Worksheet
DSCR calculator for LA and Inland Empire rentals
DSCR is monthly rent divided by the full monthly payment (principal and interest, taxes, insurance and HOA). Enter your rent, the LA or Inland Empire cost layer, a loan amount and the rate from your own quote, and the worksheet returns the ratio with a plain-English reading. It never suggests a rate.
Your ratio
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Enter rent, the cost layer, a loan amount and a rate. The ratio appears here along with the payment it is measured against.
What the ratio leaves out
DSCR measures the property against its financing, not against your life. Maintenance, vacancy, management, utilities a tenant does not pay, and one-time turnover costs sit outside the number. A file that clears the line can still be a thin deal in practice.
Reserve requirements, leverage limits and the minimum ratio a lender will accept vary by program. Those are quoted per scenario, not published here.
What the calculator does
It reproduces the arithmetic a DSCR lender uses. Gross monthly income is divided by PITIA: principal and interest, property taxes, landlord insurance and association dues, converted to a monthly figure. The rate field is blank on purpose, because a rate is a quote-specific number and this site does not publish one.
Everything runs in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere, and no figure you type is stored. If you want a person to look at the scenario, that is a separate step on the request page.
A worked example: an Inland Empire duplex
Illustrative inputs only, not a quote or a market figure. Say a duplex rents for $2,300 and $2,100 a month, so gross rent is $4,400. The monthly principal and interest you calculated from your own lender quote is $2,950. The tax bill after reassessment, including a Mello-Roos line, works out to $640 a month, the landlord policy is $210 a month, and there is no HOA.
- PITIA: $2,950 + $640 + $210 + $0 = $3,800 a month
- DSCR: $4,400 ÷ $3,800 = 1.16
- If the insurance quote comes back at $410 instead of $210, PITIA is $4,000 and DSCR drops to 1.10
- If the seller's old tax bill had been used instead of the reassessed one, the ratio would look better than the lender will calculate
The point of the example is the sensitivity: in LA and the Inland Empire, the tax and insurance lines move the ratio as much as the loan amount does.
Getting the LA and Inland Empire inputs right
Three of the inputs are usually wrong on a first pass, and all three sit in the denominator. Property taxes should be estimated from the purchase price, not copied from the seller's current bill, because a sale generally resets the assessed value. Insurance should come from a quote for a landlord policy on that specific address and use. Association dues should come from the HOA's current statement, not from the listing.
- Add special district assessments and Mello-Roos charges to the tax figure.
- Include flood insurance where the lender will require it.
- Use the association's current dues, and ask about special assessments.
- Add permitted ADU rent only if you can document the unit and its lease.
Why a lender's number can differ
Lenders vary in three places: which rent they use, whether they apply a vacancy factor, and which recurring costs they include. A lender may use the lower of lease rent and appraised market rent, and it may use a market-rent form that produces a different figure than the lease. On a property with a below-market tenant, that difference can be large.
Treat the output as a way to decide whether a deal is worth pursuing, not as an approval estimate. Two lenders can produce different ratios for the same property on the same day.
Next step
Want a second set of eyes on the numbers?
Send the property, the rent and the cost layer. We will tell you which lenders fit the file and what the ratio looks like under their guidelines.