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Schedule E estimator
Enter your rents and each expense line for one residential property. You get line 20 total expenses and line 21 income or loss, with line 18 depreciation computed rather than left for you to guess.
Short answer
Schedule E Part I reports rental income on line 3, expenses on lines 5 through 19, total expenses on line 20, and income or loss on line 21. The line most landlords leave blank is 18, depreciation, which for residential property is the building basis (cost minus land) recovered straight-line over 27.5 years with the mid-month convention in the first year. This estimator computes line 18 from your basis and shows what line 21 would say without it.
Income, line 3
All rent collected for the year, before expenses.
Depreciation inputs, line 18
Purchase price plus capitalized improvements.
Land is never depreciated. Your assessment splits this out.
The mid-month convention only prorates the first year.
Expenses, lines 5 to 19
Line 21: income or loss
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Rents received minus total expenses, including the computed depreciation on line 18.
The line most people skip
Schedule E Part I
An estimate for planning, not a filed return and not tax advice. Personal use, fair rental days, passive-activity limits and the at-risk rules can all change the number that reaches your 1040.
A one-page list of what to gather before you fill in Schedule E. Occasional landlord tax and product notes, unsubscribe anytime.
What Schedule E Part I actually asks for
Part I is one column per property and one row per kind of money. Line 3 is the rent you received. Lines 5 through 19 are the expenses, in a fixed order that has nothing to do with how you think about them: advertising, auto and travel, cleaning and maintenance, commissions, insurance, legal and professional fees, management fees, mortgage interest, other interest, repairs, supplies, taxes, utilities, depreciation, and other. Line 20 adds them up and line 21 subtracts them from the rent.
The hard part is not the arithmetic. It is deciding which line a cost belongs on, and whether it belongs on this year's return at all. A new roof is not a repair, it is an improvement that gets capitalized and depreciated. A tenant screening fee is not advertising. Getting those calls right is most of the work, and it is why the guides linked below are written one line at a time.
Line 18 is where the money is
Depreciation is usually the largest single deduction on a residential rental return, and it is the one that most often arrives blank. It is not optional in the way it feels: on sale, the IRS recaptures depreciation allowed or allowable, which means you are taxed on it whether or not you ever claimed it. Leaving line 18 empty does not defer anything. It donates it.
Worked example
Cost basis: $300,000
Land value: $60,000
Building basis: $240,000
Full year: $240,000 / 27.5 = $8,727
Placed in service in July: 5.5 / 12 = 0.4583
First-year deduction: $8,727 x 0.4583 = $4,000
On a property collecting $30,000 of rent with $18,000 of cash expenses, that $8,727 turns $12,000 of taxable income into $3,273. Nothing about your bank balance changed. That is the deduction working exactly as designed, and it is the reason a rental can be cash-flow positive and show a loss on paper in the same year.
A loss on line 21 is not a red flag
Rental losses are ordinary. Whether you can use one this year is a separate question: the passive activity loss rules generally suspend rental losses until you have passive income or sell the property, with a special allowance of up to $25,000 for active participants that phases out between $100,000 and $150,000 of modified adjusted gross income. Suspended losses are not lost, they carry forward.
What this estimator does not do
One property, one year, federal only. It does not handle personal use days or fair rental days, the at-risk rules, passive-activity carryforwards, the qualified business income deduction, cost segregation, partial dispositions, or any state return. It is a planning number, not a filing. Take it to a preparer.
Where this number leads next
Schedule E for small landlords, line by line
What each Schedule E line actually means for a 2-10 unit residential landlord, including the depreciation line spreadsheets skip.
Schedule E line 18: depreciation expense
Building basis, land split, 27.5-year mid-month depreciation, 5-year appliances, 15-year site work, and allowed-or-allowable recapture.
Rental property depreciation: the 27.5-year math, worked out
Basis, the land split, the mid-month convention, and what the deduction is actually worth on a real building, in dollars.
The $25,000 rental loss allowance: who gets it and how it phases out
Who can deduct rental losses against W-2 income, how the $100k to $150k MAGI phase-out works, and where suspended losses go.
You don't have to run this by hand.
rents.ai keeps this current all year instead of once in April. Every transaction lands on its Schedule E line as you log it, per property, and line 18 is computed from the basis you entered once.