Rental Market Statistics (2026)

The U.S. rental market entered 2026 in a state it has not occupied in more than a decade: cooling. After the pandemic-era surge that pushed asking rents up by double digits, a record wave of new apartment supply has finally caught up with demand, vacancies sit near multi-decade highs, and rent growth has slowed to its weakest pace since 2020. Yet for the roughly 44.6 million households that rent in America, affordability has not improved much — a record share still spends more than 30% of income on housing. This is the data-driven state of the rental market in 2026, with every figure sourced to its origin.

44.6MU.S. renter households (~35% of all households)

$1,910typical U.S. asking rent (Zillow, March 2026)

7.3%national rental vacancy rate, Q1 2026

22.6Mcost-burdened renter households (record)

Key takeaways

Renters are roughly a third of the country. About 44.6 million households — close to 35% of all U.S. households — rent rather than own, and renter-occupied units made up 31.2% of the national housing inventory in Q1 2026.
Rent growth has stalled. The typical U.S. asking rent rose just 1.8% year over year in early 2026 — the slowest annual pace since 2020 — and single-family rent growth hit the slowest on record in Zillow's data.
Supply finally caught up. A record streak of apartment completions pushed the rental vacancy rate to 7.3% and the multifamily vacancy rate above 7%, the highest in years.
Affordability is still broken. A record 22.6 million renter households — half of all renters — were cost-burdened in 2023, and 12.1 million were severely burdened.
Fraud and scams are surging. Roughly 1 in 8 rental applications now contains fraud, and consumers have reported about $65 million lost to rental scams since 2020.

How many Americans rent — and who they are

Renting is not a fringe arrangement; it is how roughly a third of the country lives. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, about 44.6 million households — close to 35% of all occupied housing units — are renter-occupied, with the remaining 65% owner-occupied. The Census Bureau's Housing Vacancies and Homeownership survey for the first quarter of 2026 put renter-occupied units at 31.2% of the total housing inventory.

The homeownership rate, meanwhile, has barely budged. The Census Bureau reported a homeownership rate of 65.3% in Q1 2026 — statistically unchanged from 65.1% a year earlier. With ownership rates flat and household formation continuing, the absolute number of renter households remains near its all-time high.

Rents in 2026: the slowest growth since the pandemic

The headline story of 2026 is deceleration. After years of punishing increases, rent growth has flattened. Zillow's March 2026 rent report found the typical U.S. asking rent at $1,910, up just 1.8% year over year — the slowest annual pace since 2020. By Zillow's May 2026 reading, the typical rent had edged up to roughly $1,951, still only about 2% above a year earlier.

The slowdown is broad but uneven by property type. Single-family rents climbed 2.5% year over year to about $2,225 — the slowest annual growth ever recorded in Zillow's data series — while multifamily (apartment) rents rose just 1.3% to roughly $1,757.

Single-family rent+2.5%

All rentals+1.8%

Multifamily rent+1.3%

Independent data confirms the cooling. Apartment List's National Rent Report showed the national median rent actually down about 1.5% year over year in early 2026, having fallen a cumulative 4.4% from its 2022 peak. For the first time in years, income growth is outpacing rent growth across both the single-family and multifamily segments.

Vacancy is high — supply finally caught up with demand

The reason rents have stalled is simple: there are more empty units to fill. The national rental vacancy rate reached 7.3% in Q1 2026, up from 7.1% a year earlier, while the homeowner vacancy rate held at just 1.1%. Apartment List's index put the multifamily vacancy rate at about 7.2% after peaking in February 2026 — its highest level in over four years.

That glut is the product of a historic construction wave. RealPage data shows roughly 105,525 apartment units were completed in Q3 2025 alone — the 10th consecutive quarter with completions above 100,000 units, an unprecedented streak in records dating to the 1990s. The flood of new supply is now expected to taper sharply, with completions projected to fall by roughly a third over the following 12 months as construction financing tightens — which many analysts believe will tighten the market again into 2027.

Affordability: a record number of renters are cost-burdened

Slower rent growth has not undone years of accumulated strain. The Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies' State of the Nation's Housing 2025 report found that in 2023, a record 22.6 million renter households — half of all renters — were cost-burdened, spending 30% or more of income on housing and utilities. That was a record for the third straight year, as summarized by the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

Worse, 12.1 million renters (27%) were severely cost-burdened, spending more than half of their income on housing. The burden falls unevenly by race: 57% of Black, 53% of Hispanic, and 50% of multiracial renter households were cost-burdened, versus 46% of white renter households.

