The authoritative report on US rent data
Original analysis on apartment asking prices, built on live listings from 4,797 properties in 652 cities. No statistical models. No flat-line indices. Just the raw numbers, refreshed every morning.
Pick a state, see the rent trend
Every shaded state has live listings in our dataset. Click one to open its state-wide rent trend, bedroom breakdown, and city rankings.
Industry context
The National Multifamily Housing Council counts ~23.4M apartment homes in 5+ unit buildings nationwide. Our live-listing dataset covers 0.3% of that universe at the asking-price level today.
How many apartments are in the US? Industry totals and live-listing coverage
NMHC Quick Facts puts the US apartment universe at ~23.4M units in 5+ unit buildings. We track 65,806 of them at the live asking-price level across 652 cities, refreshed every morning. The page pairs each industry headline with its live-listing analogue and tells you when to cite each.
Industry universe: 23,400,000 units (NMHC) | Our live coverage: 65,806 (0.3%)
Rent by bedroom count: studios, 1, 2, and 3-bedroom apartments compared
Median asking rents by bedroom count from 65,806 live listings. Two surprises in the data: 3-bedroom median sits below 2-bedroom, and studios beat 1-bedrooms on the median but lose on the mean. With per-room cost breakdown and salary requirements.
Studio: $1,654 | 1BR: $1,699 | 2BR: $2,026 | 3BR: $2,202
Salary needed to afford rent (2026 by bedroom and city)
What you need to earn to rent the typical US apartment without exceeding the federal 30% cost-burdened threshold. Bedroom-by-bedroom and city-by-city income requirements computed live from 65,806 listings.
Median rent $1,835 requires $73,400 annual income at the 30% rule
What is the median rent in the US? (2026 data)
Live asking-rent data from 65,806 units across 4,797 apartment properties in 652 cities. Raw percentile distribution, bedroom medians, state rankings, and the 12-month trend line that index publishers smooth away.
National median asking rent: $1,835
How much does an apartment cost in America? (2026 breakdown)
Real apartment prices from 65,806 live US listings. Studio through 3-bedroom medians, how much you need to earn to rent each, and the cheapest and most expensive markets tracked right now.
Median 1BR: $1,699 | Median 2BR: $2,026
Why our research is different
The National Multifamily Housing Council is the gold-standard citation for industry-scale figures: total apartment universe, total renter population, national vacancy. Zillow's ZORI is a statistical model estimating market-wide rents. RentCafe's public charts pull from Yardi industry indices that smooth away month-to-month movement. Our reports publish the raw asking-price distribution from 65,806 live listings, including the tails, gaps, and outliers those sources collapse into a single number.
Cite NMHC for the universe. Cite us for the live asking price inside it. The industry-totals page pairs each NMHC headline with its live-listing analogue. The coverage map shows where our data is dense enough to draw conclusions from.