Rental Turnover Cost: A Line Item Budget

My last turnover cost $1,629. The one before it cost just over $3,100, and the difference was not damage, cleaning, or anything I could photograph. It was twenty-seven extra days of an empty house.

That gap is why turnover budgets built from national averages are useless to someone with one or two units. The physical work — clean, paint, rekey, photograph, screen — prices out in the hundreds and varies by region. The vacancy prices out in the thousands and varies by how good your listing and your asking rent are. So this page does two things: it prices the small lines from my own receipts, clearly labeled, and it shows you the arithmetic for the big line so you can run it on your own rent.

The label matters, so here it is up front: every dollar figure below marked as mine comes from two Midwest houses, one person's prices, across three turnovers since 2016. Rents on these houses have run $1,200 to $1,400. If you are in a coastal metro, expect hired-labor lines — cleaning, painting, photography — to come in at two or three times these numbers; the statutes and the vacancy math transfer as-is, the prices do not. Everything statutory below was checked on 3 September 2026.

One turnover, itemized to the dollar

This is the 2023 turnover of the house that rents at $1,300, from the day the old tenant handed back keys to the day the new one's lease started.

Two things the table hides. First, about eleven hours of my own labor are priced at zero — painting, rekeying, photos, showings. Price yours honestly when you build your own version, because a turnover that lands during a busy month at your actual job is when zero stops being the right number. Second, the vacancy line is 60 percent of the total, and this was a good turnover.

The bad one is instructive. That house sat listed for forty-one days at the wrong price before I cut it — the full story and the days-per-percent arithmetic are in the piece on setting rent on one unit — and the lease finally started around day fifty. Fifty days at $45.89 is about $2,290 of vacancy on a make-ready that otherwise cost some $860. Every hour I spent choosing paint that month was arithmetic noise.

The empty days are the budget

So treat vacancy as the line you actually manage. The mechanism is one division: monthly rent ÷ 30.4 = the cost of each empty day. At $1,300 that is $42.76; at $2,600, $85.53. Then multiply by a realistic day count, and be pessimistic, because the count includes make-ready days, not just listed days — the cleaner's schedule, the paint drying, the weekend before applications arrive, the screening itself, and the gap between lease signing and lease start.

For context on what the market around you is doing, the Census Bureau put the national rental vacancy rate at 7.3 percent in the second quarter of 2026 — 9.5 percent in the South, 5.3 percent in the West (release CB26-116, 28 July 2026). A regional average will not predict your street, but it tells you which direction to round. In a soft market, budgeting 30 vacant days is not pessimism; it is the base case.

Three practical compressions, each worth actual days:

• Start the make-ready clock before move-out. Book the cleaner and order paint the day you receive the tenant's notice, not the day you get the keys. My 23-day turnover had the cleaner in on day 2 because she was booked three weeks earlier.
• Photograph before the outgoing tenant is fully gone if the unit shows well, or immediately after cleaning if not. The listing cannot go live without photos, and every day of delay is $43.
• Screen in parallel, not in series. Have your written criteria and your screening process ready before the listing goes up, so an application received Tuesday can become a decision by Friday.

Rekeying: the cheapest line, and the one a statute can own

Between tenants, rekey. The old tenant's roommate's ex has a copy of something — you cannot prove otherwise, and the downside lands on the new tenant.

In Texas this is not advice. Property Code § 92.156 requires security devices operated by key, card, or combination to be rekeyed at the landlord's expense no later than the seventh day after each tenant turnover. The same subchapter adds a detail worth noticing even outside Texas: if the tenant vacates in breach of a written lease, the rekeying cost can come out of the deposit only if the lease authorizes that deduction in underlined or boldface text. That is a legislature telling you, in typography, how deliberate a deposit deduction has to be.

Most states have no equivalent statute, but some cities write rekeying into their rental codes, so search your municipal code for "rekey" alongside your state's landlord-tenant chapter before assuming the choice is yours.

