2026 edition · for owners of one to three residential rentals

Landlord Tax Kit

The three records that decide your rental tax bill, and cannot be rebuilt later.

A Schedule E organizer for one to three properties: rent and expenses per property, depreciation from your purchase figures, a day-count log no other template keeps, and a planner for whether the loss is one you can actually use.

Get it — $29

Excel workbook · 12 sheets · works in Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers and LibreOffice

What this solves

Repair or improvement, decided a year too late

A repair is deducted this year; an improvement is recovered over 27.5 years. On a $6,000 spend that is roughly $5,782 of deduction now versus $218 a year — and it turns on what was done, which the invoice almost never records. The expense log asks at the moment you enter it.

Day counts nobody keeps

Personal use above the greater of 14 nights or 10% of the nights rented starts limiting your deductions. An average stay of seven nights or fewer takes the property out of the default rental rules altogether. Both come from a calendar kept all year — there is no way to build one afterwards, and no other template on the market tracks it.

Depreciation taken wrong at both ends

A property placed in service in March does not get a full year — it gets 9.5 months. A property finishing its 27.5 years gets a part-year and then nothing. Templates that divide the basis by 27.5 and stop are wrong for every property in its first year, and keep paying out on buildings with nothing left to write off.

A loss you may not be allowed to use

Rental losses are passive by default. The $25,000 active-participation allowance phases out between $100,000 and $150,000 of modified AGI — and married filing separately is a different rule, not a smaller version of the same one. The planner works out how much is usable this year and how much carries forward.

What is in it

Why ours and not a free one

The rates come from one file, and we update it

Every figure in the workbook is generated from the same constants file our fifteen calculators read, and each one is printed on the Rates sheet with the IRS page it comes from. Templates with rates typed into cells go stale the year they change, and nobody maintains them. A new edition is published for each tax year.

It decides, it does not only total

Other spreadsheets add your numbers up. This one tells you what share of each payment to set aside, which vehicle method is worth more, or what your day counts mean for how the property is treated. That logic is the same logic behind the free calculators on this site.

It is checked before it ships

Every release is put through a structural check, a set of tax regression tests, and a full recalculation of every formula in the file. The last of those found two real defects before anybody downloaded anything.

What it does not do

This is an organizing, recordkeeping and planning tool. It is not tax advice, it does not file anything, and it does not replace a tax professional. It does not cover Partnerships and S corporations, commercial property, royalties, Schedule E Parts II–V, prior-year suspended losses, at-risk limits, sales and 1031 exchanges, the QBI deduction, and state or local tax.

Figures are for the 2026 tax year. Review your final tax treatment with a qualified professional or against applicable IRS guidance.

Get the Landlord Tax Kit

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The free calculators behind it

The tax logic in this workbook is the logic in these — try them first if you want to see how it thinks before you download anything.