House Flipping Calculator: Calculate Your Fix & Flip Profit, ROI & Cash-on-Cash

Written by

Alex Martinez — Founder & CEO, Real Estate Skills. Has wholesaled and flipped houses for over a decade, personally acquiring 33+ residential investment properties.

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Reviewed by

Ryan Zomorodi — Co-Founder & COO, Real Estate Skills. Reviewed and verified the calculator's formulas, financing math, and ROI methodology in this guide before publication.

✓ Updated July 2026 ✓ Fact-Checked 📊 Free Deal Calculator Inside Watch on YouTube

Publication history: Originally published January 3, 2024. Updated July 2026 with a free interactive house flipping calculator, full net-profit, ROI, and cash-on-cash analysis, hard money and private money financing guidance, a real worked deal example, refreshed 2026 flipping data, and an expanded FAQ. Calculator formulas and financing math verified by Ryan Zomorodi, Co-Founder & COO of Real Estate Skills.

Use the calculator below to run your deal right now. Enter what you'd pay, what the rehab will cost, and what the finished house will sell for, and it does the rest — profit, ROI, and cash-on-cash, in seconds.

Here's why this matters more than most beginners realize. The headline flipping numbers you see quoted look great: the typical U.S. flip in early 2026 sold for roughly $66,000 more than the investor paid for it. But that figure is gross — it's just resale price minus purchase price. It doesn't subtract the rehab, the months of loan interest and taxes, or the agent fees on the way out. Your real return, after all of that, is a very different number — and it's the only one that matters. A good house flipping calculator exists to show you that real number before you're committed, not after.

That's the whole point of running your deal here first. Plug in honest numbers and you'll know, in about a minute, whether you're looking at a paycheck or a money pit. If you're brand new, the flipping houses 101 fundamentals are worth a read first, but you don't need them to start running numbers below.

The House Flipping Calculator

How To Fix and Flip Houses For Profit (FREE CALCULATOR)!

Watch Alex Martinez walk a fix-and-flip deal from start to finish — calculating ARV, rehab costs, and profit — so you can see exactly how the numbers below come together.

 

This is the same deal calculator we've used for over a decade to analyze our own flips and teach thousands of students to analyze theirs — now built right into this page. It runs the full deal, not just one piece of it. You'll build your after-repair value from comps, set your repair budget, layer in financing, holding, and selling costs, and it lands on the three numbers that decide whether a flip is worth doing: your net profit, your return on investment, and your cash-on-cash return.

Work top to bottom. Each field has a plain-English label, and you don't need every number perfect on the first pass — a rough deal takes about a minute to pressure-test, and you can tighten it as you get real bids and comps. If you're brand new and don't have figures yet, the sections below walk through where each one comes from and give you the rules of thumb we use to estimate them fast.

How To Read Your Results

Three outputs matter, and here's what each one is telling you:

Your net profit is what you actually keep — the after-repair value minus everything you spend to buy, fix, hold, finance, and sell the property. This is the number, not the "gross" figures you see quoted in flipping reports.

Your ROI (return on investment) turns that profit into a percentage, measured against the total cash the deal required, so you can compare one flip against another on equal footing.

Your cash-on-cash return is the most honest measure when you're borrowing. It's your profit measured only against the cash you actually put in — your down payment and out-of-pocket costs — not the money the lender fronted. Because most flips are financed, this is usually the number that tells you how hard your own dollars are really working. A deal can show a modest ROI on the full project cost and a strong cash-on-cash return, precisely because the lender funded most of it.

Two numbers the calculator also surfaces are worth knowing by name. Your maximum allowable offer (MAO) is the most you can pay for the property and still hit your target profit — it's your walk-away line, and it keeps you from overpaying, which is where most flips are won or lost. And your ARV, the after-repair value, is what the finished house will sell for. Both get their own full treatment on our ARV calculator and 70% rule guides; here, they're steps on the way to your profit.

