Rent Reality Calculator
See what an apartment actually costs after utilities, fees, parking, commuting, and other hidden expenses.
Rent reality
Enter a monthly rent to see what it really costs.
per month — $0 a year
Advertised rent onlyEverything is calculated in your browser. Nothing you type is sent anywhere.
The apartment
Where the money goes
| Cost | Per month | Per year |
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The first year
Move-in costs are one-time, so they are kept out of the recurring figure above. Spreading them across the first twelve months gives the effective monthly cost of year one, which is the fair number to compare against a lease you are already in.
Compare two apartments
Fill the form for one apartment and save it as A. Change the numbers for the second and save it as B. Both use the figures you entered, so the comparison is like for like.
| Apartment A | Apartment B |
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Keep this result
The summary is copied to your clipboard as plain text. Nothing is uploaded and no link is created, so your income never ends up in a URL.
Why advertised rent isn’t your real housing cost
The number on a listing is the base rent for the unit. It is the smallest of several numbers you will actually pay, and it is the only one anybody advertises.
What routinely sits outside it:
- Utilities. Electricity, gas, water, sewer and trash are separately metered or separately billed in most buildings. Ask what the unit averaged last year rather than guessing.
- Internet. Rarely included, and in buildings with a single wired provider you have no leverage on the price.
- Parking. Often a separate line, sometimes mandatory, and in dense cities frequently the largest single add-on.
- Mandatory fees. Amenity fees, package fees, pest control, trash valet. They are not optional in practice even when the lease presents them as services.
- Pet rent and pet fees. Monthly pet rent is separate from the one-time pet deposit, and both are separate from pet insurance.
- Laundry. A building with no in-unit machines costs real money every week.
- Renter’s insurance. Usually required by the lease. Cheap, but not free.
- The commute. Rent falls as you move away from where you work; fuel, maintenance and tolls rise. The listing prices one side of that trade and not the other.
- Move-in costs. Deposits, application and administrative fees, broker fees and the move itself land in a single month, before you have lived there for a day.
None of this is hidden in a dishonest sense. It is simply spread across a lease, a utility account, a parking agreement and a fuel card, so no one document ever shows the total. Adding it up is the whole job of this page.
This is an educational estimate based on figures you supply. It is not financial advice, and it is not a rental affordability decision on your behalf. What is comfortable depends on your savings, your job security, your health, your family and a dozen things a calculator cannot see.
Common questions
What costs are not included in advertised rent?
Advertised rent is the base rent for the unit. It usually excludes electricity, gas, water, sewer, trash, internet, parking, pet rent, mandatory amenity or building fees, laundry, and renter’s insurance. It never includes the cost of getting to work from that address, and it never includes the deposits and fees you pay before you move in. Adding those back is the difference between the number on the listing and the number that leaves your bank account.
How much more than the advertised rent should I expect to pay?
It depends entirely on what the building includes, so the honest answer is to add up your own figures rather than apply a rule of thumb. A unit with utilities included, free parking and a short walk to work can land within a few percent of the listed rent. A unit with separately metered utilities, paid parking, a mandatory amenity fee, pet rent and a long drive to work can run 30% to 40% above the advertised number. The gap is the point of this calculator.
Should I use gross income or take-home pay to judge whether rent is affordable?
Take-home pay, for the same reason it applies to buying. Rent is paid out of the money that reaches your account, not out of gross salary. The common rule that rent should stay under 30% is written against gross income, which quietly assumes you can spend money that was already withheld for federal tax, FICA, state tax, health premiums and retirement contributions. This calculator shows the ratio against gross income because that is the number most guidance uses, and it also shows what is left from take-home pay when you supply it.
Why does a cheaper apartment further away sometimes cost more?
Because the commute is a housing cost that the listing does not print. A round trip of 40 miles, five days a week, in a car returning 26 miles per gallon at $3.30 a gallon runs about $110 a month in fuel alone. Add maintenance, tyres and depreciation at a modest 10 cents a mile and the same commute costs roughly $197 a month. An apartment $150 a month cheaper on rent can therefore be more expensive overall, before counting the time it costs you.
How should I account for move-in costs?
Deposits, application fees, administrative fees, broker fees, pet deposits, furniture and the move itself are one-time costs, so they do not belong in your ongoing monthly figure. They still have to be paid. This calculator reports them separately and also spreads them across the first twelve months, which gives a first-year effective monthly cost. That is the number to compare against a lease you are already in, because it reflects what the first year of the new apartment genuinely costs you.
Does this calculator send my income or rent anywhere?
No. Every figure is calculated in your browser. Nothing you type is sent to a server, written to a URL, stored in a cookie, or recorded by analytics, because the site runs no analytics. Closing the tab discards everything.
Buying instead?
The same idea applies to a mortgage: the advertised payment is not the cost of ownership.
Compare this rent to buying →Carries the figures above into the rent vs buy calculator so you are comparing the true rent, not the advertised one. They travel in the part of the link after the #, which never leaves your browser.
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