Lease Negotiation Calculator

This calculator builds total occupancy cost from base rent, CAM charges, and concessions over the full lease term. Base rent per square foot compounds year over year at your escalation rate (starting from the unescalated year-one rate), and each year's rent-per-square-foot is multiplied by total square footage and summed to get total base rent over the term; the first and last year's figures are tracked separately so you can see how much rent grows from start to finish. Free rent value is calculated using the year-one monthly rent rate — not a blended or escalated rate — multiplied by the number of free months, which is the standard convention since free-rent concessions are typically granted at the start of a lease before escalation has taken effect. CAM (Common Area Maintenance) charges are applied as a flat per-square-foot rate across every year of the term with no escalation of their own, added on top of base rent, and total occupancy cost is base rent plus CAM minus the free rent credit. Note that the TI (tenant improvement) allowance is tracked and reported separately as a concession but is not subtracted from total occupancy cost — it's typically a one-time capital contribution toward buildout rather than an offset to ongoing rent, so combining it into an occupancy-cost figure would conflate two different kinds of value.

Effective monthly rent and effective rent per square foot are both headline comparison metrics, but they are not computed the same way, so don't read one as the other restated in different units. Effective monthly rent takes base rent net of the free-rent credit and divides it strictly by the months you actually pay — free-rent months drop out of the denominator entirely, and CAM is excluded, so this figure isolates the true paid-rent rate. Effective rent per square foot instead takes the full total occupancy cost — base rent plus CAM, minus the free-rent credit — and spreads it evenly across every year of the lease term, paying and free alike, before dividing by square footage. That folds CAM into the number and dilutes the free-rent concession across the whole term rather than excluding it, so treat it as a separate, CAM-inclusive annual benchmark for comparing landlord proposals, not as a per-square-foot version of the monthly figure.