Take the Calculator With You. Analyze Every Deal.

Flipping is a numbers game, and one overlooked cost can turn a projected profit into a break-even deal. Don't run your next flip on back-of-the-napkin math. Download our Free Deal Calculator to analyze every property the same way we do — estimating your ARV, rehab, holding, and financing costs, and landing on your real net profit, ROI, and maximum offer before you ever sign a contract.

A Real Flip, Start To Finish (Worked Example)

Let's run one real deal all the way through, the way we'd analyze it before making an offer. These are real numbers from a flip I analyzed — a three-bed, two-bath, 1,100-square-foot cosmetic fixer.

Start with the after-repair value. I pulled three renovated comps nearby that sold recently — $540,000, $545,000, and $550,000. Averaged, that's an ARV of $545,000. That's what the finished house should sell for, and every other number works off it.

Estimate the rehab. This one's cosmetic — paint, flooring, cabinets, landscaping, no moving walls or foundation work. In my area I can get a cosmetic job done at about $35 a square foot, so 1,100 square feet times $35 is $38,500. I round up: $40,000 in repairs.

Set the purchase price. Say I get it under contract at $400,000. (More on how to find that ceiling in a second — that's what the maximum allowable offer is for.)

Now the costs that quietly decide whether this deal is any good:

Financing. I'm not paying all cash. A hard money lender funds most of it — roughly 90% of my purchase-plus-rehab cost — at around 10% interest with one origination point, and I budget a conservative six-month hold. Interest on that loan for six months runs about $19,800, plus roughly $4,000 in points. I cover the rest of the deal with private money at 10%, which costs about another $1,600 over the six months. Call financing roughly $25,500 all in.

Holding and closing. Property taxes, insurance, and utilities while I own it, plus closing costs on both ends, come to roughly $12,000 (I run front-end closing and holding at about 2% of the purchase price, and back-end closing at about 1% of the ARV).

Selling costs. Agent commissions to sell it. Most flippers pay 5–6% of the resale price; on this deal that's about $27,000 at 5%, plus the back-end closing already counted above.

Here's the deal, top to bottom, using realistic settings — a 10% rehab contingency and a standard 5% commission:

Now watch the difference between the number that gets quoted and the number you keep. The gross profit here — resale minus purchase — is $145,000. That's the kind of figure that ends up in a headline. But after the rehab, the financing, the months of holding, and the cost to sell, the real profit is about $31,000. That gap, $145,000 down to $31,000, is exactly why you run the full calculator and never trust the gross number.

Then the returns. Measured against everything the project cost — roughly $514,000 all in — that $31,000 is an ROI of about 6%. Over a six-month hold, that annualizes to about 12%. Modest, on paper.

But here's where financing changes the picture. Most of this deal is borrowed — the hard money loan covers about $400,000, and private money covers most of the gap. The cash I actually put in out of my own pocket — my share of the gap, the loan points, and holding reserves — is only about $29,000. Measure that same $31,000 profit against the roughly $29,000 of my own money, and the cash-on-cash return is about 106%.

That's not a typo, and it's not magic — it's leverage. A 106% cash-on-cash return means the deal roughly doubled the cash I personally committed, precisely because the lenders funded most of the project. That's why experienced flippers watch cash-on-cash: the deal looks ordinary measured against its full $514,000 cost, and excellent measured against the cash it actually took me to do it. But leverage cuts both ways — carrying roughly $450,000 in debt on a deal means a delay or a cost overrun hits your thin slice of cash hard. A high cash-on-cash number is only as good as the profit cushion behind it.

For comparison: if I'd negotiated the commission down to 4% and skipped the contingency, the way a seasoned flipper might, net profit climbs closer to $40,000 and cash-on-cash higher still. But the numbers above are the honest version for a first deal — real contingency, standard commission.

