Rents are rising at their slowest pace in about 15 years. That sounds like good news until you see the other number: 22.7 million renter households in the United States are spending more than 30% of their income on housing, the highest count ever recorded. The two facts are not in conflict. They are measuring different things, and the gap between them is the clearest illustration of why America’s rental affordability crisis is not going away.
The cost-burden figure comes from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2023 American Community Survey (ACS). Note that the 2023 ACS is the dataset cited throughout this article; the 2024 ACS is typically released each September, so readers in spring 2026 should check whether updated figures have become available. The Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, working from the same federal microdata, calculated that those 22.7 million households represent 49% of all renters. Combine renters and homeowners, and 43.5 million American households crossed the cost-burden threshold, a new record.
Meanwhile, private rent trackers tell a very different story on the surface. Both Zillow’s Observed Rent Index and Apartment List’s national estimates showed year-over-year asking-rent growth falling below 1% by late 2024, a pace those same indices had not recorded since roughly 2009 and 2010. If you only looked at that trend line, you might assume renters were finally catching a break.
They are not. And one chart makes the reason obvious.
Slower growth on top of a much higher base
Picture two lines on the same graph. The first tracks national median asking rent from 2015 through 2023. It climbs gradually, then rockets upward between 2020 and 2023. According to Zillow’s Observed Rent Index, national median asking rent rose roughly 30% over that span; Apartment List’s estimates showed similar cumulative gains, with metros such as Miami, Phoenix, and Tampa recording increases of 25% or more. Pandemic-era migration, tight supply, and a construction pipeline that could not keep up all fueled the surge. The line flattens after that, barely ticking upward.
The second line tracks the share of renter households that are cost-burdened. It rises steadily over the same period, and it does not flatten when the first line does. It keeps climbing.
The disconnect is arithmetic. A 1% increase on a base that already jumped by a quarter still leaves tenants paying far more than they did a few years ago. A renter whose monthly payment climbed from $1,200 to $1,500 during the pandemic boom and then ticked up another $15 this past year is not experiencing relief. The 30% threshold does not care about the direction of the trend. It measures what a household actually pays relative to what it actually earns. By that standard, nearly half of America’s renters are stretched past the point the federal government considers sustainable.
The income gap that rent slowdowns cannot fix
Rents are only half the equation. The other half is earnings, and for millions of renter households, wages have not kept pace with the cumulative run-up in housing costs.
Median household income for renters has historically trailed that of homeowners by a wide margin, and the post-pandemic period widened the gap further. Higher-income workers saw real wage gains in some sectors, but lower-wage renters, who are disproportionately represented among cost-burdened households, often watched those gains get consumed by food, transportation, and insurance costs that were rising alongside rent.
Harvard’s analysis underscores the point. The record 43.5 million cost-burdened households reflected in the 2023 ACS did not emerge because rents spiked in a single year. They accumulated over several years of housing costs outrunning incomes, a structural mismatch that a few quarters of flat asking rents cannot unwind.
Who carries the heaviest burden
The Census Bureau’s release broke down cost-burden rates by race and ethnicity, and the disparities are stark. Black and Hispanic renter households face higher rates of cost burden than White, non-Hispanic households, a pattern rooted in longstanding gaps in income, wealth, and access to housing. The underlying ACS tables, including table B25141 and the B25140 series, provide granular counts of renter households by gross rent as a percentage of income, broken out by demographic group and geography.
Geography matters just as much. In high-cost metros like Miami, New York, and Los Angeles, cost-burden rates among renters regularly exceed 55%, according to metro-level ACS estimates. But in parts of the Midwest and South where rents are lower in absolute terms, the share of burdened households can still be high because incomes are lower, too. The national 49% figure masks enormous local variation.
New apartments are arriving, but not where they are needed most
One factor that helped slow rent growth was a wave of new apartment completions, particularly in Sun Belt metros like Austin, Phoenix, and Atlanta, where developers broke ground during the pandemic building boom. That new supply pushed vacancy rates higher and gave tenants in those specific markets more bargaining power.
But the supply surge is uneven. Coastal cities with restrictive zoning, lengthy permitting processes, and high construction costs have added far fewer units relative to demand. And much of the new construction targets higher-income renters, doing little to expand the stock of housing affordable to households earning below the area median income.
The gap at the bottom of the market is severe. The National Low Income Housing Coalition has consistently documented a shortage of millions of rental units affordable and available to extremely low-income renters. Federal housing vouchers, which are meant to bridge that gap, reach only about one in four eligible households due to chronic underfunding. New market-rate construction alone cannot close a deficit that deep.
Why the two data streams tell different stories
Understanding the apparent contradiction requires knowing what each data source actually measures, because they describe different slices of the same market.
The Census Bureau’s American Community Survey is based on responses from hundreds of thousands of households each year. It captures what people report paying in rent relative to their income, regardless of whether they recently signed a new lease or have been in the same unit for a decade. It is the gold standard for measuring housing affordability at the household level.
Private rent indices from Zillow, Apartment List, and others track asking rents on listed units. They are useful for spotting directional shifts, but they measure something narrower: the price of units actively available to new tenants. Asking rents can fall while existing tenants face renewal increases that exceed those averages. Units that never appear on listing platforms are invisible to these trackers entirely.
That gap is exactly how cooling rent growth and record cost burdens coexist. Conflating the two leads to the mistaken conclusion that falling asking rents should automatically translate into lower housing costs for the people already living in rental units. It does not work that way.
How to find the numbers for your city
For anyone trying to understand conditions in a specific city or county, the Census Bureau’s advanced data portal allows users to pull ACS tables by geography, tenure, and income. The B25140 and B25141 table series show how many renter households in a given area fall into each rent-to-income bracket, making it possible to compare local figures against the national 49% rate.
The picture those tables paint is consistent across nearly every source: the crisis is not about the latest month of rent growth. It is about the accumulated weight of years of housing costs rising faster than incomes. Slower increases at the margin have not been enough to reverse that buildup. Until wages close the gap or the supply of affordable units expands dramatically, the record will keep getting broken, no matter what the asking-rent trend line does.
