Rental income

How much can you rent
an ADU for in San Diego?

What they rent for

San Diego ADU rents by size, from market sources rather than from our own lettings — we build these, we do not manage them. Coastal parcels run above the top of these ranges; inland North County runs below the bottom.

Typical monthly rent in San Diego, 2026. Coastal neighbourhoods command a premium of several hundred dollars.
Plan	Typical rent	Coastal
CADU 500Studio · 500 sq ft	$1,900 – $2,400	$2,500+
CADU 7501 bed · 750 sq ft	$2,200 – $2,700	$2,900+
CADU 12002 bed · 1,200 sq ft	$3,000 – $3,300	$3,500+

Sources at the foot of the page. These are gross rents — what a tenant pays, not what you keep.

And here is the part nobody prints

Rent is only half of it. The other half is what the money costs. Below is the monthly payment on each of our published prices, financed in full over thirty years, set against the rent above.

Monthly principal and interest on the full build price over 30 years, against typical rent. Negative numbers are money out of your pocket each month.
Plan	At 7.5%	At 8%	At 9%
CADU 500$299,000 · rent $1,900–2,400	$2,091	$2,194	$2,406
CADU 750$365,000 · rent $2,200–2,700	$2,552	$2,678	$2,937
CADU 1200$475,000 · rent $3,000–3,300	$3,321	$3,485	$3,822

At 8%, a CADU 750 costs $2,678 a month and rents for $2,200 to $2,700. The best case is roughly break-even. The CADU 1200 is short by $185 to $485 every month at the same rate, and that is before anything below.

What the gap really is

If you finance the whole build at today's rates, a San Diego ADU generally does not cash-flow from day one. The rent covers most of the payment and sometimes all of it, and that is the honest shape of it.

Three things make the real figure worse than the table:

Vacancy. One empty month a year is about 8% off the annual rent. Budget it even if you never use it.
Property tax. The ADU adds assessed value and your bill goes up accordingly. It does not reassess the whole property — only the new construction — but it is not nothing.
Maintenance, insurance and management. Self-manage and you save the 8–10% a manager charges, and spend the Saturdays instead.

And three that make it better:

You rarely finance all of it. Most of our clients put some cash in. Every $50,000 not borrowed is roughly $367 a month off the payment at 8%.
Rent rises, the payment does not. On a fixed-rate loan the gap closes every year by itself. That is the actual investment case, and it is a slow one.
The unit adds value to the property well beyond the rent — which is also why a renovation loan underwritten on the finished value can work when your current equity will not stretch. The financing page covers that route.

Where it does work

The numbers above are the worst case: borrow everything, rent it to a stranger, count only the cash. Most of the people we build for are not in that case.

It works when you are housing family, and the alternative is paying rent somewhere else or paying for care. It works when you have cash to put in and are looking for somewhere better than a savings account to put it. It works on a coastal parcel, where the rent premium does most of the closing. And it works over a long horizon, where fixed payments and rising rents do the arithmetic for you.

It works badly if you need it to pay for itself in year one on borrowed money. If that is the plan, we would rather tell you now than after you have signed.

A note on the 750 sq ft line

There is a reason the CADU 500 holds its own here. At or under 750 sq ft an ADU pays no development impact fees in San Diego, which keeps the amount you have to borrow down without touching the rent much. The smallest unit is often the best yield, not the worst. The rules page has the detail.

Work out what you would actually borrow. The calculator shows what your equity reaches before you talk to anyone about money.

Open the calculator

How these numbers were worked out

Payments are standard amortisation on the full published build price over thirty years, principal and interest only. They exclude site work, which varies lot to lot and is broken down on the cost page, and they exclude tax, insurance and any fees a lender adds. Rates of 7.5 to 9% bracket where San Diego home equity and construction lending actually sat through 2026.

Rent ranges are from published San Diego market sources, listed below. They are not our figures — we have no units of our own to quote, and a builder quoting their own rents without any is making them up.

None of this is financial advice, and your parcel, your rate and your tenant are all specific to you.

How much can you rent an ADU for in San Diego?