Methodology
The calculator estimates what a home GPU nets per month on a rental marketplace: what renters pay, minus the platform's cut, minus electricity for the whole machine, including the hours nobody rents it.
How is net earnings calculated?
rented hours = 24 × utilization
idle hours = 24 − rented hours
earned / day = rental price × rented hours × (1 − platform cut)
energy / day = (GPU load W + rest of PC W) × rented hours
+ (GPU idle W + rest of PC W) × idle hours [Wh ÷ 1000]
net / day = earned / day − energy / day × price per kWh
net / 30 days = net / day × 30
break-even = earned / day ÷ energy / day [price per kWh at which net is 0]The three result cards differ only in the rental price: the cheapest, the median and the 90th percentile of the cheapest live Vast.ai offers. These are listed prices at one moment, not what hosts realised. Everything else uses the values you enter.
Which numbers are assumptions?
These could not be pinned to a single published figure. Each is editable in the calculator.
- Utilization, default 60%. Share of hours the GPU is actually rented. No source gives a reliable figure; Vast.ai uses 80% in one example, and new hosts start lower.
- Platform cut, default 10%. Rental prices are what renters pay. Some platforms say hosts keep their full asking price and charge renters a surcharge on top; others don't publish their cut. The default allows for the gap between what renters pay and what hosts receive.
- Rest of the PC, default 80 W. CPU, motherboard, fans and power supply losses while the machine is online. Measure yours with a plug-in power meter for a better estimate.
What is not included yet?
- Crypto mining and inference networks. Comparisons are planned once their data sources are checked.
- Taxes on earnings, which depend on where you live.
- Hardware wear, internet costs, and the time spent setting up and maintaining a host.
- Time waiting for verification, when a new host earns nothing.
How are currencies handled?
Rental prices are in US dollars. When you pick a euro electricity price, results are converted at 1.1225 USD per EUR, the European Central Bank reference rate listed below.
How sure are these figures?
Each source carries a label: primary source (the publisher's own page), third-party, checked, or not yet verified (seen only in a search summary). Unverified figures are being checked against the original pages. Corrections are listed below with their dates.
Corrections
2026-10-04: all sources were checked against their original pages. Changes:
- Italy electricity price corrected from €0.333 to €0.2966 per kWh, and Spain from €0.2872 to €0.2669, to match Eurostat's data.
- RTX 4090 rental prices replaced: the earlier $0.25–0.35/hr could not be found on its cited page and was well below live prices. It was replaced with figures from Vast.ai's own offers.
- 2026-10-04: rental prices, electricity prices and the EUR/USD rate now refresh automatically every day from Vast.ai, Eurostat, the EIA and the ECB. Rental prices describe the 64 cheapest single-GPU offers Vast.ai's API returns, and the figures above are replaced by these.
- Board power now comes from NVIDIA's own pages. US electricity price updated to July 2026 (18.31 ¢/kWh) and the EUR/USD rate to 1.1225 (2026-10-02).
- Still not confirmed: RTX 4090 and 5090 idle power (TechPowerUp blocks automated access).
Sources
Host fee removed and replaced by an internal surcharge; "the prices hosts set will be the prices they earn". Vast does not say how large the surcharge is.
Graphics card power 350 W for the RTX 3090 (450 W for the 3090 Ti).
Total graphics power 450 W.
Total graphics power 575 W.
About 18 W at idle with one monitor, about 26 W with two. Not a measurement of ours.
Idle: RTX 5090 about 30 W, RTX 4090 about 22 W. The page blocks automated access and the figures are in charts, so they were not confirmed.
- Vast AI rent my GPU: what GPU marketplace renting really meansGMI Cloud, as of 2026-10-04third-party, checked
Qualitative only: a card earns nothing while unrented, and hosts without a reliability record are skipped. It gives no utilization figure.
Refreshed automatically from Vast.ai's search API: single-GPU RTX 3090 offers that can be rented now, host asking price per hour before the renter surcharge. Low is the cheapest, typical the median and high the 90th percentile of the 64 cheapest offers (the API returns at most 64). Listed prices at one moment, not what hosts realised.
Refreshed automatically from Vast.ai's search API: single-GPU RTX 4090 offers that can be rented now, host asking price per hour before the renter surcharge. Low is the cheapest, typical the median and high the 90th percentile of the 64 cheapest offers (the API returns at most 64). Listed prices at one moment, not what hosts realised.
Refreshed automatically from Vast.ai's search API: single-GPU RTX 5090 offers that can be rented now, host asking price per hour before the renter surcharge. Low is the cheapest, typical the median and high the 90th percentile of the 64 cheapest offers (the API returns at most 64). Listed prices at one moment, not what hosts realised.
- Electricity prices for household consumers, bi-annual data (nrg_pc_204)Eurostat, as of 2025-12-31primary source
Refreshed automatically from Eurostat's data API. Households using 2,500–4,999 kWh a year, all taxes included: EU €0.2896, Germany €0.3869, Italy €0.2966, Spain €0.2669 per kWh.
- Electric Power Monthly, Table 5.6.A (residential average)U.S. Energy Information Administration, as of 2026-07-31primary source
Refreshed automatically. US residential average 18.31 ¢/kWh (preliminary estimate for the latest month).
Refreshed automatically. 1 EUR = 1.1225 USD on 2026-10-02.