Most NRI landlords know their monthly rent. Almost none have calculated their net rental yield in India — the one figure that tells you if the property is actually working.

Net Rental Yield India: The Number Every NRI Property Owner Should Know

There is a number that most NRI property owners have never computed. They know the rent — ₹38,000 a month for the Whitefield flat, ₹55,000 for the Powai 2BHK — and they have a vague sense that the property is "doing okay." What they rarely know is the net rental yield in India, the figure that answers the only question that actually matters: after everything comes out, what is this property actually returning?

The gap between gross income and net yield is wider than most people expect. And the gap between "I think it's doing okay" and the calculated number is sometimes the difference between a sound long-term asset and a sentimentally held liability.

The Gross Yield Illusion

The most common mental math goes like this: ₹38,000 per month, times twelve, equals ₹4.56 lakh annually. The property cost ₹82 lakh in 2014. That's 5.5% gross yield. Comfortable enough.

Gross yield is a starting point, not an answer. It tells you what the property earns before costs — and for NRI landlords, the costs are substantial and varied enough that the real number is usually 2 to 3 percentage points lower.

The mistake is treating the rent received as the return. It is the revenue. The return is what survives everything else.

What Actually Comes Out

Here is a reasonably complete picture of what most NRI landlords absorb each year, rarely in one place at one time:

Property tax — BBMP, MCGM, MCD, GHMC. Amount varies by city, property size, and year. Due dates differ: BBMP by June 30, MCGM by April 30, MCD by March 31. Missed payments carry penalties.
Society maintenance dues — typically ₹3,000–₹12,000 per month depending on building and city. Often invisible to the NRI owner until a demand letter arrives.
TDS under Section 195 — if your tenant is India-resident and correctly compliant, they deduct 31.2% of rent at source and remit it to the income tax department on your behalf. This isn't a loss — it is your advance tax — but it reduces the cash that actually arrives in your account, and the TDS certificates need to be tracked to claim the credit on your ITR.
Maintenance and repairs — painting, plumbing, appliances. Landlords typically absorb one major repair cycle every three to four years. Smoothed across years, this is real money.
Vacancy gaps — the months between tenants, when rent simply doesn't come in. A one-month gap in a twelve-month cycle cuts gross yield by 8.3% before a single expense is incurred.
Agent fees — typically one month's rent when a new tenant is placed. Sometimes split; sometimes not.

None of these costs are outrageous on their own. Together, on a ₹38,000-per-month property, they can easily absorb ₹1–1.5 lakh annually — reducing a nominal 5.5% gross yield to 3.5% or below, net.

How to Calculate It Honestly

The arithmetic is not complicated. What is complicated is assembling the inputs, because they live in different places.

Start with rent actually received for the year — not what was due, what arrived. Sum the bank credits.
Add back TDS withheld by the tenant (the Form 16A or 26AS entry) — this is income, just pre-paid to the tax department.
Subtract property tax paid for the year.
Subtract society dues paid for the year.
Subtract maintenance and repair costs for the year.
Subtract agent fees, if any.
Divide the result by the current market value of the property, not the purchase price. The asset is priced at what it would sell for today.

That final figure is your net rental yield. In India's tier-1 cities, a well-run property in a good location typically yields 2.5–4% net. If you're below 2%, the property is underperforming relative to the capital it represents. If you're above 4%, you're doing unusually well.

Neither number is good or bad in isolation — real estate is a long-term asset and appreciation matters alongside yield — but you cannot make that evaluation honestly if you don't know the yield.

Why Most NRI Landlords Have Never Done This Math

The reason is not laziness or indifference. It is friction. The inputs are scattered.

Rent arrives in a parent's bank account and gets forwarded piecemeal. The TDS certificate, if issued at all, comes from the tenant's CA in February. Property tax receipts are wherever last year's India visit left them. Society due confirmations come as WhatsApp forwards from the building secretary. Maintenance invoices exist as photographs on someone's phone.

You cannot calculate a number you cannot locate the components of. The honest answer for most NRI property owners isn't "my yield is X" — it's "I don't have everything in one place to know."

That is the actual problem PropertyPilot is designed to solve: a private, on-device vault where every rent entry, TDS log, property tax receipt, society due, and maintenance cost for a property lives in one place. Not so that you can file a report, but so that when you want to know the number — the real number — the data is already there.

The calculation takes five minutes when the records exist. Without them, it takes three weekends and a family WhatsApp thread and still comes out approximate.

PropertyPilot is on the waitlist now. If you've been carrying a rough sense of your property's performance without ever doing the math, join the waitlist → and give the number somewhere to live.

For more private, no-upsell money tools built for the NRI context, browse the Make the money behave collection.