Rental Property Spreadsheet: Free Excel & Google Sheets

A rental property spreadsheet is a workbook where you log every dollar that comes in or goes out of each rental, by property and by month, and sort each expense into the Schedule E line it belongs on. Set it up once, and it answers two questions on its own: what each property actually made this year, and what your CPA needs at tax time.

Below is a free template for Excel and Google Sheets, a step-by-step setup, the parts most landlords get wrong (improvements, depreciation, security deposits), and how to read the numbers once they’re in.

Free Rental Property Spreadsheet Template (Excel and Google Sheets)

The template is free, and it comes in two versions: a blank file for your own properties and a filled-in example with two rentals and a full year of real-looking numbers. Open the example first. Ten minutes of clicking around in it will teach you more than any instructions.

Download the free rental property spreadsheet:

• Blank template 
• Filled-in example with two properties

Here’s what’s inside:

Tab	What it does
Start Here	Instructions, color key, good habits
Properties	One row per rental; sets your depreciation basis
Transactions	Every dollar in or out, one row each
Categories	Which Schedule E line each category feeds
Monthly P&L	Income, expenses, NOI and cash flow by month
Schedule E Summary	Lines 3 to 21 for each property, by tax year
Depreciation	27.5-year depreciation for buildings and improvements
Rent Roll	Leases, rents, deposits held, renewal flags
Capex Reserve	Reserve target per property plus a reserve log
Portfolio Dashboard	Value, equity, NOI, cash flow, cap rate, cash-on-cash, DSCR

Most free landlord templates I’ve seen stop at a monthly income and expense grid. This one goes further in three places: every expense category maps to a Schedule E line, depreciation calculates itself, and a dashboard shows how each property performs. It handles up to 20 properties and 1,500 transactions.

The color key is simple. You type in the cream cells with blue text. Gray cells hold formulas, so leave them alone. You only enter data on four tabs (Properties, Transactions, Rent Roll and Capex Reserve), and everything else builds from those.

How to Set Up a Rental Property Spreadsheet

You set up a rental property spreadsheet in five steps: enter each property once, log every transaction in a single tab, tag each expense with its Schedule E category, keep repairs and improvements apart, and let the reports build from the log. The template already has the structure, so most of the work is the first hour of data entry.

Step 1: Enter Each Property Once

Each rental gets one row on the Properties tab: purchase date, price, closing costs, the rehab you did before renting it, the land share of the price, cash invested, loan balance, and an estimate of current value.

Get this row right on day one. It sets the depreciation basis you’ll use for the next 27.5 years, and it’s the hardest number to rebuild later from old closing statements. The same tab also gives you the start of a schedule of real estate owned, which a lender will ask for once you have a few properties and want another loan.

Step 2: Log Every Transaction in One Tab

Every rent payment, bill, repair, and mortgage payment goes in the Transactions tab, one row each, with the property and category picked from a dropdown. This single log is your rental property expense tracker, your bookkeeping record, and the source for every report in the file.

Column	Example
Date	03/01/2026
Property	112 Maple St
Category	Rent
Payee / description	Tenant: J. Rivera
Amount	1,450
Paid via	Zelle / app
Receipt link	Link to a photo in Google Drive

I’d skip the setup where every property gets its own tab. People build it that way because it feels organized, and it falls apart the first time you buy a shared item or want a portfolio total. One log with a property column does both jobs, and the formulas do the splitting.

Enter amounts as positive numbers. The category tells the spreadsheet whether a row is income or an expense. Split each mortgage payment into two rows, interest and principal, using the numbers on your lender’s statement. Interest is deductible. Principal isn’t, but it still leaves your account, so the cash flow math needs it.

If a row is missing a date, property or category, it turns red. That’s on purpose. A transaction without a property can’t land in any report, so the template makes it hard to miss.

Step 3: Sort Expenses by Schedule E Line

Sort rental expenses by the line they belong on in Schedule E, the IRS form individual landlords use to report rental income and expenses. If your categories match the form, tax prep turns into copying numbers instead of re-sorting a year of receipts.

