Rental Property in Montana: What the Numbers Actually Look Like

Two things about Montana surprise people, and both change a landlord's arithmetic.

The first is good news, and you have to file for it. Montana's 2025 property tax reform (HB 231 and SB 542) created a Homestead Rate beginning with the 2026 tax year — a reduced, tiered rate that applies to owner-occupied principal residences and to qualifying long-term rentals occupied or leased at least seven months a year. Second homes, short-term rentals, and non-residential property pay the higher rate. Roughly 80% of Montana homes saw a net tax cut, averaging over $500 a year. It is not automatic: it must be affirmatively claimed with the Department of Revenue each year, and the 2026 deadline was March 1, 2026.

Montana is one of very few states where a long-term rental is treated like a home for property tax purposes. It is also a state where forgetting a form moves you into the penalty tier.

The second is that the percentage deductible on a Montana policy is for hail, not wildfire. Insurify's 2026 hail analysis puts Montana's average wind/hail deductible at 1.10% of dwelling coverage — $3,786 — high enough to sit in the same band as the Plains hail states. Montana recorded roughly 20 hail events in 2025, some stones reaching four inches. Wildfire, meanwhile, is not managed with a deductible at all. It is managed with non-renewal, and there is no FAIR Plan to catch what falls through.

If you take one thing from this article: file the Homestead Rate claim, and read the wind/hail deductible off the declarations page. Those are the two Montana-specific numbers, and neither is in a listing.

A note before you start: this is general educational information about how rental property arithmetic works in Montana. It is not investment, tax, insurance, or legal advice, and it is not a recommendation about any property. Talk to a Montana CPA about tax treatment, a licensed Montana insurance agent about a real quote, and a Montana real estate attorney about anything contractual.

1. What a rental costs to buy here

The statewide median sale price is $527,848 (Redfin, June 2026, up 5.8% year over year). Zillow's smoothed home-value index reads $467,919 as of April 2026; that is a value index rather than a median sale price, so it is not used here, though both point the same direction.

County medians diverge sharply:

• Yellowstone County (Billings): $373,300, effective property tax rate 0.82%, average insurance $3,654
• Missoula County: $549,250, effective property tax rate 0.85%, average insurance $2,570

The cash you actually need

Montana charges no real estate transfer or deed tax. A Realty Transfer Certificate (Form RTC) must be filed with the county Clerk and Recorder when a deed is recorded, but that is a disclosure filing for assessment purposes, not a tax.

• Closing costs: 1.9% to 2.9%. Rocket Mortgage puts the Montana buyer average near 2.40%, excluding agent commissions. This article uses 2.4% — the lowest closing-cost figure of any state in this series.

On the $527,848 statewide median at 25% down:

• Down payment: $527,848 x 0.25 = $131,962
• Loan amount: $395,886
• Closing costs: $527,848 x 2.4% = $12,668.35
• Total cash in: $144,630.35

Montana's transaction costs are genuinely light. A Delaware-style buyer transfer tax share on this purchase would be roughly $10,600; a Vermont non-principal-residence rate would be roughly $19,100. Here it is nothing.

On price growth, FHFA's purchase-only index has Montana at +0.22% year over year through Q1 2026, ranked 38th among states. That is functionally flat, and it is the most important sentence in this section: an analysis that needs appreciation to rescue the cash flow is betting against the last published print.

2. The two expenses that decide whether it works

Property tax: a genuine reform, and a form you have to file

SmartAsset puts Montana's effective property tax rate at 0.69%. Cross-checks read 0.72%, 0.79%, and — from the Tax Foundation — 0.61%, possibly reflecting data collected before the 2025-2026 reform took effect. Sources cluster 0.61% to 0.79%; our data uses 0.72% as a mid-cluster figure, and explicitly flags that this number may shift as more 2026 data lands.

On the $527,848 example at 0.72%: $527,848 x 0.72% = $3,800.51 a year, or $316.71 a month.

That is 13.8% of gross rent and 31.9% of the operating expense line.

Now the reform, because it is the part that is different here. Montana does not have a traditional flat-dollar homestead exemption. HB 231 and SB 542 replaced the old structure with a tiered Homestead Rate beginning in the 2026 tax year, and — unusually — the qualifying categories are:

• Owner-occupied principal residences
• Qualifying long-term rentals, defined as occupied or leased at least seven months a year

Everything else — second homes, short-term rentals, non-residential property — pays the higher rate.

