Apartment List National Rent Report

• The national median rent held steady in July and now stands at $1,402. Month-over-month rent growth peaked early this year and has stalled out during peak moving season, when it's typically fastest.
• Rent prices nationally are down 0.8% compared to one year ago. Year-over-year rent growth had been close to flipping positive for the first time since 2023, but has now ticked further negative for three consecutive months.
• The national multifamily vacancy rate ticked up to 7.1% this month, setting a new record for our index. We're past the peak of a multifamily construction surge, but the market is still absorbing all of the new units, and vacancies are still trending up.
• Units are taking an average of 28 days to get leased after being listed, up one day from last month’s reading, and down from a high of 37 days in January.
• The Austin metro is currently the nation’s softest rental market, with the median rent there down by 6.8% over the past year; San Francisco has seen the fastest year-over-year rent growth (+4.6%).

Rents flat month-over-month, down 0.8% year-over-year

Rent growth nationally was flat in July, continuing a trend of slowing price increases. After increasing by 0.6 in March, our national rent index has seen its growth rate trending down over the past four months, at odds with the typical seasonal trend.

The late spring and summer months are normally the peak season for moving activity, and rent growth tends to ramp up at this time of year in tandem with demand. The fact that we’ve instead seen rent growth get increasingly sluggish indicates softness in the market, possibly reflecting declining consumer confidence amid a more uncertain macroeconomic outlook.

Month-over-month rent growth this July was slightly slower than what we saw in July of last year – as a result, year-over-year rent growth dipped this month, falling to -0.8 percent. From last October through this April, year-over-year rent growth nationally gradually ticked up from -0.8 percent to -0.3 percent, and appeared to be on the path to flipping positive for the first time since mid-2023. However, that rebound stalled out amid a slow moving season; year-over-year growth nationally has dipped further negative for three consecutive months, and is now back to last fall’s level.

In dollar terms, the national median monthly rent now stands at $1,402, down $11 compared to July 2024. With the overall trajectory of rents trending modestly downward in recent years, the national median rent has now fallen below its August 2022 peak by a total of 2.8 percent, or $40 per month. But that cooldown came following a period of record-setting rent growth, and the typical rent price remains 22 percent higher than its January 2021 level.

Multifamily vacancy rate hits 7.1%, a new peak

The most important driver behind the soft rent growth of recent years has been a historic surge of multifamily construction. 2024 saw over 600 thousand new multifamily units hit the market, representing a 65 percent increase compared to 2022 and the most new supply in a single year since 1986. As a result of all this new inventory, more vacant units are sitting on the market, meaning that property owners face more competition for renters and have less pricing leverage.

Our national vacancy index – which measures the average vacancy rate of stabilized properties in our marketplace – ticked up this month and now stands at 7.1 percent. This represents an all-time high for this data series, which goes back to the start of 2017. We are now past the peak of the apartment construction wave, but even as the level of new supply hitting the market falls sharply compared to last year, it remains robust by historic standards. The vacancy rate will begin to tighten eventually, but for now it continues to rise as the market is still absorbing a swell of new units.

List-to-Lease time ticks up for first time this year

As more vacant units have come onto the market, those units have also been sitting vacant for somewhat longer. Our time on market index tells us how long it takes for vacant units to get leased after they are first listed on our platform. The typical “list-to-lease” time peaked at 37 days nationally in January, an all-time high going back to the start of the data series in 2019. We have since come down from that peak, but July saw time on market tick up from the first time this year, increasing from 27 days in June to 28 days this month.

The shortening of list-to-lease time that we’ve seen since the start of this year is in line with seasonal trends. That said, units are still sitting a bit longer than they typically do at this time of year, a signal of market softness in line with our rent growth and vacancy estimates. The median time on market nationally is currently two days longer than at this time last year, and units are sitting for ten days longer than they were in July 2021 when the market was at its tightest.

New supply driving falling rents in Sun Belt markets while the Bay Area heats up

Rents increased month-over-month in 37 of the nation’s 54 large metropolitan areas with a population of over one million. However, only 26 of these cities – slightly less than half – are currently logging positive year-over-year rent growth. Rent trends vary significantly by region, with year-over-year declines currently concentrated in the South and Mountain West regions.

Austin has seen the nation’s sharpest decline among large metros – the metro-wide median rent has fallen 6.8 percent in the last 12 months and is down 18% from its 2022 peak. The Austin metro is also significant for permitting new homes at the fastest pace of any large metro in the country, indicating the impact of new supply on softening rents. Austin is not alone in exhibiting this trend; among the ten metros with sharpest year-over-year rent declines, many also rank among the highest in terms of multifamily permitting activity (e.g. Denver, Phoenix, San Antonio, Salt Lake City, Raleigh, and Dallas). Notably almost all of these markets are located in the Sun Belt.

At the other end of the spectrum, the San Francisco metro currently has the nation’s fastest rent growth, with a 4.6 percent increase over the past year. The fastest growth in the San Francisco metro is happening in the urban core; the city of San Francisco has seen prices spike by 10.6 percent over the past year. Nearby San Jose also cracks the top ten for metro-level rent growth. Despite the recent strengthening of rent growth in the Bay Area, the region has been the slowest to bounce back from pandemic declines; in fact, we estimate that rents in the San Francisco metro are only just now returning to their early-2020 level. The remainder of the top ten list for fastest rent growth is comprised primarily of markets across the Midwest (e.g. Chicago and Minneapolis) and Northeast (e.g. Providence, RI and Hartford, CT).

Conclusion

All of our key indicators are pointing toward ongoing sluggishness in the multifamily rental market – rent growth is slipping and the vacancy rate is at an all-time high. A return to tighter market conditions should still be on the horizon, but the outlook has been complicated by macroeconomic whiplash being caused by tariffs and other policies being pursued by the Trump administration. That uncertainty appears to have modestly dampened demand during this moving season. And although the supply wave is receding, the number of units that hit the market in the first half of this year was still above the long-run average. With construction expected to slow further in the second half of this year and into 2026, conditions are likely to shift.

Complete Data and Methodology

All of the underlying data presented in this report is freely available on our rental data download page, where you can find the full monthly history of our rent estimates, vacancy index, and time on market index at various geographic levels (national, state, metro, county, and city).

Apartment List has long been committed to making our data products as accurate and transparent as possible. For those interested in getting deeper in the technical weeds, please see our rent estimate methodology explainer and vacancy index methodology explainer. And if you have any questions or custom data requests, you can reach us at research@apartmentlist.com.