The current form lists rents on line 3 and expenses on lines 5 through 19 (IRS, 2025). Here’s how the template’s categories map:

Line	Category	Examples
3	Rents received	Rent, late fees, kept deposits
5	Advertising	Listing fees, signs
6	Auto and travel	Mileage to the property
7	Cleaning and maintenance	Turnover cleaning, lawn care
8	Commissions	Leasing commissions
9	Insurance	Landlord policy, flood
10	Legal and professional fees	CPA, attorney, eviction filing
11	Management fees	Property manager
12	Mortgage interest	Interest from Form 1098
13	Other interest	HELOC or private loan interest
14	Repairs	Plumber, drywall patch
15	Supplies	Filters, bulbs, smoke detectors
16	Taxes	Property taxes
17	Utilities	Water, sewer, trash you pay
18	Depreciation	Calculated on the Depreciation tab
19	Other	HOA dues, bank fees, software

A few items slip through every year:

• Mileage. Trips to show a unit, meet a contractor or pick up supplies count. The IRS standard rate for 2025 is 70 cents a mile (IRS, 2025), so 400 miles a year is $280 you’d otherwise leave behind.
• Small recurring fees. Rent collection apps, screening software and bank fees. They’re $9 here and $18 there, which is exactly why nobody logs them.
• Kept security deposits. The part you keep for damage counts as income (more on this below).
• Escrowed taxes and insurance. If your lender pays them from escrow, log them under Property taxes and Insurance when the lender pays, using the escrow statement.
• Closing costs. These aren’t expenses at all. They go on the Properties tab and into the basis.

Step 4: Keep Repairs and Improvements Apart

A repair keeps the property working and you deduct it in the year you pay. An improvement makes the property better, restores a major component or adapts it to a new use, and the IRS says you must capitalize it, which means you depreciate it over years instead (IRS, 2025). Replacing a few shingles is a repair. Replacing the whole roof is an improvement.

In my third year, I logged a $7,400 roof on a duplex under repairs and felt good about the deduction. My CPA moved it to an improvement depreciated over 27.5 years. Same money out of my account, but the first-year deduction dropped from $7,400 to about $168, because a roof installed in May only gets seven and a half months of depreciation in year one. Now improvements go in their own category the day I pay for them, and I let the CPA argue me back into a repair if the rules allow it.

Two IRS safe harbors help small landlords here:

• De minimis safe harbor. You can generally expense items that cost up to $2,500 per invoice or item, even if they’d otherwise be capitalized (IRS, 2026).
• Safe harbor for small taxpayers. If a building’s unadjusted basis is $1 million or less, you can deduct all repairs, maintenance and improvements on it for the year as long as the total doesn’t exceed the lesser of 2% of that basis or $10,000 (IRS, 2026).

Both are elections your CPA makes on the return each year. Your job is to log the expense correctly and add a note when it’s a judgment call.

Step 5: Let the Monthly P&L Build Itself

Once transactions are in, the Monthly P&L tab totals income, operating expenses, NOI, debt service and cash flow for each month. Pick one property from the dropdown or look at all of them together. It’s effectively a monthly real estate income statement, so if a lender or partner asks for an annual one, the numbers are already there.

What’s the Best Way to Track Rental Property Expenses?

The best way to track rental property expenses is to run all rental money through one dedicated bank account, log transactions weekly with a receipt link on each row, and reconcile the log against the bank statement once a month. The spreadsheet matters less than the habit.

Mine is Sunday night, about 15 minutes, with the bank app open next to the spreadsheet. Skip three weeks, and you’ll spend two hours trying to remember what a $186 Home Depot charge was for. (It was a toilet flapper, caulk, and an outlet. I only know because I logged it that Sunday.)

Snap a photo of every paper receipt, drop it in a cloud folder, and paste the link into the row. When your CPA asks about an expense in March, you click instead of digging.

How to Track Rental Property Depreciation in a Spreadsheet

To track rental property depreciation in a spreadsheet, calculate the building’s basis (purchase price plus qualifying closing costs, minus the land value, plus improvements before renting), then divide by 27.5 years. Residential rental property uses straight-line depreciation over 27.5 years with a mid-month convention, and land isn’t depreciable (IRS, 2025).

