El Cajon Rent Report: May 2026

Welcome to the Apartment List May 2026 Rent Report for El Cajon, CA. Currently, the overall median rent in the city stands at $1,659, after rising 1.4% last month. Prices remain down 1.1% year-over-year. Read on to learn more about what’s been happening in the El Cajon rental market and how it compares to trends throughout the broader San Diego metro area and the nation as a whole.

The median rent in El Cajon rose by 1.4% over the course of April, and has now decreased by a total of 1.1% over the past 12 months. El Cajon’s rent growth over the past year has has fallen behind the state average (0.4%) and is similar to the national average (-1.7%).

Four months into the year, rents in El Cajon have risen 4.3%. This is a faster rate of growth compared to what the city was experiencing at this point last year: from January to April 2025 rents had increased 1.6%.

If we expand our view to the wider San Diego metro area, the median rent is $2,259 meaning that the median price in El Cajon ($1,659) is 26.6% lower than the price across the metro as a whole. Metro-wide annual rent growth stands at -1.4%, below the rate of rent growth within just the city.

The table below shows the latest rent stats for 8 cities in the San Diego metro area that are included in our database. Among them, Oceanside is currently the most expensive, with a median rent of $2,498. El Cajon is the metro’s most affordable city, with a median rent of $1,659. The metro's fastest annual rent growth is occurring in Oceanside (2.4%) while the slowest is in Chula Vista (-4.7%).

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.