How Big or Tiny of an Apartment Can the Median Household Income Afford to Rent in the 100 Largest US Cities?

In some cities, you get what is considered a walk-in closet of a McMansion.

It’s not totally fair to compare rents in Tulsa with rents in San Francisco because household incomes are different as well. One way to look at this is to figure out how big of an apartment a household can rent by paying 30% of the local median household income in rent. And you guessed it, in a number of cities the local median household income, as high as it may be, can only rent what would be considered a walk-in closet in a McMansion.

Many households in expensive cities such as New York City or San Francisco pay far more in rent than the 30% of their pre-tax household income. 50% is not unheard of. The median asking rent for a two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco currently runs $4,600 a month.

A household signing the lease today would have to make $184,000 a year before taxes to spend 30% of their income on rent. If that household makes “only” $110,000 in income, rent would eat up 50% of pre-tax household income.

So here is a look at the 100 most populous US cities (with New York City broken up into its boroughs), and what size apartment a household earning the median household income can afford by paying 30% of their pre-tax income in rent.

The analysis was done by RENTCafe, using average rent data from Yardi Matrix and median household income data from the Census Bureau’s 2017 ACS, adjusted for inflation to reflect 2019 values. Household income includes all forms of pretax income from wages, interest, dividends, Social Security, etc., earned by all members over the age of 15, but does not include capital gains. Median household income means that 50% earn more, and 50% earn less.

Average apartment size varies by city.

Before we get to what apartment size they can afford, there is the issue of average size, which varies sharply by city. The table below shows the 10 cities with the smallest average apartments. They include the usual suspects with the highest rents: Honolulu with the most minuscule average apartment size of 561 square feet, but also three boroughs of New York City (Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens), Seattle, San Francisco, Washington DC, and Chicago … and the unusual suspect, Paradise, NV.

At the other end of the spectrum are the cities with the largest average apartment sizes, all of them close to 1,000 square feet, and the sport reasonable average rents:

So what size apartment can that household afford?

To answer that question, RENTCafe looked at how many square feet you can rent with 30% of the median income of renter-occupied households, given the average rent per square foot in that city.

In only 14 of the 100 cities can 30% of this median household income rent an apartment that is larger than average for that city. At the top is Gilbert, AZ, where this household can afford the largest apartment (1,174 square feet). Some of the cities are on the list because household incomes are very high, and others are on this list because rents are low and apartments are on average larger:

And finally, here are all 100 cities in order of how big or tiny of an apartment, in square feet, these folks can rent with 30% of the median household income. For example, in Brooklyn’s case, these folks can afford to rent a bare room of 15 by 18 square feet, which is not exactly huge. You can search the list with the search function in your browser. If your smartphone clips the table on the right, hold your device in landscape position:

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