Calculator
Rent affordability calculator
Enter your gross income to find your maximum affordable rent. Choose the 30% guideline, the 3× rule, or a custom ratio.
Before taxes. Landlords always use gross income.
Car loans, student loans, credit card minimums, etc.
Most landlords use 30% (the 3× rule). Adjust to match your situation.
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Rent-to-income rules that landlords use
Screening standards are stated as income multiples of rent, because the multiple the landlord uses decides what an applicant can claim they afford. Check the standard against your own before you price a unit or screen an inquiry.
The 30% rule, for tenants
The 30% rule says gross household income should be no more than 30% committed to rent, the threshold HUD calls cost-burdened. It is tenant-centric: no state enforces it as a screening standard, but applicants apply it to you when deciding what to inquire about. A $75,000 gross household income implies $1,875 per month max “affordable” rent under this rule.
The 3x rule, for landlords
The 3x rule requires gross monthly income of at least three times the rent. It is the landlord-side mirror of the 30% rule (at exactly 3x, the tenant spends about 33% on rent). Most large managers use 2.5x to 3x; the higher the multiple, the more it screens out of expensive metro housing markets, and the more you should document the business reason for it.
Where the math actually matters
These multiples decision real money only at two moments: the inquiry (“can I afford this unit?”) and the denial (“your income is 2.6x, policy is 3x”). Whatever multiple you set, write it into your rental criteria and apply it the same to every applicant. In practice, inconsistent thresholds are where fair-housing complaints start, not the threshold itself.
Frequently asked questions
Is the 3x rent rule a law?
No. No statute sets an income multiple; it is private screening policy each landlord writes into their own rental criteria. What law does govern is that you apply your published criteria uniformly to every applicant, and that your criteria do not screen out a protected class more harshly without a documented business reason.
Gross income or net income?
Almost every landlord uses gross (pre-tax) income, because it is what paystubs, offer letters, and tax returns show. If you accept net income for self-employed applicants, say so in the criteria and convert consistently; mixing gross for one applicant and net for another is an inconsistency that gets flagged as a fair-housing issue.
How do roommates or co-signers count?
Most criteria add all adult occupants' gross incomes for the multiple, and treat a co-signer separately at a higher multiple (commonly 5x the rent for the co-signer alone). Whatever you do, the rule must be the same for every application and spelled out before you collect application fees.
Does a Section 8 voucher count as income for the 3x rule?
In most states you must count lawful source of income including vouchers, which changes the math: the tenant portion (what the voucher does not cover) is what the multiple applies to, not the contract rent. A wage-like threshold applied to the full contract rent is a source-of-income violation in jurisdictions that ban it, and is increasingly enforced against.
Can I just charge a higher security deposit instead of enforcing the income rule?
You can only do that if your state law allows the extra deposit and your criteria says which applicants qualify for it. Deposits-as-income-substitute is a legitimate trade-off under most deposit statutes, but it cannot be an ad-hoc case-by-case offer: variable deposits by applicant is the classic disparate-treatment scenario.
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