Here’s the math for the single-family house in the example file:

• Purchase price $96,000 plus $2,300 of closing costs = $98,300
• Land is 20% of that, so the building share is $78,640
• Add $18,500 of rehab done before renting = $97,140 basis
• $97,140 ÷ 27.5 = $3,532 of depreciation per year

The mid-month convention means the first year only counts from the middle of the month you place the property in service. The house went into service in August, so year one got four and a half months, about $1,325. The Depreciation tab handles that, along with every capital improvement you log.

That example is modeled on a house I bought off-market. The first year, I left the $2,300 of closing costs out of the basis. It’s a small number, about $67 a year in lost depreciation, but it repeats for 27.5 years until somebody catches it. My CPA did, two years later.

Item	Goes in the basis?
Purchase price (building share)	Yes
Title insurance, recording fees, transfer taxes	Yes
Land value	No
Rehab before the first tenant	Yes
Repairs after it’s rented	No, expense them
Loan fees and points	No, your CPA handles them separately

Don’t know the land value? Use your county assessor’s land-to-total ratio. One more note: appliances, carpet and furniture in a rental fall in a 5-year class, not 27.5 years (IRS, 2025). The template depreciates every improvement over 27.5 years to keep it simple, so flag those items for your CPA.

How Do You Track Rent, Late Fees and Security Deposits?

Track rent and late fees as income on the date you receive them, and keep security deposits out of income entirely while you hold them. A deposit you plan to return isn’t income. If you keep part of it for damage or unpaid rent, that part becomes income in the year you keep it, and rent a tenant pays in advance counts as income the year you receive it, no matter which months it covers (IRS, 2025).

The Rent Roll tab holds one row per lease with the tenant, dates, rent and deposit, and it flags leases that have expired or come up for renewal within 60 days. When a tenant moves out, log the kept portion as “Kept security deposit” and the refund as “Security deposit returned.” A dated rental property inspection checklist from move-in is what lets you keep that deposit if a tenant disputes it.

Real Estate Portfolio Tracker: How Are Your Rentals Actually Doing?

A real estate portfolio tracker shows each property’s value, debt, equity, income and return side by side, so you can see which rentals earn their keep and which ones just keep you busy. The template’s Portfolio Dashboard builds this from your transactions and the Properties tab.

Here’s what each metric tells you, using the 2025 numbers from the example file:

Metric	Formula	Single-family	Duplex
NOI	Income minus operating expenses	$13,284	$16,681
Cash flow	NOI minus loan payments	$6,744	$4,861
Cap rate	NOI ÷ current value	8.1%	7.8%
Cash-on-cash	Cash flow ÷ cash invested	15.1%	8.3%
DSCR	NOI ÷ loan payments	2.03x	1.41x
Expense ratio	Operating expenses ÷ income	23.9%	34.3%

The duplex brings in more rent and more NOI, yet it returns about half as much on the cash I put in. That’s the kind of answer you don’t get from a bank balance. It came from a bigger loan, a vacant month and a turnover. None of that makes the duplex a bad property, but it changes what I’d pay for the next one.

This is a tracking tool, not a buying tool. It shows what happened after closing. The math you run before you make an offer belongs in a rental property analysis spreadsheet, where you estimate rents and expenses instead of recording them.

The numbers work in reverse, too. When I’m buying from one of the tired landlords I deal with, I ask for the last two years of their Schedule E. The rent roll they hand you is the story they want to tell. The Schedule E is what they told the IRS. The gap between the two is usually where my offer comes from, and a landlord who has never tracked these numbers often doesn’t know the property stopped making money two years ago.

Which is the other reason to keep the dashboard current. It’s how you notice you’re about to become that landlord.

Do the 50% and 1% Rules Hold Up Against Your Real Numbers?

The 50% rule says operating expenses will eat about half your rent, and the 1% rule says monthly rent should be at least 1% of the purchase price. Both are screening shortcuts for deals, and your spreadsheet lets you test them against what actually happened.

