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Vacant rental unit cost calculator

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This works out what one vacant unit costs you — per day, and for the whole turn — and shows how much of that bill the usual formula (monthly rent ÷ 30 × days vacant) never reports. It runs in your browser; nothing is sent anywhere and there is nothing to sign up for.

Rent forgone is real, and it is not the whole bill. A unit between tenants is not simply earning nothing — it is also spending: cleaning, paint, repairs, the make-ready list, leasing labour, advertising, and the share of taxes, insurance, utilities and financing that carries on whether or not anyone lives there. The standard formula captures the first line and stops, which understates the cost and hides the part you could actually have shortened.

Run it once per property type rather than once for the portfolio. A furnished city one-bedroom, a walk-up and a scattered single-family home have different per-day costs and different turnover frequencies, and one blended number describes none of them.

The reasoning behind this, in full: How much does a vacant rental unit cost per day?.

Your numbers

Enter every figure in one currency — the calculator does no conversion, and the two markets in the article are not comparable anyway.

$

Your number. The $1,200 prefilled here is the assumption in the article's 60-unit Ohio example, not a benchmark.

Your number. The whole gap — move-out to lease start — not days on market. The article splits it into four clocks; only the third one, ready to application in hand, is the one leasing software touches.

$

Your number, from invoices: cleaning, paint, repairs, materials, leasing labour, advertising. $1,400 is the article's worked-example assumption, not a benchmark. The nearest published figure is the National Apartment Association's $292 per unit in leasing expenses for 2024 — leasing labour and advertising only, no cleaning, paint or repairs — so treat $292 as a floor for one line of the bill, not the cost of a turn.

$

Sourced default. The National Apartment Association's 2024 Income/Expense IQ puts total US operating expenses at $8,657 per unit for 2024. Replace it with your own figure if you have one; a Canadian operator should.

%

Your call — nobody publishes this. The share of taxes, insurance, utilities and financing that does not pause because the unit is empty. 40% is a placeholder so the page is useful before you type, not a benchmark.

$

Your number. A month free, a move-in credit, parking thrown in — whatever you gave up to get it leased. Leave it at 0 if you gave nothing.

What this vacancy costs

Cost per day —

Cost of this vacancy —

LineOver 0 days
Rent forgone (rent ÷ 30 = — a day) —
Turnover cost (once per turn, not per day) —
Carrying cost that did not pause (— a day) —
Concession—
Total for this turn—

The standard formula (rent ÷ 30 × days) reports —. It misses — — the total is — the figure it gives you.

How this is calculated

  • Rent forgone = monthly rent ÷ 30 × days vacant. Kept as its own line, in exactly the form the standard formula uses, so you can see what that formula reports and what it leaves out side by side.
  • Turnover cost is added once, not per day: it is the cost of the event, and it does not get cheaper because the unit re-let quickly.
  • Carrying cost = operating cost per unit per year ÷ 365 × the share you said keeps running × days vacant.
  • Concession is added as you entered it.
  • Cost per day = the total ÷ days vacant. It is higher than rent ÷ 30 by construction, which is the point.

What this deliberately does not do

  • It does not price the wrong tenant taken in a hurry. That cost is real and frequently the largest, and it is not quantifiable from inputs like these. A long vacancy is where standards quietly slip; the answer is to shorten the days, not lower the bar.
  • It does not multiply by turnover frequency. Severity and frequency are separate numbers. Count how many of your units turned in the last twelve months, by property type, and multiply this total yourself. Canadian operators can sanity-check against CMHC's published turnover series; there is no equivalent US national series, so a US operator is measuring it for the first time.
  • It does not compare markets. US and Canadian vacancy figures cover different universes over different survey periods and must never be averaged.

Sources

  • National Apartment Association, on its 2024 Income/Expense IQ — Momentum Management (published 22 December 2025): total operating expenses of $8,657 per unit and leasing expenses of $292 per unit for 2024. Both figures are US.
  • CMHC, 2025 Rental Market Report — the source of the published Canadian turnover rates referred to above. Not used as a default here.

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