And notice what protected the whole thing: the purchase price. I didn't pull $400,000 out of the air — it's near the most I could pay and still clear a reasonable profit. That ceiling is your maximum allowable offer, and it's the single most important discipline in flipping. We break down exactly how to calculate it in our 70% rule guide and MAO formula guide; the calculator above works it out for you automatically.

The House Flipping Formulas (Profit, ROI & Cash-on-Cash)

You don't need a finance background to analyze a flip. Three formulas do almost all the work, and the calculator above runs them for you — but knowing them means you understand what the tool is telling you.

The House Flipping Profit Formula

This is the core of every flip analysis:

In plain terms: take what the finished house sells for, then subtract everything you spent to buy it, fix it, hold it, borrow for it, and sell it. What's left is what you actually keep. The mistake that sinks beginners is stopping at "resale minus purchase" — that's gross profit, and it ignores the four cost categories in the middle that quietly eat your margin.

The ROI Formula

Return on investment turns your profit into a percentage so you can compare deals:

Your total investment is everything the project cost — purchase, rehab, holding, financing, and selling. If a deal nets $31,000 on a total investment of about $514,000, that's an ROI of roughly 6%. ROI on total cost is a conservative, apples-to-apples way to rank one flip against another.

The Cash-on-Cash Formula

This is the return that matters most when you finance a flip — and most flippers do:

The difference from plain ROI is the denominator. Here you divide by only the cash you put in — your down payment, your points, your out-of-pocket holding and closing costs — not the money the lender fronted. Because leverage means you fund a small slice of the deal, your return on that slice is far higher. That same ~$31,000 profit measured against roughly $29,000 of your own cash is a cash-on-cash return of about 106% — the same deal, a completely different picture, because the lenders covered most of the cost. Just remember what that number is really saying: it's high because you borrowed most of the money, which means more debt riding on the deal, not free profit.

One More Worth Knowing: Annualized ROI

A flip that returns 6% in six months isn't the same as one that returns 6% in twelve. Annualizing adjusts for time:

A 6% return earned in six months is about a 12% annualized return. When you're deciding which of two deals to take, annualized ROI is often the truer comparison, because a faster flip lets you recycle your capital into the next one sooner. Time is the quiet variable in every flip — every extra month of holding is more interest, more taxes, more risk.

If you'd rather not run these by hand, that's what the calculator at the top is for. Enter your numbers and it returns all four at once.

How To Calculate A Flip, Step By Step

The calculator gives you the answer; this shows you where each number comes from, so you can trust what you put in. Get these inputs right and the output is reliable. Guess at them and, as the saying goes, garbage in, garbage out. Here's how we source each one on a real deal.

Step 1: Calculate Your Total Acquisition Cost

Your acquisition cost is everything it takes to take ownership — not just the purchase price. Start with what you're paying for the property, then add the front-end closing costs: title, escrow, inspection, lender fees, and any loan origination points. A quick way to estimate the closing piece is about 2% of the purchase price, which also gives you a small cushion for the odds and ends. Get this number complete, because it's the foundation the rest of the deal sits on — if it's off, every number downstream is off with it.

Step 2: Estimate Your Rehab Budget

Your rehab budget is what it costs to bring the house to its after-repair value. The fastest way to ballpark it — the one we use to analyze deals in seconds instead of hours — is a dollar-per-square-foot rule for cosmetic work: paint, flooring, cabinets, fixtures, landscaping, nothing structural. As a rough national guide, a light refresh runs around $10 a square foot, a solid cosmetic renovation lands near $30, and a heavy or gut-level job can run $60 or more. In our own market it's typically $35–40 a square foot for a cosmetic flip, and it climbs at higher price points where buyers expect nicer finishes. So a 1,100-square-foot cosmetic fixer at $35 is about $38,500 — call it $40,000.

