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.
Wyoming guide
Wyoming looks, on the summary line, like one of the easiest states in the country to hold a rental in. No income tax. No transfer tax. No mortgage recording tax. Buyer closing costs around 0.76%, among the lowest anywhere. An effective property tax rate of 0.55%, tied for the lowest in this article's seven-state group. A premium of $1,896 that is below the national average.
Two of those numbers deserve harder scrutiny than they usually get, and both scrutinies go the same direction.
The property tax rate is measured on housing that gets an exemption your rental will not get. Wyoming's 25% Homeowner Property Tax Exemption, enacted by SF 69 of 2025, exempts a quarter of the first $1,000,000 of fair market value — and it requires the owner to occupy the home eight or more months a year. A rental is not eligible. Section 2 works out what that gap is plausibly worth, and it is not small.
The wind/hail deductible figure rests on reporting that does not actually separate Wyoming from Colorado. The 2% figure this article uses comes from carrier, agency, and contractor market sources that treat the Colorado-Wyoming corridor as one hail market. The Wyoming Insurance Department publishes no deductible-distribution survey. That is stated here rather than smoothed over.
And underneath both: Wyoming sits at the corner of Hail Alley — the Nebraska/Colorado/Wyoming junction that averages seven to nine hail days a year, the highest hail frequency in the country — with no FAIR Plan behind it.
A note before you start: this is general educational information about how rental property arithmetic works in Wyoming. It is not investment, tax, insurance, or legal advice, and it is not a recommendation about any property. Talk to a Wyoming CPA about tax treatment, a licensed Wyoming agent about a real quote, and a Wyoming attorney about anything contractual — which you will need anyway, because Wyoming requires one.
Read the full Wyoming guide →20 min read · Updated 2026-08-28