Rent Burden Calculator
Enter your rent and income to see your rent burden with HUD’s official bands, flip to max-rent mode to find what you can afford, or to salary-needed mode to work backwards from a rent you are eyeing. Use take-home pay, not gross salary, for the honest number: 30% of gross is a much bigger slice of what actually lands in your account.
HUD defines cost-burdened as over 30% of income on housing and severely burdened as over 50%. Guidelines only, not financial advice.
Quick Answer
$1,800 rent on $6,000 monthly take-home pay is a 30.00% rent burden: good, within HUD guidelines. At the same income, the most rent the 30% guideline allows is $1,800 a month, leaving $4,200 for everything else. Working backwards, a $1,800 rent plus $200 of other monthly housing costs needs $6,666.67 a month, or $80,000.00 a year, at a 30% target. The calculator above is pre-filled with this example; change the inputs and click Calculate for your own numbers.
Worked example, checked against this exact tool
Burden: $1,800 rent on $6,000 monthly take-home: (1,800 ÷ 6,000) × 100 = 30.00%: good, within HUD guidelines. Enter $72,000 as annual income and the tool converts it to the same $6,000 monthly. Max rent: $6,000 take-home at 30% = $1,800, leaving $4,200 for everything else.
Salary needed: a $1,800 rent plus $200 of other monthly housing costs is $2,000 of housing; at a 30% target the income needed is $2,000 ÷ 0.30 = $6,666.67 a month, or $80,000.00 a year. The landlord 40x check on the $1,800 rent alone asks for $72,000.00 of annual income.
Use take-home pay, not gross
The 30% rule was written against gross income, but your budget runs on take-home. $6,000 gross might be $4,600 take-home; 30% of gross ($1,800) is 39% of take-home, which is burdened, not comfortable. Landlords screen on gross (the 3x-rent rule: income ≥ 3 × rent, i.e. burden ≤ 33%), but you should budget on take-home. The toggle above lets you see both.
What the bands mean in practice
Under 25%: comfortable, with room to save. 25-30%: the HUD guideline zone. 30-50%: cost-burdened: the rent gets paid but savings, debt payoff and emergencies compete for what is left. Over 50%: severely burdened: one surprise expense away from missing rent. These are national affordability guidelines; high-cost cities push millions of households past 30% with no realistic alternative, which is a housing-market problem, not a personal-failure problem.
Salary needed: work backwards from the rent
Max-rent mode answers “what can I afford on this income”. Salary-needed mode answers the question renters ask the other way round: “what income does this rent need”. Enter the target rent, your other monthly housing costs, and your target burden, and the tool divides total housing by the target share. Count everything that is housing, not just rent: utilities, parking, and insurance all sit on the same side of the fraction, which is why the mode asks for them separately.
The landlord screen sits beside the answer. Landlords commonly require annual gross income of at least 40 times the monthly rent, the 40x rule, which is the 30% rule rearranged: 12 ÷ 0.30 = 40. A $1,800 rent therefore faces a $72,000 annual-income screen even when the budgeting answer, which includes your other housing costs, is higher. If the screen is the binding constraint, that is the number the application will be judged against.
What competing calculators miss
Most rent calculators take one income number without asking whether it is gross or take-home, which silently flatters the result by 20-30%. None pair the burden check with the reverse max-rent question renters actually ask first (“what can I afford?”). This page does both, with HUD’s bands stated plainly.
The salary-needed mode closes the third direction: given a rent and your other housing costs, it gives the income the target demands, with the landlord 40x screen beside it.
Frequently asked questions
30% or less of income is the HUD guideline; 25% or less is comfortable.
(Monthly rent ÷ monthly income) × 100. $1,800 ÷ $6,000 = 30%.
Take-home for budgeting honesty; landlords screen on gross. The tool handles both.
Landlords often require gross monthly income of at least 3 times the rent, which is a burden of 33% or less.
Spending over 50% of income on housing, per HUD. High financial stress by definition.
$1,800 at the 30% guideline ($1,500 at a comfortable 25%).
HUD’s measure includes utilities. This tool uses rent alone; add utilities to the rent figure for the HUD-comparable number.
It is officially burdened (over 30%) but below severe (50%). It is manageable only with disciplined budgeting elsewhere.
Switch to Salary needed mode, enter the target rent, your other monthly housing costs, and your target burden. For a $1,800 rent plus $200 of other housing costs at 30%, the income needed is $6,666.67 a month, or $80,000.00 a year. The result also shows the landlord 40x check: annual income of 40 times the monthly rent.
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References
- U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Households spending more than 30% of income on housing are cost-burdened; households spending more than 50% are severely cost-burdened. These are the bands used on this page.
- Philadelphia Fed. Rental Housing Affordability Data Explorer: definitions (cost burden and severe cost burden). Accessed October 24, 2026.