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About AverageRentCost
AverageRentCost exists to answer one question well: what does rent look like, here? Rental sites usually answer it with scraped listings — a snapshot of whatever happens to be advertised this week, skewed toward new buildings and priced to test the market. We take a different approach. Every figure on this site comes from one of two authoritative public sources — HUD's Fair Market Rents and the Census Bureau's American Community Survey — and we show the source and its date on every data page so you can check any number yourself in a few clicks.
Our Editorial Team
The AverageRentCost Editorial Team is a small group of researchers and writers who work with public housing data every day. Our backgrounds span housing policy, personal finance, and data journalism. Team members decide which counties and comparisons to feature, design the analysis you see on each page — the income a rent implies under the 30% rule, the spread between a state's priciest and cheapest counties, the gap between what HUD benchmarks and what renters report paying — and review every page before publication. We write for readers making real decisions: a move, a lease renewal, a voucher search, a job offer in another state. So we favor plain language, show the underlying numbers, and avoid hype. When a figure could mislead — for example, when a Fair Market Rent is quoted as if it were an advertised asking rent — we say so on the page and explain the difference.
How we source and check our numbers
Rent benchmarks come from the Fair Market Rents program of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, fiscal year 2027 schedule (effective October 1, 2026 – September 30, 2027), published as a county-level data file at huduser.gov. Before building this site we cross-checked a sample of areas from that file — including Anchorage, Alaska; Phoenix, Arizona; and the metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas of Alabama — against HUD's published FY2027 Schedule of Metropolitan and Non-Metropolitan Fair Market Rents, and every sampled figure matched exactly. State medians come from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey 2024 1-year estimates, table B25031 (median gross rent), at census.gov; the national median from that table, $1,487, matches the Census Bureau's published headline figure. Our rules: figures are taken only from those published values and are never averaged together across sources or blended with listing data; where HUD sets one figure for a whole rent area we show it once per county and say that the area is shared; and derived numbers on this site (incomes at the 30% rule, percentage comparisons) are simple arithmetic on the published figures, shown with their inputs.
Two limitations are worth knowing. First, a Fair Market Rent is a benchmark, not a quote: it is set near the 40th percentile of gross rents for recent movers, includes utilities, and is built to run the voucher program — individual homes rent above and below it every day. Second, the ACS medians are survey estimates of what renter households reported paying in 2024, so they describe the existing stock of leases, including long-held ones, rather than today's asking prices. We flag both points in the disclaimer shown on every data page.
What we do not do
We do not list apartments, take applications, accept payment to feature a county or landlord, or adjust a figure because it makes a page more dramatic. We do not publish rent "estimates" for areas HUD did not publish, and we do not mix fiscal years into a single number. If you spot a figure that looks wrong, please tell us through the contact page — corrections are made promptly and noted on the page.
Questions about the site or its data? Visit the contact page.