A unit turn, also called a make-ready, is everything that happens between one tenant handing back the keys and the next tenant being able to move in: the trash-out, the clean, the paint, the punch-list repairs, the flooring, the re-key. It is the most repeated job in a rental portfolio and one of the most reliably mispriced, because the people pricing it tend to add up the trades they can see and stop there. Whether you are a property manager scoping a turn for an owner or a maintenance contractor bidding turns for a management company, the price that holds up is the one built from the work and the one that accounts for the cost the work creates while it is being done.
What an apartment unit turn costs in 2026
There is no single turn price, because there is no single turn. The honest range runs from a few hundred dollars for a clean unit a careful tenant left in good shape to well over ten thousand for a unit that needs flooring throughout, a full repaint, appliance replacement, and a trash-out before any of that can start. The benchmark worth holding in your head is the all-in number: a 2024 industry survey of property managers running communities of 250 units or more put the average cost of turning a unit at about $3,872, and that figure deliberately includes lost rent, marketing, and concessions alongside the repairs and cleaning.1
That breakdown is the whole argument of this guide. The make-ready invoice, the part with the paint and the cleaning and the repairs on it, is usually under half of what a turn costs. The rest is the rent you did not collect while the unit sat empty and the money you spent to fill it. Price only the visible half and you will optimize the wrong number all year.
Scope the turn before you put a price on it
Pricing a turn sight unseen is how operators lose money on the units that need the most work. The walk-through is the price. Before a number goes on the page, someone has to stand in the unit and sort the work into the tiers the industry already uses, because each tier prices differently.
A light turn is a unit a good tenant left clean: touch-up paint, a full make-ready cleaning, a short punch list, maybe a carpet shampoo. A standard turn adds a full repaint of high-traffic rooms, real repairs, and often a flooring decision in one or two rooms. A heavy turn is the unit that needs flooring replaced throughout, walls patched or re-textured, appliances swapped, and a trash-out before the trades can even start. The mistake is pricing every turn as a standard turn out of habit, then eating the difference when a heavy unit comes back. Sort the unit honestly at the walk-through and the price follows the work instead of an average.
Build the price from line items, not a lump sum
The turn priced as one number, "make-ready, $1,600," is the turn that gets argued, padded, or rejected. Build it from line items the way you would build any quote, because an itemized turn is faster to approve, easier to bill back to an owner, and impossible to nickel-and-dime after the fact. The standard line items on a turn are the trash-out and haul-away, the make-ready clean, interior paint, the punch-list repairs, flooring work, and the re-key.
Two of those lines are mostly labor, so they are the ones to cost from the wage up rather than guess at. Paint is the biggest labor line on most turns. The median wage for painters in construction and maintenance was $48,660 a year in May 2024, roughly $23.40 an hour.2 The punch list, the patches and caulk and fixture swaps and blind replacements, is general maintenance work, and the median wage there was $48,620 a year, about $23.38 an hour, in the same period.3 Those are wages, not bill rates. The rate you charge has to carry payroll taxes, workers compensation, the truck, materials, and a margin on top, which is why a painter you pay around $23 an hour bills out closer to $55 to $70. Cost the labor lines from the loaded hour, not the wage, and the turn price stops being a guess.
The most expensive line never hits the invoice
Here is the line item that does not appear on any make-ready invoice and usually costs more than the ones that do: the rent you lose for every day the unit is not ready to lease. A unit renting for $1,500 a month is losing about $49 in rent for every single day it sits empty. A turn that takes seven days from move-out to rent-ready has already cost roughly $345 in lost rent before you count the time it then takes to sign a new lease. Drag the same turn to fourteen days and the lost rent alone is near $690, which on many turns rivals the entire paint line.
This is why the make-ready survey number is so much larger than a make-ready invoice: lost rent is baked into it.1 And it is why the lever that matters is almost never the one operators reach for first. Shaving $100 off the paint bid saves you $100 once. Cutting five days off the turn cycle saves you the daily rent five times over, on this turn and on every turn after it. The way you cut those days is rarely a faster painter. It is removing the waiting: the days a unit sits done-but-not-inspected, or scoped-but-not-approved, or waiting on a vendor who was never dispatched with a clear work order. An itemized turn that an owner can approve the same day it lands does more for the real cost of the turn than any single trade discount, because it attacks the expensive line instead of the cheap one.
Normal wear versus damage: who pays for what
Not every cost on a turn lands on the same party, and pricing the turn is also the moment to decide who is billed for what. The general principle across US rentals is that ordinary wear and tear from normal living is the owner's cost, part of the carrying cost of the property, while damage beyond normal wear caused by the tenant can be charged against the security deposit. Repainting because the paint is three years old and scuffed is normally wear. Repainting because the walls were covered in crayon or have fist-sized holes is damage. Where exactly that line falls, how much you can deduct, and the deadline and itemization rules for returning a deposit all vary by state, so confirm your local landlord-tenant rules before you bill anything to a deposit.
