Investment property calculator

The three numbers that decide it

What it takes to get in, what it costs to hold, and what it returns — with your state's actual duty schedule doing the acquisition maths rather than a percentage someone guessed.

An investment property is three separate questions wearing one coat, and most arguments about whether one is "good" happen because two people are answering different ones.

Can you get in? That is the cash figure, and it is bigger than the deposit — on the example above, stamp duty alone adds tens of thousands, and it is the one cost that changes completely depending on which side of a state border you buy. The calculator charges the investor rate: the general rate, without the home concessions an owner-occupier can get. Two concessions are open to investors as at October 2026 and are not modelled here: Victoria's temporary off-the-plan concession for a lot in a strata subdivision with common property (contracts signed before 21 April 2027) and the Northern Territory's house-and-land package exemption for a new home (contracts to 30 June 2027).

Can you hold it? That is the weekly figure, and it is the one that ends ownership early when it is wrong. Note what the refund does and does not do: it softens the loss, it does not remove it. A property costing $250 a week after tax costs $13,000 a year, every year, whatever the market is doing.

Is it working? That is the yield, and it is the number most often quoted with the least agreement about what it means.

Break-even rent is the honest version of "negatively geared"

Every negatively geared property has a rent at which it would stop costing anything, and naming it turns a vague position into a measurable gap. On the example above the property rents for $650 a week and breaks even at $827.24, so the rent has to rise by $177.24 a week before it pays for itself. That gap is not what it costs you to hold in the meantime: each extra dollar of rent is taxed, so the cost while the refund lasts is the after-tax $115.88 a week — and $234.62 from July 2027 if it is an established home bought now.

Income moves the figure as well. A larger share of the loss comes back as a refund at a higher marginal rate, so two people can buy the identical property and hold it at genuinely different costs. From 2027-28, in a year an established home bought after Budget night runs at a loss, that difference goes: the loss stops reducing anyone's salary.

Why we show three yields instead of one

The gap between the first and the last is the whole argument. On the example purchase the gross figure is 4.3% and the money-that-actually-left-your-account number is 3.2%. Neither is dishonest; they answer different questions, and a yield quoted without its denominator answers neither.

One warning the arithmetic insists on: while the net figure is positive, net-on-outlay is always the smallest of the three. Once it is negative, the order inverts — dividing a loss by a bigger number makes it look smaller. That is why this page labels each figure rather than calling one of them "the conservative one".