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.
Louisiana guide
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.
Read the full Louisiana guide →23 min read · Updated 2026-08-28