On price, this line has collapsed. Rekeyable-cylinder deadbolts — the kind sold at any big-box hardware store — let you rekey a door in a few minutes with the old key and a change tool, no disassembly. My $31 covered two doors' worth of new keys and copies. The locksmith alternative ran $95 here; urban quotes I have seen run $150 and up. If you own the property for a decade, the rekeyable hardware pays for itself on the first turnover.

Screening: capped in some states, and possibly not your cost at all

The screening line in my table is $0 because the applicant paid the portal's fee directly to the screening company. That model is common now, and where it is legal it moves the cost off your budget entirely. But two regulatory layers sit under this line, and they vary hard by state.

First, application fee caps. California's Civil Code § 1950.6 caps the application screening fee at $30 per applicant, adjusted annually with the Consumer Price Index since 1998 — arithmetic that lands in the mid-to-high sixties by 2026, though no state agency publishes the official current figure, so keep your own CPI worksheet if you charge above the base. The same section says the fee may not exceed your actual out-of-pocket cost plus the reasonable value of your time, and it was amended again effective January 2026, so read the current text rather than a summary. Washington, Massachusetts, and a growing list of others restrict what can be charged or require the fee to mirror actual cost. Other states are silent.

Second, some jurisdictions now require landlords to accept a "reusable" or "portable" screening report the applicant obtained themselves — in which case you may not be able to charge a screening fee at all for that applicant. Search your state legislature's site for "reusable tenant screening report" before you set your fee.

Mechanism to keep: the screening fee is a cost-recovery device, not a revenue line. Price it at your actual cost, refund it where the law says an unconsidered application gets a refund, and this line stays boring.

Almost none of this comes out of the deposit

Here is the mistake that turns a $1,600 turnover into a $3,000 one: looking at the table above, looking at the deposit you are holding, and deciding they are connected.

They mostly are not. The deposit covers tenant-caused loss beyond ordinary wear — not the cost of getting a unit from "lived in normally for two years" to "ready to photograph." Walk the table:

• Cleaning — partially chargeable at most. California's § 1950.5 wording is the useful benchmark: cleaning charges are allowed only to return the unit to the same level of cleanliness it had at the start of the tenancy. Your re-listing standard is higher than that, and the gap is your cost.
• Paint — a routine repaint between tenancies is the owner's cost essentially everywhere. Crayon murals and smoke staining are a different category, with a depreciation calculation attached; the room-by-room line between wear and damage walks through it.
• Rekeying — owner's cost, and in Texas, statutorily so, with the narrow boldface-clause exception above.
• Photos, screening, vacancy — never deposit items. Vacancy loss can sometimes be pursued as unpaid rent when a tenant breaks a lease, but that is a claim under the lease, mitigated by your duty to re-rent, not a line on an itemization.

And whatever is legitimately chargeable still has to survive your state's deposit procedure — the itemization deadline, the account rules, the penalty multipliers — which is its own set of rules with its own clock. Charging a turnover cost the statute assigns to you is exactly the kind of deduction that converts into a treble-damages judgment.

Budget as if the deposit does not exist. When some of it legitimately covers a genuine loss, that is recovery, not revenue.

Divide the bill by the months, then look at renewals differently

The turnover number is most useful spread across time. Take your realistic all-in figure and divide by expected tenancy length in months:

That per-month figure belongs in your operating math next to taxes and insurance, because it is just as real — it simply arrives in lumps.

It also reprices the renewal conversation. If your turnover runs $1,600, then a tenant who renews instead of leaving has just saved you $1,600, and a $50 rent concession that secures the renewal costs $600 over the year. The turnover table is the strongest argument in the building for answering the repair request promptly and thinking hard before pushing a marginal increase on a good tenant. Not sentiment. Division.

Prices labeled as mine are from two Midwest houses and will not match your market. The statutes cited are the current versions as of 3 September 2026 as best I can read them, and I am not a lawyer — before charging a fee or a deposit deduction, confirm the text on your own legislature's site.