Cap rate, real cash flow, and return on the cash you put in — including the expenses most analyses leave out. Estimate only, not investment advice.
Estimates only — not investment, tax, or legal advice. How we calculate every figure
Estimated all-in monthly payment for a home price you have in mind.
What homeowners insurance costs in your state, and whether what you pay is out of line.
Income, savings, and debts in — max home price and qualification signal out.
A rental bought for $300,000 and sold seven years later for $394,780 nets $158,925 at closing — and owes about $24,753 of federal tax, $15,273 of it on depreciation you were required to take. Here is the math, why a sale with zero appreciation still owes tax, and the three clocks a fourth-quarter sale starts.
A leveraged rental makes money three ways and cash flow is only one of them. Here is what the other two are worth — and why the structure that maximises them is a bet, not a plan.
How to verify one specific rental deal: audit the seller's pro-forma line by line, comp a real rent, reassess the tax, age the systems, and price the offer the numbers actually support.
Set up basis correctly, claim the depreciation you are owed, survive the passive-loss rules, and know what the sale will cost — with every figure tied to the statute.
Connecticut guide
Connecticut asks you to pay three times.
You pay a high entry price — a $485,000 statewide median, and $708,500 in Fairfield County. You pay a high effective property tax rate — 1.81% statewide, and 2.40% in Hartford County, which is higher than New Jersey's statewide rate and the highest county figure anywhere in this seven-state series. And if the property is anywhere near Long Island Sound, you pay a third time in the form of a percentage hurricane deductible that can run to 5% of the dwelling limit within 2,600 feet of the water.
Insurance itself, at $2,050 a year at $300,000 of dwelling coverage, is the least of your problems here. Property tax is 4.28 times the insurance bill.
The clearest single number in this article is the Hartford County example in Section 5. It needs $4,235.95 a month of rent to break even on cash flow, against a $418,818 purchase price. That is 1.01% of price per month — the only property anywhere in this series that genuinely requires the full "1% rule," and it requires it because of the tax rate.
If you take one thing from this article: in Connecticut, get the town's mill rate before you get excited about the price. Connecticut levies at the municipal level, the spread between towns is enormous, and the county figures below are averages over towns that differ wildly.
A note before you start: this is general educational information about how rental property arithmetic works in Connecticut. It is not investment, tax, insurance, or legal advice, and it is not a recommendation about any property. Connecticut has no county governments in the ordinary sense — property tax is assessed and levied town by town, and the county effective rates used here are averages, not bills. Talk to a Connecticut CPA about tax treatment, a licensed Connecticut insurance agent about a real quote, and a Connecticut real estate attorney about anything contractual. Connecticut is an attorney-closing state, so you will have one.
Read the full Connecticut guide →21 min read · Updated 2026-08-28