Berkeley Rent Report: May 2026
Welcome to the Apartment List May 2026 Rent Report for Berkeley, CA. Currently, the overall median rent in the city stands at $2,088, after rising 0.7% last month. Prices and are now up 3.5% year-over-year. Read on to learn more about what’s been happening in the Berkeley rental market and how it compares to trends throughout the broader San Francisco metro area and the nation as a whole.
The median rent in Berkeley rose by 0.7% over the course of April, and has now increased by a total of 3.5% over the past 12 months. Berkeley’s rent growth over the past year has has outpaced both state (0.4%) and national (-1.7%) averages.
Four months into the year, rents in Berkeley have risen 2.7%. This is a slower rate of growth compared to what the city was experiencing at this point last year: from January to April 2025 rents had increased 6.0%.
If we expand our view to the wider San Francisco metro area, the median rent is $2,756 meaning that the median price in Berkeley ($2,088) is 24.2% lower than the price across the metro as a whole. Metro-wide annual rent growth stands at 5.1%, above the rate of rent growth within just the city.
The table below shows the latest rent stats for 19 cities in the San Francisco metro area that are included in our database. Among them, San Mateo is currently the most expensive, with a median rent of $3,560. Oakland is the metro’s most affordable city, with a median rent of $2,072. The metro's fastest annual rent growth is occurring in San Francisco (14.5%) while the slowest is in Hayward (-2.7%).
Apartment List is committed to the accuracy and transparency of our rent estimates. We begin with reliable median rent statistics from the Census Bureau, then extrapolate them forward to the current month using a growth rate calculated from our listing data. In doing so, we use a same-unit analysis similar to Case-Shiller’s approach, capturing apartment transactions over time to provide an accurate picture of rent growth in cities across the country. Our approach corrects for the sample bias inherent in other private sources, producing results that are much closer to statistics published by the Census Bureau and HUD. For more details, please see the Apartment List Rent Estimate Methodology.
Apartment List publishes monthly rent reports and underlying data for hundreds of cities across the nation, as well as data aggregated for counties, metros, and states. These data are intended to be a source of reliable information that help renters and policymakers make sound decisions. Insights from our data are covered regularly by journalists across the country. To access the data yourself, please visit our Data Downloads Page.