That rule is for a fast first offer. Once you're under contract, verify it. Walk the property with an experienced contractor, and price the big-ticket items separately — a roof, a foundation crack, an HVAC system aren't in the per-foot number, so add them on top. And build in a contingency: at least 10% on a light cosmetic job, up to 25% on a full gut, because no walk-through catches everything. For a deeper breakdown of pricing a rehab, see our guide on estimating rehab costs.

Don't Let a Missed Repair Turn Profit Into Break-Even

Underestimating the rehab is the fastest way to sink a flip — a single overlooked roof, foundation, or HVAC line can erase your entire margin. Don't guess your renovation budget. Download our free Scope of Work Template to itemize every repair, hand a clear plan to your contractors, and lock in accurate, hard numbers to run through the calculator above before you ever make an offer.

Step 3: Project Your After-Repair Value (ARV)

Your ARV is what the finished house will sell for, and it drives everything — your offer, your profit, your max offer all work backward from it. You find it with comps: recently sold, renovated properties similar to yours in size, bed/bath count, and location. Pull a few, look at what they actually sold for, and let them tell you the number.

The discipline that matters most here is staying conservative. Never price your flip above the highest recent sale in the neighborhood — the moment you assume you'll sell for more than anything comparable ever has, you've stopped analyzing and started hoping. That's where flippers lose money: they take the top comp and tack on another $25,000–$50,000 "because the market's going up." Don't. Use the real comps, and if anything, lean low. Getting the ARV right is a deep skill on its own — we cover the full comp criteria and how to nail this number in our ARV calculator guide. The calculator above will also build your ARV from comps for you.

Get Your ARV Right — Every Number Depends On It

Your after-repair value drives your profit, your ROI, and your maximum offer — get it wrong and the whole deal is wrong with it. Pulling the right comps is what separates a real ARV from a hopeful guess. Download our free Comp Criteria Cheatsheet for the exact criteria we use to choose comparable sales — the same standards that make the difference between an accurate number and a costly one.

Step 4: Add Up Your Holding Costs

Holding costs are what you pay every month you own the property, before it sells — loan interest, property taxes, insurance, utilities, and any HOA dues. They're easy to underestimate because they're invisible on day one and brutal by month six. The single biggest driver is time: every extra month on the market is another month of all of these. A useful rule of thumb for estimating your timeline is that roughly $10,000 of renovation work takes about a week to complete — so a $40,000 cosmetic job is about a month of actual work. But budget your hold conservatively. We plan for around six months on a standard flip: a couple of months of work, a couple on the market, a couple for closing, each padded for delays. If it finishes faster, that's extra profit. If you budget 60 days and it takes six months, that surprise comes straight out of your pocket.

Step 5: Factor In Your Financing Costs

Unless you're paying all cash, borrowing has a cost, and it's bigger than most beginners expect. Most first-time flippers use a hard money lender — a company that lends specifically on the deal, usually funding around 90% of your purchase-plus-rehab cost, secured by the property itself. Two costs come with it: an interest rate, typically around 10–14% annualized and charged interest-only, and origination points, usually 1–2% of the loan amount, paid in cash at closing.

Here's how that math works on a real deal. Borrow $396,000 at 10% for a six-month hold, and the interest is about $19,800 (half of the annual $39,600, because you only hold it six months). Add one origination point on that loan — about $4,000 — and your hard money costs roughly $23,800. If you also bring in a private money lender to cover your down payment and the gap, that's an additional cost on top. Private money is often cheaper and more flexible than hard money — we've borrowed it anywhere from 6% to 12% depending on the relationship — and it's frequently where experienced flippers get most of their capital. The calculator lets you enter your loan terms and see exactly how financing changes your cash-on-cash return, because leverage is the whole reason that number can be so much higher than your ROI on total cost.

Step 6: Factor In Your Selling Costs

Selling isn't free, and these costs come off the top of your resale price. The big one is agent commissions — most flippers pay 5–6% of the sale price. There's also back-end closing (roughly 1% of the ARV), transfer taxes in some areas, and any concessions a buyer negotiates. On a $545,000 resale, commissions alone at 5–6% are $27,000–$33,000. It's worth shopping this: some flippers work with a listing agent at a reduced rate and keep total commissions closer to 4%, because they're handing over a clean, finished property. Whatever your number, don't gloss over exit costs — leaving them out is one of the most common ways beginners overstate a deal's profit.