Black renters57%

Hispanic renters53%

Multiracial renters50%

White renters46%

Shelter remains the stickiest part of inflation, too. The Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Price Index showed the shelter index up 3.4% year over year as of May 2026 — still running well above overall goods inflation even as market asking rents flatten, because the CPI captures rents across all existing leases, not just new ones.

Why people stay renters longer

One of the clearest structural shifts behind sustained rental demand is the collapse of first-time homebuying. The National Association of Realtors reported that the share of first-time home buyers fell to a record-low 21%, while the median age of a first-time buyer climbed to an all-time high of 40 years. The first-time-buyer share has contracted by roughly 50% since 2007.

When would-be buyers are priced out, they remain renters — and high rents make saving a down payment harder still, a feedback loop that keeps the renter pool deep even as the market cools on the supply side.

Evictions: filings dip for a second straight year

One bright spot: eviction pressure eased modestly. The Eviction Lab's 2025 eviction filing analysis recorded about 1.23 million eviction filings across the 38 cities and 10 states it tracks (home to roughly a third of all renter households) — down from 1.26 million in 2024 and the second consecutive annual decline, running 3.2% below the post-pandemic average.

Still, the average eviction filing rate across tracked locations was 8.0% — meaning landlords filed roughly one eviction case for every 13 renter households. And the national figure masks sharp local increases: filings ran well above average in places like Travis County, Texas (the Austin area, +27%), and across multiple Oregon markets.

Rental fraud and scams hit record levels

As the market softened, fraud intensified on both sides of the lease. On the application side, screening-technology firm Snappt's research found that roughly 1 in 8 (about 12%) rental applications contains some form of fraud, most commonly forged income documents, falsified employment verification, and fabricated rental history. In Snappt's operator survey, 84.3% of property managers reported receiving falsified financial documents during tenant screening — a problem made dramatically worse by AI tools that generate convincing fake pay stubs.

Prospective renters are victims too. The Federal Trade Commission's December 2025 data spotlight on rental scams reported nearly 65,000 rental scam complaints since 2020, totaling about $65 million in losses, with a median reported loss of $1,000. People ages 18 to 29 were three times more likely than other adults to lose money, and about half of reported scams started with a fake ad on Facebook (another 16% on Craigslist).

The 2026 rental market at a glance

Metric	2026 figure	Source
Renter households	~44.6 million (~35%)	U.S. Census Bureau
Rental vacancy rate (Q1)	7.3%	Census HVS
Homeownership rate (Q1)	65.3%	Census HVS
Typical asking rent	$1,910 (+1.8% YoY)	Zillow
Median rent change (YoY)	−1.5%	Apartment List
Cost-burdened renters	22.6 million (record)	Harvard JCHS
Eviction filings (tracked)	~1.23 million	Eviction Lab
Applications containing fraud	~1 in 8 (12%)	Snappt
Rental-scam losses since 2020	~$65 million	FTC

What a cooling market means for landlords

For independent landlords and small property managers, the 2026 data points to a clear strategic shift. With vacancy at 7.3% and rent growth near zero, the market has tilted toward renters in much of the country — two in five Zillow listings offered concessions like free rent or waived fees in March 2026. Filling a vacancy quickly now matters more than pushing the rent another 3%, because every empty month wipes out a year's worth of modest rent increases.

At the same time, the surge in application fraud raises the cost of getting a tenant wrong. With roughly 1 in 8 applications carrying some form of fraud and AI-generated documents growing harder to spot by eye, rigorous, consistent tenant screening — verified credit, criminal, and eviction history pulled from authoritative data, plus careful income verification — is the single highest-leverage thing a landlord can do to protect cash flow in a soft market. A thorough screen is also a fair-housing safeguard: applying the same documented criteria to every applicant is what keeps a screening process both effective and compliant.

VerticalRent's free landlord platform lets independent owners advertise vacancies, accept online applications, and run comprehensive tenant screening reports — credit, criminal background, and eviction history — so the data in this report becomes something you can act on, one applicant at a time. In a market where the margin for error has narrowed, screening every applicant the same way, every time, is how landlords stay ahead of both vacancy and fraud.

Methodology & sources

Every statistic above is drawn from a primary or authoritative secondary source published by a government agency, university research center, or industry data provider, and is linked inline. Figures reflect the most recent releases available as of June 2026; rental market data is revised frequently, so always check the linked source for the latest reading.