Clothing Rental Income Calculator

Cleaning is the whole business

Gross rental income looks generous — 10 to 15% of retail per rental is the usual range, so a £400 dress renting at £50 looks like eight rentals to pay for itself. Net income tells a different story.

A platform fee of 10 to 15% comes off first, then dry cleaning, which for occasion wear is £15 to £25 every time. On a £50 rental that is somewhere between a third and a half of the gross before anything else.

The ratio worth watching is the rental price divided by the cleaning cost. Four or more and the garment is a business; under two and it is a hobby that occasionally loses money on a difficult clean.

A worked example

A £400 dress renting at £60, platform taking 12%, cleaning at £15. Net per rental is £52.80 less £15, so £37.80. At eight rentals a year that is £302, and over three years £907 — a 127% return on the purchase price.

Drop the rental price to £40 and the net is £20.20, the annual income £162, and the three-year total £485. The rental price fell by a third and the profit fell by nearly half, because cleaning did not move.

Where the answer misleads

Rentals per year is the optimistic input. Occasion wear rents in seasons, and eight rentals a year is a good result rather than a baseline. Modelling monthly rentals doubles the income and halves the payback, and neither is real.

The model also assumes the garment stays rentable. Damage, alterations by renters, and simply looking tired in photographs all end a garment's rental life before its physical one. Fifteen to thirty rentals is the usual range.

Finally, this is per garment. A rental business is a portfolio, and the ones that work carry the ones that do not — so a single garment's return is a useful check on stock selection rather than a forecast of the business.