Three consequences a landlord should act on:

1. A long-term rental is on the favourable side of this line. That is genuinely unusual. In Idaho, Hawaii, Maine, and Vermont, a rental is on the wrong side of the equivalent rule. In Montana it is not, provided you meet the seven-month test.
2. You must claim it, every year. The reform is an application, not an automatic classification, and the 2026 deadline was March 1, 2026. Missing the filing is how a qualifying property ends up taxed as a second home.
3. A short-term rental does not qualify. If part of your plan is summer nightly rental in a resort county, the tax classification changes with the use, and the arithmetic below no longer describes your property.

The effective-rate figure used in Section 3 reflects the post-reform statewide picture as measured. It is a statewide average across classifications, and your specific parcel's rate depends on your classification and your county's mill levies. Get the actual figure from the Department of Revenue and the county, and confirm your Homestead Rate claim is on file.

Insurance: expensive, and less precisely known than most

The reference figure is $2,829 a year at $300,000 of dwelling coverage with a $1,000 all-perils deductible. Read that as a reference-tier midpoint rather than a measurement, because the underlying sources disagree by about 32% and split into two credible pairs rather than one clear winner:

• Insurance.com: $3,221 on exactly $300,000 dwelling / $300,000 liability / $1,000 deductible
• Insurify: $2,399 for 2025 rising to a projected $2,437 by end-2026 — but Insurify does not publish Montana's average dwelling limit, so its coverage basis is the state average rather than a stated $300,000, and cannot be corrected for. That is the main uncertainty in this figure.
• ValuePenguin: $2,490 at $350,000 dwelling coverage
• NerdWallet: $3,765 at $400,000 dwelling coverage

The full spread is $2,399 to $3,765, wider than for most states in this dataset. Here is what that uncertainty is worth. Take the identical house at the identical rent and change only the insurance premium:

The uncertainty alone is worth 0.26 points of cap rate and $113.83 a month. That is not a rounding error, and it is the reason this article says "get a quote" rather than "budget $2,829."

Statewide averaging also hides an unusually wide internal spread. A home in the wildland-urban interface near the Bitterroot or the Flathead prices nothing like a home in Billings or Great Falls — and, as Section 5 shows, not in the direction most people assume.

The wind and hail deductible, and why it is a landlord's problem specifically

Montana is usually thought of as a wildfire state, and it is. But the separate percentage deductible that actually appears on Montana declarations pages is a wind and hail deductible.

Insurify's 2026 hail analysis puts Montana's average wind/hail deductible at 1.10% of dwelling coverage — $3,786 — which places it in the same band as the Plains hail states, well above what a mountain-West state is usually assumed to carry. Montana recorded roughly 20 hail events in 2025, with some stones reaching four inches.

On a $300,000 dwelling limit a 1% wind/hail deductible is $3,000, against a $1,000 flat deductible for every other peril.

Two qualifications matter enormously for a landlord:

First, this is carrier underwriting practice, not statute. Montana has no mandated offer, no buy-back requirement, and — critically — no storm-naming trigger. In Florida or Delaware, the percentage deductible only fires when the National Weather Service names or warns on a storm. In Montana, an ordinary summer hailstorm invokes it. There is no rare-event framing to hide behind: the trigger is a common weather occurrence in a state that saw twenty of them last year.

Second, wildfire is handled entirely differently. Rather than a percentage wildfire deductible, Montana carriers have responded to wildfire exposure through non-renewal, tighter underwriting near open land, defensible-space requirements, and outright withdrawal. About 29% of Montana properties face high wildfire risk, and nearly 70% of the state's recorded wildfires have occurred in the last 26 years. That is why Montana's availability problem is sharper than its deductible problem.

Put the deductible against the property. Section 3 works out that this rental produces $13,463.29 of net operating income in a good year:

• A 1% wind/hail deductible ($3,000) is 22% of a full year's NOI
• The statewide-average 1.10% on a $344,000 dwelling limit — Insurify's $3,786 — would be 28% of a full year's NOI

You cannot pass any of it to a tenant. It is not a lease obligation and it is not billable. And unlike a hurricane deductible, this one can plausibly fire more than once in a hold period, because there is nothing rare about hail in eastern Montana.

There is no state backstop. This is confirmed, not assumed: Montana has no FAIR Plan, no state windstorm or wildfire pool, and no state-run insurer of last resort of any kind. A Montana homeowner who cannot place coverage in the admitted market has exactly one route: the surplus-lines market, whose eligible-carrier list the Montana Commissioner of Securities and Insurance maintains at https://csimt.gov/insurance/surplus-lines/.

