About us

Your Landlord Guide is a free set of tax calculators and plain-English guides for US landlords with a handful of properties.

Why we exist

Landlord tax is genuinely complicated

Depreciation recapture, passive-loss limits, the two-of-five-year window on a home you moved out of, whether an LLC changes anything at all. These are not edge cases — they decide real money for ordinary people with two or three properties, and they rarely come up until the decision has already been made.

Most of the advice out there has an angle

A cost segregation firm will tell you cost segregation is worth it. A lender has a product. Much of what is left is written to rank rather than to be right, and hedged so heavily it protects the author instead of helping you. Nobody in that picture is neutral.

Small landlords get compliance, not planning

Your accountant files an accurate return. That is what you asked them for, and most do it well. But by the time a return is filed the decisions have already happened — and if you didn’t know to ask about recapture before you listed, nobody was going to raise it for you. The problem usually isn’t your accountant. It’s that you don’t know what to ask them.

How we work

Every figure shows its source

Numbers come from IRS publications and the tax code, and where the source is a government page you can click the figure and read the rule yourself. Where we’ve had to rely on an industry estimate because no government publication carries the number, we say so rather than dress it up.

Ranges, not false precision

Your rate depends on your total income, your state, and facts we don’t have. So the calculators give a range that reflects the real uncertainty instead of a confident number that would be wrong.

We’ll tell you when to do nothing

Sometimes the honest answer is that the strategy isn’t worth it for you, or that sitting tight beats acting. You’ll get that answer here. It is one of the few things we can offer that a business selling the strategy cannot.

What we are not

We are not accountants and this is not an accountancy firm. We sell no properties, no loans, no filings and no software. Nothing here is advice about your situation, and reading it creates no professional relationship — it is background so that the conversation you have with a professional is a better one.

How we make money

The guides and calculators are free and stay free. If you choose to be introduced to an independent tax professional, we may be paid a fee by them for the introduction. It costs you nothing, it is entirely optional, and it doesn’t change what the calculators tell you. The terms set it out in full, and how an introduction works explains what happens to your details.