What is the depreciation life of a roof on a rental property?

27.5 years for a residential rental, the same as the building, because a roof is a structural component of the building rather than its own asset class. It does not matter that the shingles will physically last 20 years. A new roof starts its own 27.5-year schedule the month it is placed in service, and the old roof's remaining basis can be written off through a partial disposition election.

What is the depreciation life of an HVAC system in a rental?

It depends on the type. A central HVAC system (furnace, ductwork, central AC) is a structural component and depreciates over 27.5 years in a residential rental. Window units and portable air conditioners are personal property on the fast schedules (5 to 7 years). The same logic applies to water heaters and built-in plumbing: attached to the building means the building's clock.

How long do you depreciate appliances in a rental property?

5 years under MACRS: refrigerators, ranges, dishwashers, washers and dryers, plus carpet and furniture. In practice many appliances never hit a depreciation schedule at all, because units costing $2,500 or less can be expensed in full the year you buy them under the de minimis safe harbor election.

What is 15-year property on a rental?

Land improvements: driveways, fences, sidewalks, patios, retaining walls, in-ground sprinkler systems, and landscaping. They sit between the fast 5-year personal property and the 27.5-year building. The land itself never depreciates on any schedule.

What happens to the old roof when I replace it?

By default, nothing good: the old roof's remaining basis keeps depreciating inside the building schedule while the new roof starts its own 27.5-year clock, so you depreciate two roofs at once. The fix is a partial disposition election in the year of replacement, which lets you write off the old roof's remaining basis immediately and removes it from future recapture.

Do I have to depreciate a $1,900 dishwasher, or can I expense it?

You can expense it. With the de minimis safe harbor election on your return, items invoiced at $2,500 or less are deducted in full the year of purchase and never enter your depreciation schedules, which also means no recapture on them at sale. Above $2,500, it is 5-year MACRS property.

Is the depreciation life different for a commercial rental?

Yes. Commercial buildings depreciate over 39 years instead of 27.5. The faster classes are mostly the same (5-year personal property, 15-year land improvements), which is why cost segregation matters even more on commercial property: every dollar moved off the 39-year clock is worth more.

Depreciation Life of Rental Property Assets: The Full Table

The depreciation life of every rental property asset: why a roof and central HVAC take 27.5 years, appliances take 5, driveways take 15, and what to do with the old roof you just replaced.

"How long do I depreciate this?" has exactly four answers for a residential rental, and most people guess wrong on the two expensive ones. The depreciation life of a rental property asset is set by asset class, not by how long the thing physically lasts: a roof that will wear out in 20 years depreciates over 27.5, and a refrigerator that will run for 15 years depreciates over 5. Here is the full table, the logic behind it, and the two moves (de minimis expensing and the partial disposition election) that the useful-life table doesn't tell you about.

The four clocks

Everything you buy for a residential rental lands on one of four MACRS schedules, per IRS Publication 527 and the class lives in Publication 946:

Depreciation life	Asset class	What's on it
5 years	Personal property	Appliances (refrigerator, range, dishwasher, washer/dryer), carpet, furniture, window and portable AC units
7 years	Catch-all personal property	Office furniture and equipment used for the rental, and property with no assigned class life
15 years	Land improvements	Driveways, fences, sidewalks, patios, retaining walls, sprinkler systems, landscaping
27.5 years	The building and its structural components	The structure itself, plus the roof, central HVAC, water heater, plumbing, wiring, windows, flooring that's glued or nailed down

Two things never depreciate: the land, and anything you expensed instead of capitalizing (more on that below). Commercial buildings run 39 years instead of 27.5; foreign residential rentals run 30 under ADS.

The rule that decides the hard cases: attached or not

The expensive surprises (roof, HVAC, water heater) all come from one distinction. If a component is structurally part of the building, it takes the building's 27.5-year life, no matter what it cost or how long it physically lasts. If it is freestanding personal property, it gets the fast 5-year clock.

That is why a $14,000 roof and a $9,000 central AC system each depreciate over 27.5 years, while the $900 window unit in the same house depreciates in 5 or gets expensed outright. The test is not price or lifespan; it is whether removing it would damage the building. Central furnace: structural, 27.5. Portable AC: personal property, fast clock. Wall-to-wall carpet tacked down: 5-year property by specific IRS classification, one of the few soft exceptions.

Each of these starts its own schedule the month it is placed in service, with its own mid-month proration in year one (personal property uses a half-year convention instead). A property six years into ownership can easily be running four schedules at once: the building, a roof, a driveway, and a set of appliances, each on its own clock. The math for each is the same straight-line calculation we walk through in how rental depreciation is calculated, and our depreciation calculator builds the year-by-year schedule for the 27.5-year assets.

A worked example: one renovation, three clocks

Say you spend $28,400 getting a rental ready for the next tenancy: a $14,000 roof, a $6,000 driveway, a $6,500 central AC replacement, and a $1,900 dishwasher.

Item	Cost	Life	First full-year deduction
Roof	$14,000	27.5 yrs	$509
Central AC	$6,500	27.5 yrs	$236
Driveway	$6,000	15 yrs	$400
Dishwasher	$1,900	expensed (de minimis)	$1,900
Total year-one deductions	$28,400 spent		$3,045

Same renovation, four very different tax outcomes. The dishwasher never touches a schedule: with the de minimis safe harbor election, anything invoiced at $2,500 or less is deducted in full the year you buy it. That is also the best recapture planning you can do years in advance, because an expensed item has no accumulated depreciation to recapture at sale. The 5- and 15-year classes are also what a cost segregation study carves out of a purchase price, and they are the classes eligible for bonus depreciation; the building itself never is.

The move everyone misses: the partial disposition election

Replace a roof and, by default, you are depreciating two roofs at once: the new one on its fresh 27.5-year schedule, and the remains of the old one still buried inside the building's basis. The old roof's undepreciated cost just sits there, deducting itself a few dollars a year until 2050-something, and its accumulated depreciation waits in your recapture total.

The fix is a partial disposition election in the year of the replacement: you estimate the old roof's remaining basis, write it off in full that year, and remove it from the building schedule. A real deduction now, a smaller recapture bill later. It is use-it-or-lose-it, elected on the return for the year the old component came out, which is exactly the kind of thing that gets missed when the books are reconstructed at tax time instead of kept as the work happens.

Where this lands on Schedule E

All four clocks converge on one number: Schedule E line 18. Each asset's annual depreciation, summed per property, is the line-18 deduction, and each asset's accumulated total is what feeds the recapture math when you sell (or carry forward: a 1031 exchange moves every one of these schedules into the replacement property at their old ages). On our own books the app keeps one schedule per asset (building, improvements, each on its own start date and life) and carries the accumulated totals forward, because the failure mode we kept hitting with spreadsheets was not the division, it was remembering that the 2023 driveway and the 2025 roof are different rows with different clocks. However you keep the books, keep the schedules per asset, not per property, and date every one. If you track it by hand, our free depreciation schedule template is exactly this structure: one row per asset, mid-month first year computed, and a total row that equals line 18.

The takeaway

Four clocks: 5 years for what plugs in or lies loose, 15 for what's poured or planted outside, 27.5 for the building and everything attached to it, and "never" for land and anything you expensed under the $2,500 de minimis rule. When you replace a structural component, take the partial disposition write-off instead of depreciating the ghost of the old one. And if you are staring at an invoice deciding repair or improvement, that call matters more than the life it lands on: our guide to categorizing rental expenses covers that line, and it is the one an audit reads first.