The total base rent payable for the first full lease year.
By Angel Campa, Founder · Updated March 2026
Annual base rent is the single largest cost component in most commercial leases. It serves as the foundation for calculating holdover penalties (often 150-200% of base rent), security deposit requirements (typically 1-3 months), and the overall NPV of the lease obligation. Extracting the wrong figure propagates errors through every financial analysis downstream.
Defined in the "Rent" or "Base Rent" section, usually within the first 10 pages. Often presented as a schedule showing annual rent, monthly rent, and per-RSF rates for each year of the term.
Lextract uses a combination of AWS Textract OCR and Claude AI to identify and extract the annual base rent from your lease PDF. The AI searches for all pages of the document, then assigns a confidence score based on OCR quality and extraction certainty. Fields with lower confidence are flagged for human review.
Payment Frequency
The interval at which rent is due.
Escalation Type
The methodology used to increase rent over the term.
Fixed Escalation %
The static percentage by which rent increases annually, if applicable.
CPI Index Used
The specific inflation index utilized for variable escalations.
Percentage Rent Rate
The percentage of gross sales payable to the landlord.
Breakpoint Amount
The gross sales threshold that triggers percentage rent obligations.
Base rent is usually quoted as a dollar amount per rentable square foot per year (e.g., $30/RSF/yr). To calculate monthly payments, multiply the per-RSF rate by the total RSF and divide by 12. A $30/RSF rate on 5,000 RSF equals $150,000/year or $12,500/month.
In a NNN lease, base rent does not include operating expenses -- those are billed separately. In a gross or full-service lease, base rent may include a base amount of operating expenses, with increases above the base year passed through as additional rent.
Total occupancy cost includes base rent plus all additional charges: CAM/operating expenses, real estate taxes, insurance, utilities, parking fees, and any other pass-throughs. Base rent alone often represents only 60-75% of total occupancy cost.
How to calculate commercial lease rent escalations for fixed annual increases, CPI adjustments, and percentage rent. With worked examples.
A complete reference for commercial lease financial terms. Covers base rent, escalations, NNN vs gross, TI allowances, and percentage rent with examples.
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