Renter Statistics (2026)

About 44.6 million US households rent their homes, roughly 34.7% of all occupied housing units, according to the 2024 American Community Survey (see the table below). The other 65.3% own, giving a homeownership rate that the Census Housing Vacancy Survey put at 65.3% in the first quarter of 2026.

The median gross rent (contract rent plus utilities) was $1,487 in 2024, and the median asking rent for vacant units had climbed to $1,579 by early 2026. Renting is now the default for a large and growing slice of the country, especially younger and lower-income households.

The renter share is not fixed. It rose steadily after the 2008 housing crash, peaking around 36.6% of households in 2016 as foreclosures and tight credit pushed people out of ownership, then eased as the homeownership rate recovered (see the chart and table below).

Renters made up 29.9% of occupied units in 2010 but 34.7% in 2024, a meaningful long-run shift toward renting. The homeownership rate has since settled in the mid-60s percent, leaving roughly one in three households renting.

Even with a steady homeownership rate, renters are where the growth is. Redfin analysis of Census data found rental households reached about 45.3 million in 2024 and grew 1.9% on the year, more than double the pace of owner-occupied homes and accounting for over half of all US household growth (industry estimate).

The drivers are affordability and flexibility: mortgage payments have jumped far more than rents since the pandemic, so even households who could buy are choosing to lease. New York (51.9% renter) and Los Angeles are the only large metros where most households rent.

The core affordability problem is that rents have grown faster than renter paychecks. The Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies reports median gross rents rose from $1,088 in 2019 to about $1,498 in 2024, roughly a 37% jump, while real renter incomes barely moved (see the table below).

Zoom out further and the gap is starker: between 2001 and 2024, rents rose about 30% in inflation-adjusted terms while renter incomes rose just 9%. That two-decade divergence is why rent burdens keep climbing even when rent growth cools month to month.

A household is cost-burdened when it spends more than 30% of income on housing, and by that yardstick renters are stretched like never before. A record 22.7 million renter households, nearly half of all renters, were cost-burdened in 2024, per the JCHS (see the table below).

Worse, 12.1 million renter households were severely cost-burdened, spending more than half of income on rent and utilities. For the lowest-income renters (under $30,000), just $210 a month is left after housing, a record low that has fallen roughly 60% since 2001.

Rent burden is not shared evenly. Using 2023 ACS data, the Census Bureau found 56.2% of Black renter households and 53.2% of Hispanic renter households were cost-burdened, versus 46.7% of white and 43.4% of Asian renters (see the chart below).

The severe-burden gap is even wider: about 30.6% of Black renters spent more than half their income on housing. These disparities compound the racial wealth gap, since rent-burdened households have little left over to save toward a down payment.

The National Low Income Housing Coalition frames affordability as a housing wage: the hourly pay a full-time worker needs to afford a modest rental at 30% of income. In 2025 that wage was $33.63 an hour for a two-bedroom and $28.17 for a one-bedroom, against a $7.25 federal minimum (see the chart and table below).

The average renter earns $23.60 an hour, about $10 short of the two-bedroom housing wage, and more than 60% of all US workers earn less than it. A full-time minimum-wage worker would need roughly 116 hours a week, or nearly three full-time jobs, to afford a two-bedroom.

Renting is overwhelmingly a younger-household story. Only 36.8% of householders under 35 owned their home in early 2026, meaning roughly 63% rent, versus 78.4% ownership among those 65 and over (see the table below). The median renter is about 42, the median homeowner about 56.

Homeownership rises with every age bracket as households build savings and settle down, from 61.1% at ages 35-44 to about 76% at 55-64. But the under-35 ownership rate has drifted structurally lower over two decades, keeping young adults in the rental market longer.

Renters earn far less than owners on average. Zillow's 2024 housing-trends survey put the median renter household income near $51,300, well below the roughly $74,600 national median and the higher incomes typical of homeowners (company survey, flagged).

The income skew is stark at the top: households earning $150,000 or more make up about 26% of homeowners but only 8.6% of renters. Lower incomes are exactly why rent burdens bite so hard, since a fixed rent claims a bigger slice of a smaller paycheck.

Renters are more racially and ethnically diverse than owners. About half of renters are non-Hispanic white, below the roughly 60% white share of the adult population, while Black adults are about 19% of renters versus 12% of the population (Zillow, flagged).

Put differently, Black and Hispanic households are roughly twice as likely to rent as white households. That mirrors the homeownership gap the Census tracks: 75.0% of non-Hispanic white householders owned in Q1 2026 versus just 44.0% of Black householders.

Renting is not only for those priced out of buying. RentCafe analysis of Census data (industry, flagged) found renters earning $150,000 or more grew about 60% between 2019 and 2023, the fastest growth of any income band, with roughly 249,000 such high-earners renting in New York City alone.

At the very top, the number of renter households earning $1 million or more more than tripled, from about 4,500 to 13,700 over the same span. Many affluent households now rent by choice, favoring flexibility and keeping capital invested rather than tied up in a home.

Even as demand grows, the affordable end of the stock is shrinking. The JCHS reports the US lost about 9.3 million units renting below $1,400 a month between 2014 and 2024, including 2.5 million that had rented for under $600, a 30% collapse in the cheapest tier.

New construction is also cooling: multifamily completions fell to about 416,000 units in 2025 from 547,000 in 2022, so the recent pipeline that softened rents is thinning out. With the median rental unit now about 45 years old, aging stock and lost low-cost units keep supply tight where it is needed most.

The rental market loosened modestly as pandemic-era construction delivered. The rental vacancy rate was 7.3% in Q1 2026, up slightly year over year, which helped flatten asking rents (professionally managed apartment rents were down 0.6% year over year in late 2025).

Quality and risk remain concerns: about 3.6 million renter households (8%) live in moderately to severely inadequate units, and more than 18 million rental homes sit in areas of moderate to high natural-hazard risk, per the JCHS. Softer rents have not fixed the underlying affordability and adequacy problems.

For renters, the math argues for building wealth outside of home equity. With rent claiming 30% or more of income for nearly half of renters, the leftover margin is thin, so an automated, low-cost investing habit (even small monthly amounts into diversified funds) is how renters compound wealth without a mortgage.

Renting also frees up capital and flexibility that owners tie into a house, and historically a diversified stock portfolio has returned about 7% a year after inflation. The practical playbook: keep an emergency fund in a high-yield account, avoid rent burden where you can, and invest the difference consistently rather than waiting to buy.