DSCR Loan Calculator

Search for a DSCR loan calculator and nearly every result is a private lender's lead-generation tool — enter your numbers, get a "see your rate" button and a call from a loan officer. This DSCR loan calculator is different: no signup, no rate quote, no phone call. Just the math, computed two ways, entirely in your browser.

The debt service coverage ratio (DSCR) measures whether a rental property's own income covers its own debt payment, independent of your personal income. It's the core underwriting metric for DSCR loans — a category of investor financing that qualifies you on the property's cash flow rather than your W-2 or tax returns.

Enter your rent, vacancy assumption, operating expenses, and loan terms below to see your DSCR under both methods lenders actually use, whether you clear your lender's target, and the maximum loan this property's income would support.

There isn't one universal DSCR formula. Private DSCR lenders split roughly into two camps, so this calculator computes both:

• NOI method — the traditional commercial-underwriting standard. Net Operating Income (effective rent after vacancy, minus operating expenses) divided by the mortgage's principal-and-interest payment. This is the more rigorous, investor-grade calculation and the one used across commercial real estate more broadly.
• PITIA method — common among residential DSCR programs (the kind marketed to individual rental-property buyers). It divides gross rent by the full housing payment: Principal, Interest, Taxes, Insurance, and Association dues. No separate operating-expense deduction — the assumption is that taxes/insurance/HOA already cover the property-level costs.

The two methods can produce meaningfully different ratios on the same deal, so if a lender has quoted you a number, check which formula they used before comparing it to what you see here.

$2,000/month rent, 5% vacancy, $7,200/year operating expenses, $240,000 loan at 7.5% over 30 years, $3,000 tax + $1,500 insurance:

• Effective gross income: $2,000 × 12 × 95% = $22,800/yr
• NOI: $22,800 − $7,200 = $15,600
• Monthly P&I: $1,678.11 → Annual debt service $20,137
• DSCR (NOI method): 0.775 — fails a 1.0 target; the rent doesn't cover the mortgage payment alone, let alone expenses
• DSCR (PITIA method): 0.974 — closer to passing, but still short of the 1.25 target used in this example
• Max loan at the example 1.25 target DSCR: ~$148,700 — far below the $240,000 requested; this specific deal would need a bigger down payment, higher rent, or a lower rate to qualify

This example is deliberately a fail case, because it's the more instructive one — it shows exactly how a lender's math can reject a deal that looks fine on a rent roll. Raise the rent to $2,600/month with the same expenses and the NOI-method DSCR climbs to roughly 1.13, and to about 1.9 at $3,200/month — illustrating how sensitive DSCR is to rent, not just to the loan terms.

Most DSCR lenders use these rough bands:

DSCR loans generally don't require personal income or employment verification the way a conventional mortgage does, which is the whole appeal for investors with several properties or non-traditional income. In exchange, rates are usually higher than for a conventional investment-property loan, and most programs still expect a substantial down payment.