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.
New Hampshire guide
New Hampshire is the most tax-dominated rental market in this series, and it is not close.
The effective property tax rate is 1.48%, which SmartAsset calls the fourth-highest in the country. On the statewide median that is $8,498.16 a year. Against the same house's insurance premium of $1,380, the tax bill is 6.2 times larger. It is 53.6% of the entire operating expense line and 27.2% of gross rent — before a single other expense.
That is the trade New Hampshire made. No income tax, no sales tax, and the money comes from real property instead. For a resident that arithmetic can come out well. For a landlord holding a leveraged single-family house, it means the largest line in the analysis is one you cannot shop, negotiate, or mitigate.
If you take one thing from this article: in New Hampshire, the town's mill rate is the number that decides the deal. Section 5 shows the county spread; town-level variation inside a county is larger still.
There is a second, quieter thing, and for once it is in a landlord's favour: New Hampshire has no general homestead exemption. In Idaho, Hawaii, Maine, and Vermont, the published effective rate is measured after an owner-occupant break that a rental does not get, so the listing's tax bill understates yours. In New Hampshire there is no such break to lose. The 1.48% is the rate.
A note before you start: this is general educational information about how rental property arithmetic works in New Hampshire. It is not investment, tax, insurance, or legal advice, and it is not a recommendation about any property. Talk to a New Hampshire CPA about tax treatment, a licensed New Hampshire insurance agent about a real quote, and a New Hampshire real estate attorney about anything contractual — in this state a settlement attorney is customary.
Read the full New Hampshire guide →21 min read · Updated 2026-08-28