70% Rule Calculator for House Flipping – Max Offer (MAO)

A fast 70% rule calculator for house flippers and wholesalers. Enter a property's after-repair value (ARV) and rehab costs to get your Maximum Allowable Offer (MAO) — the most you can pay and still leave a buffer for holding, selling, and profit. Adjust the rule percentage, add a wholesale assignment fee, and carve out a desired minimum profit floor. Everything runs locally in your browser; nothing is uploaded.

🔒 Pure browser calculation — nothing is uploaded.

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Hard profit floor carved out before the offer.

Your maximum offer

ARV × rule %—
− Estimated repairs—
− Wholesale fee—
− Desired profit—
Maximum Allowable Offer (MAO)—
Your offer as % of ARV—
Buffer for holding, selling & profit—

The 70% rule is a screening tool. A passing deal still needs a full cost breakdown — itemize holding, financing, and selling costs with the fix and flip profit calculator before you commit.

How the 70% rule works

The 70% rule is the fastest way to sanity-check a house-flipping deal. It states that your maximum purchase price should be 70% of the property's after-repair value (ARV), minus whatever the renovations will cost: MAO = (ARV × 70%) − repairs. A $300,000 ARV with $40,000 of repairs caps your offer at $170,000. The rule deliberately bakes in a 30% margin so that, after you've paid for financing, holding the property, agent commissions, and closing on both ends, there's still profit left.

That 30% is not your take-home profit — it is a cushion shared across every cost the rule doesn't name. On a typical flip, holding and financing might eat 8–12% of ARV, selling costs another 7–9%, leaving a single-digit-percent net margin. That is exactly why the rule is a filter, not a final decision: it is conservative on purpose so a deal that fails the 70% test is almost never worth chasing, while a deal that passes earns a closer look.

Change the rule percentage to match your market. Investors competing in hot metros sometimes accept 75%; cautious flippers and cheaper price points lean toward 65%, where fixed costs consume a larger share of a small ARV. Wholesalers add an assignment fee so the buyer they assign to still clears the rule. If you'd rather lock in a hard margin than trust the buffer, enter a desired minimum profit — the calculator subtracts it up front, so a passing offer guarantees at least that profit while the remaining buffer covers only holding and selling costs.

Once a property passes this screen, analyze it properly: run the full deal in the fix and flip profit calculator, or if you plan to keep it as a rental, check the BRRRR calculator. Browse every tool in the real estate investment calculators hub.

Frequently Asked Questions

The 70% rule says a fix-and-flip investor should pay no more than 70% of a property's after-repair value (ARV) minus the estimated repair costs. The formula is Maximum Allowable Offer = (ARV × 70%) − repairs. The 30% gap that's left over isn't pure profit — it's a buffer that absorbs holding costs, financing, agent commissions, closing costs, and your margin. It's a quick screening tool to filter deals before you run a full profit analysis.

Multiply the ARV by your rule percentage (70% is standard), then subtract your estimated repair costs. For example, a home with a $300,000 ARV needing $40,000 in repairs gives (300,000 × 0.70) − 40,000 = $170,000 maximum offer. Wholesalers subtract their assignment fee on top of that. This calculator does the math live as you type and also shows the offer as a percentage of ARV.

ARV is what the property will be worth once renovations are complete, estimated from recent sales of comparable, already-renovated homes in the same area. It is the single most important input in the 70% rule — overestimate the ARV and every downstream number is wrong. Pull at least three close comps, or have an agent or appraiser confirm it, before you trust your offer.

70% is the default, but the right number depends on your market and risk. In hot, low-inventory markets investors sometimes stretch to 75% to win deals; in slower or higher-cost markets, or for new flippers, 65% leaves more cushion. Cheaper properties often need a lower percentage because fixed costs eat a bigger share. Change the rule percentage in the calculator to see how sensitive your offer is.

Not explicitly — that's the point of the 30% margin. The leftover 30% of ARV is meant to cover purchase and sale closing costs, holding costs (loan interest, taxes, insurance, utilities), agent commissions, and your profit, all at once. Because it lumps them together, the rule is a screen, not a final answer. Once a deal passes, run the numbers properly with a fix and flip profit calculator.

Wholesalers calculate the MAO the same way, then subtract their assignment fee so the end-buyer (the flipper) still hits the 70% rule. Enter your fee in the wholesale fee field and the calculator lowers the contract price accordingly. If a $170,000 MAO leaves room for a $10,000 fee, you'd aim to put the property under contract at $160,000.

Enter a dollar figure in the desired minimum profit field and the calculator carves it out before computing your offer: MAO = (ARV × rule %) − repairs − wholesale fee − desired profit. This guarantees a hard profit margin instead of trusting the 30% buffer to deliver enough. If a deal won't pencil out at, say, $25,000 of locked-in profit, lower your offer until it does — or walk away. When you set a profit floor, the buffer row relabels to "holding & selling costs" because your profit is now an explicit line item rather than part of the leftover margin.

It remains a useful first-pass filter, but it's a rule of thumb, not a guarantee. High financing rates, expensive markets, and light-rehab deals can all make a flat 70% misleading. Use it to quickly reject obvious bad deals and shortlist promising ones, then confirm the shortlist with a full profit and ROI breakdown that itemizes every cost.

No. This calculator is pure client-side JavaScript — your ARV, repair figures, and offers are never uploaded, logged, or stored. It keeps working offline once the page has loaded.