For pricing, what matters is that the split is decided and documented at the turn, not reconstructed weeks later when a former tenant disputes a deposit deduction. Photograph the unit at move-out, tie each chargeable line to a specific photo, and keep the make-ready scope and the deposit deductions as two separate records even when the same crew does the work. The owner-paid make-ready and the tenant-charged damage are different bills with different rules, and blurring them is how a deposit deduction gets thrown out.
Put the scope on the quote so the extras get billed
A turn is where scope creep is almost guaranteed, because the unit is already empty and open. "While you're in there, also swap the bathroom faucet, and the owner mentioned the closet doors." Each add is reasonable. Together, unpriced, they are how a turn quoted at $1,600 gets delivered at $2,100 with no paper trail to bill the difference. The protection is a written scope that says what the price covers and, just as plainly, what it does not.
Write the included work as line items, then add a short exclusions note: this turn does not include flooring replacement, appliance replacement, or work beyond the listed punch list, and any added work will be quoted as a change order before it starts. That one sentence converts every "while you're in there" from a margin leak into a new approved line. It also gives the owner a clean record, which matters most when the turn bills back through a management agreement. The mechanics of routing those costs to the owner are their own topic, covered in the guide on how to bill property owners for repairs, and the turn itself is just a large, multi-trade version of the work order that should be running every repair, which is the subject of the guide on property management maintenance work orders.
A worked example: pricing a standard two-bedroom turn
Here is a standard turn for an illustrative 900 square foot two-bedroom unit left in fair shape by a tenant of two years. The line amounts are illustrative, built from the loaded-labor logic above, not a quote for your market.
| Line | Amount |
|---|---|
| Trash-out and haul-away | $150 |
| Make-ready cleaning (full unit) | $200 |
| Interior paint, high-traffic rooms (labor + materials) | $650 |
| Punch-list repairs (patches, caulk, blinds, two outlets, door hardware) | $360 |
| Carpet clean, two bedrooms | $140 |
| Re-key / lock change | $95 |
| Make-ready invoice total | ~$1,595 |
That $1,595 is the number most people would call "the cost of the turn." Now add the line that is not on the invoice. If the unit rents for $1,500 a month and the make-ready takes seven days, the lost rent over that window is about $345. The true cost of getting this unit back to rent-ready is closer to $1,940, and that is before a single day of leasing time. Run the same turn with the make-ready dragging to fourteen days because the scope sat unapproved for a week, and the lost rent doubles to about $690, pushing the real cost past $2,280 without one extra dollar of labor or materials.
The lesson the two versions teach is not "paint cheaper." It is that the same make-ready invoice can cost $345 or $690 in vacancy depending entirely on how fast the scope gets approved and the trades get dispatched. The price you put on the turn should be built from the line items so it gets approved on day one, because the approval speed is worth more than the trade pricing.
Pricing turns when you do them at volume
A portfolio that turns dozens of units a year cannot price each one from scratch. The move is to standardize: define a "standard turn" as a fixed scope with a set price, define light and heavy as named adjustments off it, and price the recurring trades, paint and cleaning especially, as per-unit rates you have already negotiated with your crews. Then each individual turn becomes a fast walk-through that picks a tier and notes the exceptions, not a fresh estimate. That is how a management company keeps turn pricing consistent across owners and avoids the slow, bespoke quote that itself adds vacant days.
Standardizing also makes the bill-back clean. When every owner sees the same itemized turn scope and the same per-unit rates, the make-ready stops being a line an owner argues and becomes a number they recognize. The fastest portfolios are the ones where the turn scope, the price, and the owner approval all live on one page that moves the day the unit is walked, rather than a quote that waits in someone's inbox while the rent meter runs.
Price the turn on one page an owner can approve today
We built EosLog's quote generator so a unit turn goes out as an itemized scope, unit by unit, on one page an owner or asset manager can approve without a phone call. The faster the scope gets approved, the fewer days the unit sits empty, which is the part of the turn that moves the cost.
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Sources and further reading
- Multifamily Dive, "Turnover costs hold steady at nearly $4,000 per resident" (reporting on Zego's 2024 Resident Experience Management Report, based on 630 property managers of communities of 250 or more units; average turnover cost of about $3,872 per unit, including repairs, cleaning, marketing, concessions, and lost rent).
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, Painters, Construction and Maintenance (median annual wage $48,660, roughly $23.40 per hour, May 2024).
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, General Maintenance and Repair Workers (median annual wage $48,620, about $23.38 per hour, May 2024).
This guide reflects general US rental turnover and make-ready practice as of 2026 and is not legal or accounting advice. Wage data and cost ranges vary by region and change over time, and landlord-tenant rules on security deposits, wear and tear, and deposit deductions vary by state and change as well. Confirm current figures against the cited sources and confirm the deposit and wear-and-tear rules in your state before relying on this article for a specific turn.