Guide to Building a 27.5-Year Rental Property Depreciation Schedule in Spreadsheets

A tutorial explains how landlords can create a reusable depreciation tab in Excel, Google Sheets or LibreOffice for residential rental property. Under IRS rules, the building portion is recovered over 27.5 years, land is excluded, and the first and last years are prorated by month using a mid-month convention. The sheet tracks each building or improvement, such as a new roof, with its placed-in-service date, cost, and land-to-total value split from the tax assessment. The author says the formulas were checked against worked IRS examples, an independent Python model, and a sample tracker file. The article notes it is not tax advice and covers only the general 27.5-year method, excluding bonus depreciation, cost segregation, and 5-year property.