33 insurance line. Swap in Mississippi's $3,218 average and the same check passes with $16 to spare — which tells you the house is fine and the state's insurance market is the problem.

4. The expenses people leave out

Vacancy, management, and capital reserves do not arrive as invoices. Nobody bills you for the month the house sits empty, or for the roof you will need in nine 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 $4,528.80 a year of net operating income — $1,632 of vacancy, $1,876.80 of management, $1,020 of reserve. They flatter the cap rate by 1.74 percentage points and hide 60% of the annual loss.

Look at what that does to the story you would tell yourself. At 4.84% and -$248 a month, this reads as a marginal deal that a rent increase or a slightly better rate could fix. At 3.10% and -$626 a month it is not marginal, and no rent increase you are going to get fixes it. Same house. Same day. The only difference is three lines nobody invoices you for.

Vacancy. Eight percent is roughly one month a year, which is what a single clean turnover costs between move-out and the next tenant's first full month. Setting it to zero assumes the house is never empty, including between tenants.

Management. Set it to zero and the return is paying you for your own labor rather than for the property. Self-managing this house saves $1,876.80 a year, lifting NOI to $9,952.35 and the cap rate to 3.82%, with cash flow improving to -$469.48 a month. It is a real saving. It does not fix the deal, and it stops being free the moment you stop being available — which in a hurricane state is precisely when you are least able to be.

Capital reserves. Roofs, HVAC, water heaters, and flooring have known lives, and in Louisiana the roof clock is shorter than the shingle warranty suggests. Section 2 explains that carriers start depreciating or declining roofs around 15 years, which means the insurance market will effectively force a replacement before the roof physically fails. 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 $2,603 each. Run that way: total operating expenses $13,858.45, expense ratio 73.84%, NOI $4,909.55, cap rate 1.89%, cash flow -$889.71 a month, cash-on-cash -14.39%, DSCR 0.31.

So the honest cap-rate range for this property is 1.89% to 3.10% depending on which reserve convention you choose. Choose one deliberately.

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 $30,716.66 a year, or $2,559.72 a month — 0.98% of purchase price per month. That is where the old "1% rule" comes from: at 2026 financing costs it is roughly the point at which a leveraged single-family rental stops bleeding. The assumed $1,700 rent is 0.65% of price.

The price this rent supports. Hold rent at $1,700 and solve for the price at which cash flow reaches zero with 25% down: about $145,421, roughly 56% of the statewide median. That price exists in Louisiana. It is not the median house, and it will not be in the parish you first thought of.

The down payment this price needs. Keep the $260,300 price and the $1,700 rent and solve for the loan the NOI can service: about $101,151 — which means roughly $159,149 down, or 61% of the price. At that point you have bought a 3.10% cap rate mostly with cash, which is a real decision but a different one.

The insurance line is what makes all three of those numbers so demanding. Cut the premium to Mississippi's $3,218 and the breakeven rent falls by about $177 a month; cut it to zero and it falls by $473 a month.

5. What actually varies by parish here

Louisiana property tax rates are not flat across parishes. The statewide 0.55% conceals a range from roughly 0.13% (St. Helena, West Carroll) to about 0.85% (Orleans) — more than a six-to-one spread, one of the widest intra-state ranges in the country. East Baton Rouge sits at 0.70%, Jefferson at 0.52%.

And it still is not the story. Take the identical $260,300 house at $1,700 rent and apply each parish's actual tax rate and average premium:

Read the Jefferson column again. The expense ratio is 94.95%. Ninety-five cents of every dollar of collected rent goes to operating costs before a single dollar of mortgage is paid. The property produces $948.64 of net operating income for the year — about $79 a month — on a house worth a quarter of a million dollars.

Jefferson Parish has the lower property tax rate of the two, by 18 basis points. That advantage is worth $468.54 a year. Its insurance disadvantage is worth $7,158 a year. The tax rate is noise; the premium is the entire signal. The NOI swing between the two parishes on the same house at the same rent is $6,689.46, or 2.57 points of cap rate.