Step 7: Calculate Your Net Profit, ROI & Cash-on-Cash Return

Now subtract everything — purchase, rehab, holding, financing, and selling — from your ARV. What's left is your net profit. Run it against your total project cost for your ROI, and against the cash you actually invested for your cash-on-cash return. If the profit is thin or the returns don't clear your target, walk away. There's no shame in a deal that doesn't pencil; there's real pain in one you talked yourself into.

A word on how much profit to aim for. A simple beginner rule: make at least $1 of net profit for every $1 of renovation you spend. Budget $40,000 in rehab, target at least $40,000 in net profit. That margin isn't greed — it's the cushion that absorbs the things that go wrong, and something almost always goes wrong.

How to Start Flipping Houses as a Beginner! [STEP BY STEP]

Alex Martinez and Stan Gendlin walk the entire fix-and-flip process from start to finish — funding, finding, and analyzing your first deal.

 

What's A Good ROI For House Flipping?

A good ROI on a house flip depends on your market, your financing, and how you measure it — but a useful benchmark is to target at least a 10% return on your total project cost, with many experienced flippers aiming for a minimum net profit of $25,000–$30,000 per deal on smaller flips and more on higher-priced ones. On the cash you actually invest, a healthy financed flip can return far more.

The number you'll see quoted most often comes from ATTOM's national flipping data, and it's worth understanding exactly what it does and doesn't tell you. In the first quarter of 2026, the typical U.S. home flip generated a gross profit of about $66,000 — the gap between what investors paid and what they resold for — which worked out to a roughly 25.4% return. That was actually the first uptick after seven straight quarters of decline, up from a low of 24.7% the prior quarter, though still below the roughly 29.6% flippers were seeing a year earlier.

Here's the catch, and it's the most important thing to understand about that figure: it's a gross return. ATTOM calculates it as resale price minus purchase price, divided by the purchase price — and it explicitly leaves out the rehab, the holding costs, the financing, and the cost to sell. Those expenses typically run 20–33% of a home's after-repair value. So that headline 25.4% is not what flippers actually take home. Your net return, after everything the calculator accounts for, is meaningfully lower — which is precisely why running your own numbers beats leaning on a national average.

Two other things that benchmark hides. First, returns vary enormously by market — in the same period, some metros posted single-digit gross returns while others cleared much higher, so a national figure tells you very little about the deal in front of you. Second, a good ROI on paper can still be a bad deal if the margin is too thin to survive a surprise. A flip projected at a 15% return that gets hit with an unexpected foundation repair or two extra months of holding can evaporate to break-even fast. That's why we'd rather see a conservative deal with real cushion than an aggressive one that only works if everything goes perfectly — because in a renovation, something rarely does.

The takeaway: use the national numbers to calibrate your expectations, not to evaluate your deal. A good ROI is one that clears your target after every cost is subtracted and still leaves room for the things that go wrong. The calculator gives you that real number; the average can't.

This is educational, not financial advice. Flip returns vary widely by market and are not guaranteed. Figures cited are from ATTOM's Q1 2026 U.S. Home Flipping Report; confirm current data before making investment decisions.

Common Mistakes To Avoid With A House Flipping Calculator

A flip calculator is only as accurate as the numbers you feed it — garbage in, garbage out. The tool won't stop you from entering an optimistic ARV or a lowball rehab number; it'll just hand you a confident-looking profit that isn't real. Here are the mistakes that most often wreck an otherwise good analysis, all of them input errors rather than tool errors.

