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.
Hawaii guide
Hawaii holds two national records that both flatter it, and both are wrong in the same way: the number you are shown has had something removed from it.
The cheapest headline homeowners premium in the United States — $1,125 a year at $300,000 of dwelling coverage. It is cheap because a standard Hawaii homeowners policy excludes hurricane damage entirely. Not a carve-out deductible; a peril the policy does not cover. Buying it back costs roughly $500 to $2,500 a year on a separate policy or endorsement.
The lowest effective property tax rate in the United States — 0.27%. It is low partly because the counties grant owner-occupants a home exemption of $50,000 to $260,000. A rental gets none of it, in any of the four counties.
If you take one thing from this article: in Hawaii, neither headline number describes what a landlord pays. Both need to be rebuilt from the specific property before you can say anything useful about the deal.
A note before you start: this is general educational information about how rental property arithmetic works in Hawaii. It is not investment, tax, insurance, or legal advice, and it is not a recommendation about any property. Hawaii layers several taxes on rental activity that are outside this article's scope — the general excise tax on rental income, and a transient accommodations tax with county surcharges on short-term stays. Those rates are not in our data and are not guessed at here. Talk to a Hawaii CPA about them, a licensed Hawaii insurance agent about a real quote, and a Hawaii real estate attorney about anything contractual.
Start with an honest warning about the price itself. Hawaii's statewide median is more disputed than any other state's in this dataset, and it is not a small disagreement:
Read the full Hawaii guide →22 min read · Updated 2026-08-28