Now run each parish at its own median price, which is the comparison an actual buyer faces:

• East Baton Rouge at $282,900 with an assumed $1,800 rent, 0.70% tax and $5,391 insurance: loan $212,175, P&I $1,411.61, cash in $80,626.50, NOI $8,353.50, cap rate 2.95%, cash flow -$715.49 a month, cash-on-cash -10.65%, DSCR 0.49.
• Jefferson Parish at $270,000 with an assumed $1,750 rent, 0.52% tax and $12,549 insurance: loan $202,500, P&I $1,347.24, cash in $76,950, NOI $1,335, cap rate 0.49%, cash flow -$1,235.99 a month, cash-on-cash -19.27%, DSCR 0.08.

At Jefferson's own median, a 2% named storm deductible of $6,000 is 4.5 years of net operating income. Not 4.5 months. Four and a half years of everything the property earns, due in a single event, while the rent has stopped.

Two further parish-level facts to check for a specific address, neither of which is in a parish average:

Municipal versus parish millage. Louisiana's homestead exemption does not apply to municipal taxes in most cities, and city millage is layered on top of parish millage. Whether a house sits inside or outside city limits changes the bill. For a rental this cuts the other way from how it reads: you had no exemption anyway, so what matters is simply the total combined millage on the parcel. Get it from the assessor for the actual parcel.

Flood zone. This is parcel-level, not parish-level, and in Louisiana it is the single largest unmodeled cost in an analysis. Get the flood quote before the inspection period ends. In much of the state the flood premium is a second insurance line of the same order of magnitude as the first.

One more thing about Louisiana Citizens

Louisiana Citizens Property Insurance Corporation is the state-created non-profit insurer of last resort. Investors routinely misunderstand what it is.

By statute Citizens must charge above the highest rate charged by a private insurer in the parish — commonly described as roughly 10% above. That is deliberate: it exists so Citizens does not compete with the voluntary market and so policyholders leave as soon as private coverage becomes available. It is not a cheap option you can plan around. If your analysis only works at a Citizens premium, your analysis does not work.

The enrollment trend is the encouraging part of the Louisiana story. After the 2020-2021 storm seasons and the resulting carrier insolvencies drove the policy count to a 2022 peak, it had fallen to roughly 114,000 policies as of June 2026 — a decline of nearly 20% from that peak. Citizens runs a formal depopulation program that transfers blocks of policies to private carriers on set assumption dates: Round 23 assumed April 1, 2026, and Round 24 is planned for December 1, 2026, with policyholders given 90 days to opt out and stay with Citizens.

If you buy a property currently on a Citizens policy, understand that a depopulation offer can arrive with a 90-day clock on it, and that the private carrier's terms — including the named storm deductible percentage — may not match what you underwrote.

6. Financing a rental is not financing a home

These are the 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 genuine exception is house hacking: a two-to-four-unit property you live in one unit of qualifies for owner-occupied programs, and in Louisiana it would also preserve the homestead exemption on your unit.

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; lenders pass those through as rate or points. The 7.00% modeled above is an assumption. Get a real quote.

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. In Louisiana you want those reserves regardless of the lender's requirement, because Section 2's named storm deductible is a $6,000 to $15,000 cash event that arrives at the same moment rent stops. Size the reserve against the deductible, not against the mortgage payment.

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 — commonly stated at or above 1.0 and often above 1.2.

Look at Section 3. This property's DSCR is 0.52, and even with vacancy, management, and reserves stripped out it is 0.81. In Jefferson Parish it is 0.06. It does not qualify at 75% loan-to-value on any of those readings. The DSCR underwriting is telling you the same thing the cash flow line is, in a different vocabulary.

Insurance is a closing condition, and in Louisiana it can be a deal-killer. A four-point inspection (roof, electrical, plumbing, HVAC) is routinely required to bind coverage, and a roof past 15 years can make a house effectively uninsurable at any price a deal survives. Get a bindable landlord quote for the specific address during your inspection period. Not after.

