1% Rule Calculator

Can you still hit the 1% rule? All 50 states, measured

Short answer: not on a statewide median. Measuring HUD's FY2026 two-bedroom Fair Market Rent against Zillow's June-2026 median home value, zero of the 50 states reach 1.00% monthly rent-to-price. The best in the country is West Virginia at 0.546% per month — roughly 55% of the way to the rule. The median state sits at 0.417%, and only 8 states clear even 0.50%.

This does not mean 1% deals do not exist. It means they are no longer where the median is, so a rule calibrated to a market where they were common now functions as a filter that only unusual listings pass — sub-median houses, small multifamily, by-the-room rentals, and properties bought below list. Read the column below as "how hard is this state making you work", not as "no property here works".

These are screens. They are not underwriting.

The entire job of the 1%, 2% and 50% rules is to kill bad deals in ten seconds so you never spend an evening modelling them. That is a real and useful job. It is not the same job as deciding whether to buy something.

Every one of these rules is blind to the things that actually determine whether a rental works: your financing terms, your property tax rate, your insurance exposure, your vacancy rate, your capital expenditure runway, and your tax position. A deal can pass the 1% rule and still lose money every month at 7% interest in a high-property-tax county. A deal can fail it and still be the best asset you own, because it is in a market where the value comes from appreciation and rent growth rather than day-one yield.

So use the screen in the direction it works. A fail is a strong signal to move on quickly. A pass is not a signal to buy — it is a signal that the property has earned the twenty minutes it takes to underwrite properly.

• • The 1% rule: monthly rent ÷ all-in cost ≥ 1%. A gross-revenue test. Says nothing about expenses, debt, or taxes.
• • The 2% rule: the same ratio at ≥ 2%. On statewide medians nothing in the United States is close; it survives mostly as shorthand for "very high yield, probably very high risk or very low price point".
• • The 50% rule: assume non-debt operating expenses run about half of gross rent over a full hold. This is the most useful of the three because it is the one people get wrong in the optimistic direction — it forces vacancy and capital reserves into the model even though they do not bill monthly.
• • GRM (gross rent multiplier): price ÷ annual gross rent. The same information as the 1% rule expressed as a payback-style multiple. Lower is cheaper. A GRM of 8.33 is exactly the 1% rule; the 50-state median above is 19.99.
• • None of the four adjust for condition, location quality, tenant profile, rent growth, or your cost of capital.

It passed the screen. Now actually underwrite it.

A screen tells you a property is worth an hour. These are the calculations that spend the hour — in the order they answer the questions that kill deals.

• • Cap rate — strips out your financing entirely so you can compare the property against other properties rather than against your own loan.
• • Cash-on-cash return — the number that answers "what does my actual cash earn", which is what the 1% rule was a proxy for in the first place.
• • Rental property ROI, for your state — folds in that state's real property tax rate and insurance costs, which is exactly the layer these rules of thumb are blind to.
• • Seller net proceeds — the exit. A deal that only works if you never sell is not a deal, it is a position.

Every calculator linked here is on this site and free, with its own methodology and source disclosure. Property-tax and insurance figures on the state pages come from the same state dataset that produced the table above.

Where every number on this page comes from

Two of these are official published series. The rest are your inputs, or thresholds that define the named rules themselves. None of them are estimates we invented and none are attributed to a source that did not publish them.

What this page does NOT model

Published so you know exactly where the number stops being useful. Nothing below is a rounding error.

• • Your loan. The 1%, 2% and GRM screens are pre-financing by construction. Only the 50% rule section here subtracts debt service, and only from the principal-and-interest figure you type in.
• • Property taxes and insurance as line items. They are folded into the 50% rule's blanket half-of-rent assumption, which is a national heuristic, not your county's actual millage or your actual premium.
• • Vacancy, turnover, maintenance and capital expenditure as separate inputs — same reason. The 50% rule is a single blended assumption standing in for all of them.
• • Rent growth, appreciation, and inflation. Every figure on this page is a snapshot at today's rent and today's price.
• • Taxes on the income. Depreciation, passive-activity limits, the qualified business income deduction and depreciation recapture on exit are all absent, and they can move a rental's real return substantially in either direction.
• • Any claim about an individual property. The 50-state table is a median-vs-median ratio built from statewide aggregates; your specific market, neighbourhood and unit will differ, sometimes by a lot.
• • Achievable market rent. The table uses HUD Fair Market Rent because it is official, per-state and citable — not because it is what your unit will lease for. FMR is a 40th-percentile assistance standard and generally sits below asking rent for a renovated single-family home.