Overestimating the ARV. The most expensive mistake, because ARV drives every other number. It happens two ways: pricing off active listings instead of sold comps, and reaching above the highest recent sale in the neighborhood "because the market's going up." Both are hope, not analysis. Use closed comps, stay conservative, and never assume you'll sell for more than anything comparable actually has.

Underestimating the rehab. The second most expensive, and the one that ends the most flipping careers. Beginners lowball the budget to make a deal "work," then get buried when the walls come open. Price cosmetic work honestly, add big-ticket items separately, and carry a contingency — 10% minimum, up to 25% on a gut. Remember the numbers from earlier: a $200k gut that became $300k, a $65k budget that was really $130k. The tool can't see the rotted framing behind the drywall; your contingency is what covers it.

Forgetting the financing cost. If you're borrowing — and most flippers are — leaving out interest and points overstates your profit, sometimes badly. A six-month hard money loan can cost tens of thousands in interest alone, plus points paid in cash at closing. Enter your real loan terms, not "I'll figure it out later."

Underbudgeting the hold. Time is the quiet killer. Every extra month is more interest, taxes, insurance, and utilities. Don't model a 60-day flip and plan your finances around it — budget conservatively, and treat a fast sale as upside rather than the plan.

Skipping or shrinking the exit costs. Agent commissions, back-end closing, transfer taxes, buyer concessions — these come straight off your resale price and routinely total five figures. Leaving them out is one of the easiest ways to turn a break-even deal into an imaginary winner on paper.

Trusting the gross number. The through-line behind all of these: analyzing "resale minus purchase" and calling it profit. That's the figure the national averages report and the figure that gets flippers into trouble. Your real profit is what's left after every cost above. Run the full calculation, every time, and let the honest number make the decision.

House Flipping Calculator FAQs

Final Thoughts On Using A House Flipping Calculator

Flipping houses isn't won on demo day or in the kitchen — it's won in the analysis you do before you ever make an offer. The investors who last aren't the ones who find the prettiest houses or the cheapest ones. They're the ones who know their numbers cold, so when a deal is tight, they can see whether it actually works or just looks like it does.

That's the entire job of a house flipping calculator. It replaces hope with a number. The gross profit on a flip always looks good — that's why the headlines quote it — but the number that lands in your account is what's left after the rehab, the months of holding, the financing, and the cost to sell. Run every deal all the way to that number, and you'll pass on the ones that only work on paper and move confidently on the ones that hold up.

And not every deal will work — that's normal, not failure. Most of the properties you analyze won't pencil, and the discipline to walk away from a thin deal is worth more than the willingness to chase it. The break-even flip that eats six months of your life almost always started as a deal someone talked themselves into. The calculator is how you avoid being that someone.

So here's your next step: take a property you're actually considering — or one you're curious about — and run it through the calculator at the top of this page. Enter the purchase price, the rehab, the ARV, and your costs, and look at the real profit, ROI, and cash-on-cash return. If the numbers work, you've found a deal worth pursuing. If they don't, you just saved yourself from a bad one. Either way, you're doing the thing that separates flippers who make money from flippers who wish they had. For the full process behind the numbers, see our guide on how to flip a house.

About The Author

Alex Martinez

Founder & CEO, Real Estate Skills

Alex Martinez is the Founder and CEO of Real Estate Skills. With more than a decade of investing experience and 33+ residential properties acquired, he has personally wholesaled and flipped houses across the country. Through Real Estate Skills, Alex and his team have helped thousands of students learn how to analyze deals, run the right numbers, and close profitable real estate transactions.

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Real Estate Skills is not a law firm or a financial advisory firm, and the information in this article is provided for educational purposes only — it does not constitute legal, tax, or financial advice. House flipping returns, costs, and financing terms vary by market and change over time, and all real estate investing carries risk, including the risk of loss. The calculator and examples on this page produce estimates only and do not guarantee any result. Always confirm your numbers with your own comps, contractor bids, and lender, and consult a licensed real estate, tax, and financial professional before making any investment decision.