Visualizing Rent Growth in the U.S. Rental Market, 2018-2022

For more than six years, the Apartment List Research Team has been tracking prices in the rental market and publishing real-time data for hundreds of cities, counties, and metros across the nation.

From 2017 to 2019 the rental market showed stable price growth, trending up gradually with predictable ebbs and flows. But in 2020 the COVID pandemic rattled this trend, cratering prices in some markets while intensifying the affordability crisis in others. Rent data became an integral component of any discussion about the economy, inflation, and the future of American towns and cities.

The infographic below uses data on monthly rent changes across the 100 largest cities in the country to tell the big-picture story of the U.S. rental market over the past half-decade. Scroll through the following slides for more commentary on each year.

Complete City-Level Data

If you would like to take a closer look at the data, hover over the interactive version of this table to see city-and-month-specific rent growth. These stats can also be accessed via our public-facing databases.