Minimum Lease Payment
The minimum lease payment is the lowest amount that a lessor can expect to make (and a lessee can expect to pay) over the lifetime of the lease. Accountants calculate minimum lease payments in order to assign a present value to a lease in order to record the lease properly in the company's books.The method of calculating minimum lease payments is laid out in the Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 13 (FAS 13), Accounting for Leases, which was published by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) in 1980.