America’s 43 million renter households spent $535 billion on rent in 2015, up $19 billion, or 4 percent, from $516 billion in 2014. The increase was driven both by rising rents and a surge in the number of U.S. renter households, which grew by about 1.8 million this year compared to 2014.
America’s 43 million renter households spent $535 billion on rent in 2015, up $19 billion, or 4 (3.7 %) percent, from $516 billion in 2014. The increase was driven both by rising rents and a surge in the number of U.S. renter households, which grew by about 1.8 million this year compared to 2014.
The amount spent on rent was roughly evenly split among renters in multifamily apartment buildings, who spent a combined $239 billion, and renters of single-family homes, who spent about $245 billion.
American’s 2015 rental expenditures were roughly comparable to the total budget of the Department of Defense (about $575 billion) and almost five times what Americans spent on dental care in 2014. Using his entire net worth – estimated by the 2015 Forbes 400 at $47 billion – Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos could have paid roughly one month’s rent for every American renter in 2015.
About two-thirds of the total rent paid nationwide in 2015 was paid by renters in the country’s 50 largest metro areas. New York-area renters spent a combined $56 billion on rent in 2015, followed by Los Angeles-area renters (almost $35 billion spent cumulatively on rent in 2015) and San Francisco-area renters (who spent about $17 billion on rent). At the other end of the list of the largest 50 metros, Salt Lake City renters spent about $800 million cumulatively on rent, Louisville renters spent about $1.2 billion and New Orleans and Birmingham renters each spent about $1.4 billion.
And while New Yorkers top the list for total rent paid, Angelenos and Chicagoans lead the pack for total rent paid on single-family residences.
Use the tool below to see the total rent paid in each metro area in 2015 by mousing over the dots. The color of the dot corresponds to the total amount of rent paid in 2015, and the size of the dot corresponds to the number of renter households.
To calculate the total rent paid, we estimated the number of renter households in each metro area based on the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2005 through 2014 American Community Surveys (ACS), and households counts and metro-level homeownership rates from the Current Population Survey/Housing Vacancy Survey (CPS/HVS). ACS microdata files were downloaded from the University of Minnesota, IPUMS-USA.
We then summed the monthly Zillow Rental Indexes (ZRI) for each month, including a forecast for December 2015 ZRI as the final month of data for the current year are unavailable at the time of this publication. Finally, we took the product of the estimated number of renter households and the summed ZRIs for each metro, and scaled the results by a rental stock adjustment factor, which controls for differences in the footprint of the rental stock and the total housing stock. The rental stock adjustment factor was derived from the relationship between ZRI and monthly gross rents reported in the 2014 ACS for each geography.
