Lost rent is only the first line. The full cost of a vacancy adds carrying costs, cleaning, repairs, advertising, and leasing time — worked through in a complete example that totals nearly $4,000 for one 38-day vacancy.
Ask a landlord what a vacancy costs and you will usually hear the rent: "The unit is $1,650, so a month empty costs me $1,650." It is a tidy answer and a wrong one — typically wrong by more than half. An empty unit keeps spending money every day it sits: the mortgage, taxes, and insurance do not pause, utilities and services continue, and filling the unit again costs a second stack of money in cleaning, repairs, advertising, and time. This guide itemizes the full bill, works one complete example down to the cent, and shows how to use the total to make the two decisions vacancy always forces: how hard to work to keep the current tenant, and how fast to cut the price on the empty one. The companion tool is the Vacancy Loss Calculator — everything below is the reasoning behind its fields.
Vacancies rarely respect calendar months, so price them daily. Divide the monthly rent by 30 to get the daily rate and multiply by the days empty. A $1,650 unit loses $55.00 a day. This framing matters because it converts vague worry into a decision tool: once you know the daily figure, "should I spend $200 to fill it three days sooner?" answers itself. Lost rent is almost always the largest single line — but as this example shows, it is barely more than half the story.
While the unit is empty you still pay its share of the mortgage, property taxes, and insurance, plus any utilities, lawn care, or services you maintain. These are the fixed costs field in the calculator, entered as a monthly total and also divided by 30 so they accumulate daily alongside the lost rent. Landlords who skip this line — and many do, because the mortgage feels like a separate obligation — understate every vacancy by hundreds of dollars and systematically make waiting look cheaper than acting. If a cost would stop when the property was sold and continues while it sits empty, it belongs in this line.
Between tenants, the unit itself bills you: a thorough cleaning, the repairs and touch-ups that only happen at turnover (paint, a dripping faucet finally fixed, a worn blind replaced), and any locks, filters, or supplies the change of occupancy requires. These costs are easy to wave away individually — $350 here, $475 there — and they recur at every single turnover, which is why they belong in the vacancy total rather than in a vague annual maintenance allowance. They are also the part of the bill a departing tenant's deposit sometimes offsets for genuine damage; handle that side with the Security Deposit Deduction Estimator and keep the two ledgers separate and documented.
Listing fees and advertising are the visible part. The larger part is time: photographing the unit, writing and posting the listing, fielding inquiries, scheduling and attending showings, screening applications, and preparing the lease. If you hire that out, it appears as a leasing fee — often half a month's rent or more. If you do it yourself, it is unpaid but not free, because those hours are the same hours you would otherwise spend on the rest of your business or your life. The worked example below uses a deliberately modest $200 for advertising plus leasing effort combined, so the total stays conservative; many landlords' real figure is higher.
Take a unit renting for $1,650 a month with $580 a month in fixed carrying costs. The combined daily cost is $1,650 plus $580, divided by 30 — $74.33 a day. The unit sits empty for 38 days between the old tenant's move-out and the new tenant's move-in, a completely ordinary gap once cleaning, showings, and screening are included. The vacancy loss is 38 times $74.33, which is $2,824.67. Now the one-time costs: cleaning $350, repairs and touch-ups $475, advertising $125, and leasing time and miscellaneous costs $200 — a turnover stack of $1,150. Add the two parts: $2,824.67 plus $1,150 is $3,974.67.
Sit with that number for a moment. The "$1,650 problem" the landlord thought they had is actually a $3,975 problem — about 2.4 months of rent — and 38 days is 10.4% of the unit's entire year spent producing nothing. This is also why the standard 5% vacancy allowance used in purchase underwriting deserves respect in the Landlord ROI Calculator: one ordinary turnover like this one, in a single year, blows straight through it.
Keeping a tenant. Retention offers should be priced against the vacancy total, not against the rent. If a $60-a-month concession — $720 over a lease — keeps a reliable tenant from leaving, and the alternative is a $3,975 turnover, the concession is not generosity; it is the cheapest money in the building. This is the arithmetic behind raising rent without losing the tenant: modest increases pass easily once both sides of the comparison are visible.
Filling the empty unit. Once a unit is empty, the daily cost is the clock. At $74.33 a day, a $100-a-month price reduction that fills the unit three weeks sooner saves 21 times $74.33 — about $1,561 — against a cost of $1,200 over a 12-month lease. The reduction wins. The same reduction that only fills it four days sooner saves about $297 and loses. Price cuts, concessions, and extra advertising are all just purchases of days; the daily cost tells you what a day is worth, and the calculator's concession analysis runs exactly this comparison. One discipline on top: fix exposure before price. A clean unit with good photos on every major listing site, inquiries answered the same day, and showings available promptly will fill at a fair price; a neglected listing will not fill at any price quickly, and cutting rent to compensate for bad marketing pays tenants for your oversight for a full lease term.
An empty month is not a pause in the business. It is the business, running in reverse at $74 a day. Price it fully, and the decisions around it — renewals, increases, concessions, advertising — mostly make themselves.