That is a materially worse position than a FAIR-Plan state, for three specific reasons:

• Surplus-lines policies are not backed by the Montana guaranty association
• They are not subject to the same form and rate review
• In high-wildfire-risk placements they carry deductibles far above admitted-market norms

Creating a FAIR Plan on the Colorado model has been discussed — the Environmental Quality Council took a Consumer Federation of America presentation on wildfire and homeowners insurance in March 2026 — but nothing has been enacted.

Roof settlement, and a Montana wrinkle worth understanding. No Montana statute or regulation sets a roof settlement basis. Montana's matching protection is a regulator's stated position rather than codified law, and that distinction matters. In advisory memoranda issued August 20, 2003 and July 6, 2009, the Montana Commissioner of Securities and Insurance took the position that materials replaced in a covered loss must be replaced with similar quality, kind, texture, and colour so there is a reasonable match with existing materials — and where such materials are unavailable, existing materials must be replaced to achieve a match, for both interior and exterior losses.

That is the Commissioner's opinion, published as guidance. It is not a statute or an administrative rule, and no Montana matching caselaw is reported. It is better than nothing and weaker than a rule.

What decides the payout in practice is roof age and the endorsement attached. Montana sits at the northern end of the hail belt, and carriers here commonly attach a roof surface payment schedule or an actual-cash-value wind-and-hail roof endorsement that depreciates by age — a 15-year-old architectural shingle roof might be paid at roughly 40 to 60 cents on the dollar before the deductible. Cosmetic-damage exclusions for hail-dented but functional metal roofing are also common here, and metal roofing is common in Montana.

Stack those three: a 1% deductible, a depreciating roof schedule, and a cosmetic-damage exclusion. A hail claim on an older metal roof in Billings can produce a payout of zero against a real repair bill.

Rebuild cost. Montana construction runs about $220 per square foot, within a published band of $160 to $280 — a band Montana shares with eight other Mountain and Plains states, which makes it a regional bucket rather than a Montana survey. On an 1,800 square foot house that is a replacement cost near $396,000, well above a $300,000 dwelling limit.

3. A full worked example

The property. A single-family house at the Montana statewide median of $527,848, held as a long-term rental on a lease of at least seven months.

The rent — read this carefully. This site does not carry rent data. The $2,300 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
• Property management: 10% of collected rent
• Repairs and maintenance: 5% of gross scheduled rent
• Capital reserve: 5% of gross scheduled rent
• Property tax at the 0.72% statewide effective rate, which is an average across classifications rather than your parcel's rate
• Insurance at $2,829, which Section 2 explains is a midpoint of a wide range
• Financing: 25% down, 30-year fixed at 7.00% — an assumption, not a quote
• No HOA, no defensible-space maintenance contract, no plowing contract

Step 1 — income

• Gross scheduled rent: $2,300 x 12 = $27,600
• Vacancy loss: $27,600 x 8% = $2,208
• Effective gross income: $27,600 - $2,208 = $25,392

Step 2 — operating expenses

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

• Management: $25,392 x 10% = $2,539.20
• Property tax: $527,848 x 0.72% = $3,800.51
• Insurance: $2,829
• Maintenance: $27,600 x 5% = $1,380
• Capital reserve: $27,600 x 5% = $1,380
• Total operating expenses: $11,928.71

Expense ratio: $11,928.71 / $25,392 = 46.98% of collected rent — inside the 35% to 55% band most rentals land in. Insurance is 23.72% of that expense line and property tax 31.86%.

Step 3 — net operating income and cap rate

• NOI = $25,392 - $11,928.71 = $13,463.29
• Cap rate = $13,463.29 / $527,848 = 2.55%

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: $527,848 x 75% = $395,886. At 7.00% over 30 years, principal and interest is $2,633.84 a month, or $31,606.08 a year.

• Annual cash flow = $13,463.29 - $31,606.08 = -$18,142.79
• Monthly cash flow = -$1,511.90
• Debt service coverage ratio = $13,463.29 / $31,606.08 = 0.43

Step 5 — cash-on-cash return

• Cash invested: $144,630.35 (Section 1)
• Cash-on-cash = -$18,142.79 / $144,630.35 = -12.54%

Rate sensitivity, since 7.00% was an assumption

• At 6.50%: P&I $2,502.27/mo, annual cash flow -$16,563.95
• At 7.00%: P&I $2,633.84/mo, annual cash flow -$18,142.79
• At 7.50%: P&I $2,768.09/mo, annual cash flow -$19,753.79

A full point of rate is worth about $3,189.84 a year — 13% more than the insurance premium, and 84% of the property tax bill.

