🏠 Rent Affordability Calculator

How much rent can you actually afford? The honest answer.

What this tool helps with

Maximum affordable rent based on income rules

What you can enter

  • Monthly take-home pay (£): 2200
  • Other monthly commitments (£): 300

Why this page is useful

How much rent can you actually afford? The honest answer. This page loads fast, gives a direct answer, and then expands with useful context instead of burying the result under filler.

How the Rent Affordability Calculator works

The rent affordability calculator takes Monthly take-home pay (£) and Other monthly commitments (£) and returns Maximum affordable rent based on income rules. The calculation runs entirely in your browser — nothing is sent to a server, no sign-up, no tracking beyond standard analytics, and no waiting for results.

Under the hood the tool uses the same transparent formula people would apply by hand, just faster and without the arithmetic mistakes. If you want to sanity-check the output, the "Frequently Asked Questions" section below walks through the reasoning and edge cases.

When this is worth using

Most people land on a money tools page like this when they want a quick, honest answer without a sales pitch. Typical moments include planning ahead, settling a debate, double-checking an assumption, or figuring out whether a rough idea actually holds up once you put numbers on it.

If you're going to repeat this calculation with different values, bookmark the page — it's designed to load instantly and give a clean result every time.

Getting a more accurate result

  • Use realistic inputs. Round numbers are fine for a first pass, but your actual figures will give a meaningfully better answer.
  • Try a few variants. Adjust one value at a time to see which inputs move the result the most — that's usually where it's worth focusing your attention in real life.
  • Cross-check with the related tools below. They cover adjacent questions and will flag anything that looks off.

Frequently Asked Questions

The general rule is no more than 30% of take-home pay. In London, 35-40% is common but stressful.
No — this is rent only. Budget separately for council tax, energy and broadband.