The Summer 2026 Rent-to-Payment Report: Where You Can Still Cash Flow With Real Estate

Foreword by Dave Meyer In a new era of real estate investing, the old rules of thumb no longer work. Back in the day of cheap homes and high rents, you could confidently use rent-to-price ratios (one month of rent divided by the purchase price) to estimate cash flow. If you hit the magical 1% target for rent-to-price or at least got close to it, you were good to go. Unfortunately, in today’s era of higher interest rates, insurance costs, taxes, and pretty much higher everything, those metrics no longer cut it. We need new metrics to identify good deals, so I created one and ranked the largest U.S. cities by it. I’m calling it the Rent-to-Payment Ratio, and the formula is to divide one month’s rent by one month’s total mortgage payment (principal, interest, taxes, and insurance, aka PITI). By comparing your total payment rather than purchase price, you better account for interest rate changes and how much insurance costs and taxes vary by state. After ranking every metro by rent-to-payment, we can establish new benchmarks for cash flow estimates here in 2026, and the gold standard is still around 1.0. Anything that hits 1.0 or higher should have strong cash flow, but 1.0 is not some...