The simplest version of the same finding

Add up the four bills a lender escrows:

• Principal and interest: $2,633.84
• Property tax: $3,800.51 / 12 = $316.71
• Insurance: $2,829 / 12 = $235.75
• Total: $3,186.30 a month

Against $2,300 of assumed rent, that is -$886.30 a month before vacancy, management, or a single repair.

The reason is not any one expense. It is the ratio: a $527,848 house against a $2,300 rent is a rent-to-price ratio of 0.44%, and at 7% money that is not close.

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 $6,127.20 a year — $2,208 of vacancy, $2,539.20 of management, $1,380 of reserve. They flatter the cap rate by 1.16 percentage points and hide 34% of the annual loss.

Note the left-hand expense ratio of 29.02%, below the 35% to 55% band. Any analysis landing there on a single-family rental is missing inputs, and here you can see which.

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. Montana carries a specific tension here: in the resort counties, the highest-rent months are exactly the months a short-term listing would earn most — which is precisely how a property drifts out of the seven-month long-term test and into the higher tax classification. Vacancy and tax classification are the same decision in Montana, and neither shows up on a listing.

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 $2,539.20 a year, lifting NOI to $16,002.49 and the cap rate to 3.03%, with cash flow improving to -$1,300.30 a month and DSCR to 0.51. It is a real saving, and in a state with Montana's distances it is a real job.

Capital reserves. Roofs, HVAC, water heaters, and flooring have known lives, and Montana shortens the roof clock from two directions at once. Hail damages roofs on a schedule nobody controls, and Section 2 explains that carriers commonly depreciate roof payouts by age and exclude cosmetic hail damage outright — so a Montana roof frequently costs the owner money without producing a claim. Defensible-space work near open land is a further recurring cost with no line in any standard model.

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 $5,278.48 each. Run that way: total operating expenses $19,725.67, expense ratio 77.68%, NOI $5,666.33, cap rate 1.07%, cash flow -$2,161.65 a month, DSCR 0.18.

So the honest cap-rate range for this property is 1.07% to 2.55% 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 $52,521.36 a year, or $4,376.78 a month — 0.83% of purchase price per month. The assumed $2,300 rent is 0.44% of price, or 53% of what the property needs.

The price this rent supports. Hold rent at $2,300 and solve for the price at which cash flow reaches zero with 25% down: about $257,372, roughly 49% of the statewide median.

The down payment this price needs. Keep the $527,848 price and the $2,300 rent and solve for the loan the NOI can service: about $168,636 — which means roughly $359,212 down, or 68% of the price. That is among the highest figures in this series.

And remember the last line of Section 1: +0.22% appreciation. In a state where prices moved a fifth of a percent, the "it will grow into it" argument does not have a print to point at.

5. What actually varies by county here

Montana's county story is the most counterintuitive in this series, and it is worth walking through carefully.

Take the identical $527,848 house at $2,300 rent, hold the tax rate at the statewide 0.72%, and change only the insurance premium to each county's own average:

Billings insures 42% higher than Missoula, a $1,084 a year difference worth 0.21 points of cap rate — and it runs opposite to the mental model most out-of-state investors bring to Montana. Missoula County sits in the western mountains where wildfire risk is concentrated. Yellowstone County sits on the eastern plains where the hail is.

That is Section 2's point in county form: Montana's wildfire exposure is priced through availability and underwriting, while its hail exposure is priced into the premium and the deductible. The premium map therefore looks like a hail map, not a wildfire map. It does not follow that a Missoula wildland-urban-interface property is cheaper to own — it follows that its risk shows up somewhere the county average cannot see, in non-renewals and surplus-lines placements.

Now run each county at its own median price and its own tax rate:

• Yellowstone County at $373,300 with a $1,900 assumed rent, 0.82% tax and $3,654 insurance: NOI $9,883.34, cap rate 2.65%, cash flow -$1,039.07 a month, cash-on-cash -12.19%, DSCR 0.44.
• Missoula County at $549,250 with a $2,400 assumed rent, 0.85% tax and $2,570 insurance: NOI $13,727.77, cap rate 2.50%, cash flow -$1,596.65 a month, cash-on-cash -12.73%, DSCR 0.42.

Billings wins on cap rate, cash flow, and DSCR once its lower price is included — the insurance disadvantage is smaller than the price advantage. In Montana, as in Idaho, the county decision is dominated by price-to-rent, not by either operating expense.

