If you are a renter and are looking to see how much rent you can afford, a rental calculator is a perfect tool to easily calculate rental affordability. The most optimal rent to income ratio is 30%. What this means is the amount of rent you can afford, should not be more than 30% of your annual or monthly income. Another easy way to calculate this is to use the 40 times monthly rent method which essentially means, take your annual income and divide by 40. This will get your ideal monthly rent you can afford each month. Let’s use an example.
If you make $50,000 in income a year, 30% of that would $15,000 you can spend on rent each year. If we divide that by 12 months, your ideal monthly rent should be $1,250.
You can get to this same number by also using the 40 times month rent method and dividing $50,000 by 40 to get $1,250 in monthly rent you can afford. Notice that both these calculations come to the same number but the 40 times month rent method is much easier. Below are the top 5 rental calculators you can use to gain even more insight into your rent to income ratio so you can find the perfect rental.
Top 5 Rental Calculators
Number 1
Apartmentlist has a nifty rent calculator for renters that also calculates your monthly income, how much you have left over after the month and takes it one step further and adds a step for how many bedrooms you are looking for.
Number 2
Zillow offers a simple to use interface to calculate the affordability of rent based on your net monthly income, monthly debts and location. Once you enter your details, it spits out your debt to income ratio and gives your suggested properties within your area that match the affordability price.
Number 3
Forrent.com has a how much rent can I afford calculator that accomplishes the same as the others but instead of looking at monthly income, it calculates based on your annual income. This is a rather simple, less sophisticated way of looking at income to debt ratios but give you a little insight into what rent you can afford.
Number 4
rentlingo has a rental affordability calculator that also looks at annual salary but gives you the option to run this as monthly or weekly too. You can also add other sources of income like alimony or other investment income.
Number 5
The domu rent calculator is straightforward and gives the renter a range of low, mid and high based on the amount of annual income. The negative with this approach is it doesn’t take into consideration monthly expenses which is important in really seeing what the ratio should be.