In the example portfolio, operating expenses came to 30% of income, which looks like the 50% rule is wildly pessimistic. Then add the $8,750 of capital improvements from the same year (a roof and a water heater) and the total lands at 50.5%. The rule works because it quietly assumes you’ll pay for big replacements, vacancy and management sooner or later. A single good year hides that.

The 1% rule holds up better as a filter. The example house rents for $1,450 on a $96,000 purchase, or 1.5%, and still clears 1.2% once you add the rehab and closing costs. The duplex sits at 1.2%. Both passed, and both cash flow.

Use your real expense ratio in your deal analyzer spreadsheet instead of a rule of thumb once you have two or three years of data.

Rental Property Spreadsheet vs. Software: When Should You Switch?

Switch from a spreadsheet to rental accounting software when matching bank transactions by hand takes longer than the analysis, or when you add partners, LLCs or enough units that one person can’t keep the log current. For a small portfolio run by one owner, a spreadsheet is enough.

Most rentals fit that description. Individual investors own 59.6% of single-family rentals, down from 70.9% in 2021, while LLCs and partnerships hold 20.6% (GlobeSt, 2026). That shift toward LLCs matters for your books: each entity needs its own bank account and its own records, and that’s where spreadsheets start to strain.

I stayed on a spreadsheet until my eleventh door. The number of properties wasn’t what pushed me off. Matching 60-plus bank transactions a month by hand was. If you’re one of the absentee owners running rentals from out of state, bank feeds and online rent collection start to matter more than the flexibility of a spreadsheet.

The common options split into two camps. Stessa and Baselane connect to your bank and categorize rental transactions. REI Hub and QuickBooks are full double-entry bookkeeping, which your CPA will like once you have entities and partners. Whatever you pick, keep the same Schedule E categories so your history carries over.

How Long Should You Keep Rental Property Records?

Keep most rental income and expense records for at least 3 years after you file. Keep records tied to the property itself (the purchase, closing costs and improvements) until the period of limitations expires for the year you sell it (IRS, 2026).

In practice, that means you hold the purchase and improvement records for as long as you own the property, plus at least 3 years after the sale. The template’s receipt links and Properties tab cover most of it, as long as the cloud folder outlives your current phone.

Tracking Expenses for Flips, Wholesale Deals or an Agent Business

This template is built for rentals reported on Schedule E. Flips, wholesale fees and agent commissions are a different kind of income, usually business income rather than rental income, so they need their own tracking and a conversation with your CPA about where they go on the return.

If you flip, a house flipping spreadsheet that tracks purchase, rehab budget, holding costs and sale by project fits better than a monthly P&L. Before you buy, those same numbers belong in your business plan for flipping houses. If you run a wholesaling business, your biggest line items are marketing and lead costs, so track cost per deal, not cost per property. Agents should look at real estate agent tax deductions, since agents report on a different schedule entirely.

And if you’re trying to qualify for real estate professional status, keep an hours log alongside your books. The IRS can ask you to prove those hours, and a log you kept as you went holds up far better than one you rebuild at tax time.

Final Thoughts

A rental property spreadsheet isn’t glamorous, and nobody got rich from bookkeeping. But it’s the only place you’ll find out which property earns its keep, what your real expense ratio is, and how much you can afford to put into the next deal. Set it up once, give it 15 minutes a week, and tax season becomes an email to your CPA instead of a lost weekend.

Once the numbers tell you you’re ready for another property, plan it the same way with a real estate business plan. And when you start looking, my best rentals have come from sellers who never listed. If you want to see what that looks like in your market, browse our off-market leads.

References

1. GlobeSt, 2026. Small Investors Still Dominate SFRs Despite Institutional Buzz.
2. Internal Revenue Service, 2025. Schedule E (Form 1040), Supplemental Income and Loss.
3. Internal Revenue Service, 2025. Publication 527, Residential Rental Property.
4. Internal Revenue Service, 2026. Tangible Property Final Regulations.
5. Internal Revenue Service, 2026. How Long Should I Keep Records?.