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

Wildfire risk score for the parcel, and current carrier appetite. With no FAIR Plan, an uninsurable property is an unfinanceable property. Check this before the inspection period ends, not after.

Your Homestead Rate classification. County mill levies vary, and your classification determines which rate they apply to. Confirm both with the Department of Revenue and the county before you underwrite.

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.

Conforming loan limit. Both Yellowstone and Missoula carry the 2026 one-unit baseline of $832,750, well above both county medians.

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 Montana, size them for the wind/hail deductible and for the possibility of a non-renewal forcing a surplus-lines placement mid-hold at a materially higher premium. There is no FAIR Plan to cap that outcome.

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 0.43, and even with vacancy, management, and reserves stripped out it is 0.62. It does not qualify at 75% loan-to-value. The DSCR underwriting is telling you the same thing the cash flow line is.

Insurability is a closing condition. With no residual market and active wildfire underwriting, "we will sort the insurance out later" is not a plan in Montana. Get a bindable landlord quote for the specific address during your inspection period, and ask whether it is an admitted-market or surplus-lines placement.

7. What to check before you buy in this state

The Homestead Rate, first, because it has a deadline.

1. Confirm the property's current classification with the Montana Department of Revenue, and confirm what it will be under your intended use.
2. Confirm you can meet the seven-month occupancy or lease test for a qualifying long-term rental — and that your business plan does not quietly break it.
3. Diary the annual claim deadline. The 2026 deadline was March 1, 2026. This is not automatic.
4. If any part of the plan is short-term rental, price the higher classification, not the one in Section 3.

Property tax, from the county.

1. Get the county's mill levies and apply them to your actual classification. The 0.72% statewide effective rate is an average across classifications.
2. Recompute the tax from the assessment rather than the seller's bill, and remember the reform is recent enough that older bills may not reflect the current structure.

Insurance, and specifically whether you can get any.

1. Get a bindable landlord policy quote for the specific address — a dwelling fire form with loss-of-rents coverage, not a homeowners quote and not a statewide average. Section 2 explains why the statewide average is a wide range rather than a number.
2. Ask whether it is an admitted-market or surplus-lines placement. Surplus lines carries no Montana guaranty-association backing and no equivalent form and rate review.
3. Read the wind and hail deductible off the quote and convert it to dollars. At 1% of a $300,000 limit that is $3,000, and an ordinary hailstorm invokes it.
4. Ask whether the policy carries a cosmetic damage exclusion for hail, and whether there is a roof surface payment schedule that depreciates by age.
5. Get the property's wildfire risk score and ask what defensible-space work would change it.
6. Confirm the policy carries loss of rents and find out how many months it pays.
7. Confirm the dwelling limit against replacement cost, not purchase price. At $220 per square foot, an 1,800 square foot house is near $396,000 to rebuild.
8. Get a flood quote separately, whatever the flood map says. No property policy anywhere covers flood.

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 0.83% and the assumption was 0.44%. In Montana this is the test that fails first.
3. Do not lean on appreciation. The last published figure was +0.22%.

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. Montana residential tenancies are governed by the Montana Residential Landlord and Tenant Act of 1977, Title 70, Chapter 24 of the Montana Code Annotated. Read it at the Legislature's own site, https://leg.mt.gov/, or have a Montana real estate attorney walk you through it. Security-deposit handling in particular carries specific notice requirements that are easy to get wrong and expensive to get wrong.
2. Check the city and county separately: rental registration, inspection requirements, and short-term rental restrictions are local, and the resort communities have legislated actively.

The money and the tax treatment.

1. Ask a Montana CPA how the property will be taxed, including depreciation, passive activity loss rules, and treatment on sale. Montana levies a state income tax, so this conversation matters.

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 — and in Montana, with a real insurance quote rather than a statewide midpoint, because Section 2 shows the published range spans 0.26 points of cap rate on its own.

The Montana 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.

The Montana insurance premium estimator will get you closer to a real figure for a specific dwelling limit than the $2,829 midpoint, and it converts the wind/hail percentage deductible into actual dollars rather than leaving it as a percentage.

The Montana mortgage payment calculator gives you the principal and interest figure for the rate you are actually quoted, which Section 3 shows is worth about $3,190 a year per point.

This article is general educational information about rental property arithmetic in Montana, 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. Montana's 2026 property tax structure is recently reformed and the effective rate used here is a mid-cluster statewide figure that may shift as more data becomes available. Insurance premiums, property tax assessments, and mortgage rates change and vary by property. Consult a Montana CPA, a licensed Montana insurance agent, and a Montana real estate attorney before buying.