7. What to check before you buy in this state

Insurance, first, before anything else.

1. Get a bindable landlord policy quote for the specific address — not a homeowners quote, not a statewide average, not a rate from a comparison site.
2. Find out which of the three deductibles the policy carries: named storm (39 mph trigger), hurricane (74 mph), or wind and hail (any wind). They are not the same product and the premium difference is real.
3. Read the La. R.S. 22:1337 disclosure form. For policies effective after January 1, 2023 the insurer must give it to you and request your signature. It is the document that answers question 2 in writing.
4. Multiply the percentage into dollars against the dwelling limit and write that number down. It is your minimum cash reserve. At 2% on a $300,000 limit it is $6,000.
5. Confirm the policy carries loss of rents coverage and find out how many months it pays.
6. Get the roof age in writing and ask whether the roof settles at replacement cost, actual cash value, or on a payment schedule.
7. Price the FORTIFIED retrofit. La. R.S. 22:1483.2 requires a mandatory offer of the endorsement, Regulation 136 requires a roughly 20-30% hurricane-premium discount from January 1, 2027, the Fortify Homes Program grants up to $10,000, and the state tax deduction covers 50% of cost up to $10,000. On the only expense that matters in this state, this is the one lever you control.
8. Get a flood quote separately, whatever the flood map says.
9. If the property is on a Citizens policy, ask when the next depopulation round is and what the assuming carrier's deductible structure looks like.

Property tax, from the purchase price rather than the listing.

1. Recompute the tax at full market value with no homestead exemption, at the parish rate rather than the state rate. On a $260,300 house the exemption the seller had is worth roughly half the bill.
2. Confirm whether the parcel is inside municipal limits, since city millage stacks on parish millage.

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 0.98%. Knowing where you sit against that tells you immediately whether you are buying cash flow or betting on appreciation — and Louisiana's appreciation figure is 1.29% a year.

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

1. Do not take eviction timelines, notice periods, security-deposit handling, or late-fee rules from a blog — including this one. Louisiana is a civil law jurisdiction and does not work like its neighbors: residential leases are governed by the Louisiana Civil Code, Book III, Title IX ("Lease," articles 2668 and following), security deposits by the Louisiana Lessee's Deposit Act at La. R.S. 9:3251 and following, and eviction procedure by the Louisiana Code of Civil Procedure, articles 4701 and following. Read them at the Legislature's own site, https://www.legis.la.gov/legis/law.aspx, or have a Louisiana attorney walk you through them. Security-deposit handling in particular carries specific requirements that are easy and expensive to get wrong.
2. Check the city and parish separately: rental registration, inspection requirements, and short-term rental restrictions are local. New Orleans in particular regulates short-term rentals heavily and has revised the rules repeatedly.

The money and the tax treatment.

1. Size your cash reserves against the named storm deductible in dollars, not against a month of mortgage payments.
2. Ask a Louisiana CPA how the property will be taxed, including depreciation, passive activity loss rules, Louisiana state income tax treatment of rental income, and treatment 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 Louisiana 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. It also warns you when you have left out the expenses Section 4 is about, rather than letting them pass silently.

Because insurance is the number that decides a Louisiana deal, start with the Louisiana insurance premium estimator — it will get you closer to a real figure for a specific dwelling limit than a statewide average that credible sources put anywhere from $2,430 to $5,937, and it converts the 2% and 5% named storm deductibles into actual dollars rather than leaving them as percentages.

The Louisiana mortgage payment calculator gives you the principal and interest figure for the rate you are actually quoted, which Section 3 shows is worth about $1,573 a year per point — one-sixth of what the insurance spread inside this state is worth.

This article is general educational information about rental property arithmetic in Louisiana, 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. Insurance premiums, property tax assessments, and mortgage rates change and vary by property and by parish. Consult a Louisiana CPA, a licensed Louisiana insurance agent, and a Louisiana attorney before buying.