Columbia Rent Report: May 2026

Welcome to the Apartment List May 2026 Rent Report for Columbia, MD. Currently, the overall median rent in the city stands at $2,262, after rising 1.2% last month. Prices remain down 1.0% year-over-year. Read on to learn more about what’s been happening in the Columbia rental market and how it compares to trends throughout the broader Baltimore metro area and the nation as a whole.

The median rent in Columbia rose by 1.2% over the course of April, and has now decreased by a total of 1.0% over the past 12 months. Columbia’s rent growth over the past year has is similar to both the state (-1.2%) and national averages (-1.7%).

Four months into the year, rents in Columbia have risen 2.4%. 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 3.1%.

If we expand our view to the wider Baltimore metro area, the median rent is $1,756 meaning that the median price in Columbia ($2,262) is 28.8% greater than the price across the metro as a whole. Metro-wide annual rent growth stands at -0.8%, above the rate of rent growth within just the city.

The table below shows the latest rent stats for 11 cities in the Baltimore metro area that are included in our database. Among them, Odenton is currently the most expensive, with a median rent of $2,520. Baltimore is the metro’s most affordable city, with a median rent of $1,448. The metro's fastest annual rent growth is occurring in Bel Air South (1.5%) while the slowest is in Annapolis (-3.5%).

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.