Home › Rents by State › California

Average Rent in California

By the AverageRentCost Editorial Team · Last updated: October 2026

Rent in California runs from a 2-bedroom Fair Market Rent of $1,084 a month in Modoc to $4,254 in Santa Cruz — a spread of 3.9× inside one state. The table below is the complete FY2027 HUD schedule for California: every county (or county-equivalent) with its Fair Market Rent for each unit size, efficiency through four bedrooms. For context, the Census Bureau's American Community Survey measured California's median gross rent — what renter households actually reported paying — at $2,104 a month in 2024.

FY2027 Fair Market Rents by county in California

Two things in this table reward a second look. First, the 2-bedroom column (highlighted) is the standard benchmark: HUD and housing agencies quote it most often, and it is the column to use when comparing one county with another. Second, many counties share a rent area and therefore share identical figures — that is deliberate. HUD sets FMRs for rent areas, not individual counties: metropolitan counties in the same housing market get the same numbers, while each nonmetropolitan county is generally its own area. All figures are gross rents, meaning they include the cost of utilities on top of the lease rent.

Where California rents run highest — and lowest

The three most expensive county listings in California are Santa Cruz ($4,254), Marin ($3,697), San Francisco ($3,697). The three least expensive are Modoc ($1,084), Trinity ($1,153), Lassen ($1,248). That 3.9× gap between the top and bottom of the table is mostly a story of housing markets rather than county lines: the priciest figures belong to counties inside or near the state's large metropolitan areas, where wages, land prices, and demand are highest, while the lowest figures are rural counties where HUD's formula rests on thinner rental markets and lower incomes.

Measured against what renters actually pay, 38% of California's county listings carry a 2-bedroom FMR above the state's ACS median gross rent of $2,104. That pattern is expected rather than alarming. An FMR is set near the 40th percentile of rents paid by recent movers, and recent movers usually pay more than long-settled tenants, whose rents are held down by tenure. The ACS median, by contrast, covers every renter household including those in place for a decade. Read together, the two series bracket the market: the ACS median shows the typical existing rent, and the FMR shows what a new lease at the modest end of the market is expected to cost.

What income covers the typical California two-bedroom?

The long-standing affordability yardstick is the 30% rule: a household is "cost-burdened" when gross rent takes more than 30% of gross income. At the median California county 2-bedroom FMR of $1,725, staying under the line takes an annual income of about $69,000 — roughly $33 an hour for a full-time worker. In Santa Cruz, the state's priciest market, the same rule requires about $170,160 a year. Our rent affordability calculator runs this math for your own income against the counties we cover in depth.

We also publish a dedicated page for California’s largest rental market covered in depth: Los Angeles, with the full bedroom-by-bedroom table and the income each unit size takes under the 30% rule.

Compare with the neighboring state tables: Arizona · Colorado. Or go back to the national overview for the most and least expensive counties in the country.

California rent questions

Sources: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Fair Market Rents FY2027 (county-level data file, effective October 1, 2026), huduser.gov; U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2024 1-year estimates, table B25031 (median gross rent), census.gov. Last verified: October 2026.