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.
Mississippi guide
Mississippi looks, on the surface, like the easiest rental math in the South. The statewide median home price is $284,900, the effective property tax rate is a middling 0.65%, and the average homeowners premium at $300,000 of dwelling coverage is $3,218 — less than half what Louisiana pays and about 38% of Florida's.
Two things complicate that picture, and both of them are geography.
The first is that Mississippi's coastal counties are a genuinely different insurance market from the rest of the state — Harrison County averages $7,244, or 2.25 times the statewide figure. The second is more specific and worse: Mississippi's named-storm deductible applies per occurrence, not once per hurricane season. Florida and Louisiana both cap a policyholder at one storm deductible per year. A bill to do the same thing here, HB 1479, died in committee on February 4, 2025. So on the Gulf Coast, two landfalls in one season means two deductibles — $12,000 on a $300,000 dwelling limit at 2%, which Section 3 shows is 117% of a full year's net operating income on this article's example.
A note before you start: this is general educational information about how rental property arithmetic works in Mississippi. It is not investment, tax, insurance, or legal advice, and it is not a recommendation about any property. Mississippi insurance is priced per structure and per county — construction, roof age, elevation, and distance to open water move it enormously — and property tax is administered county by county at rates that vary more here than the statewide average suggests. Talk to a Mississippi CPA about tax treatment, a licensed Mississippi insurance agent about a real quote, and a Mississippi attorney about anything contractual.
The Mississippi statewide median home price is $284,900.
Read the full Mississippi guide →22 min read · Updated 2026-08-28