The apartment market that punished renters with double-digit rent hikes a few years ago has quietly flipped in the other direction for more than half of the country’s largest cities. Apartment List’s latest national rent report puts the median U.S. apartment at $1,390 a month as of August, and in 52 of the 100 largest cities, that same measure is still lower than it was a year ago. The report, published August 26, also shows the first signs that the multi-year slump in rents may be nearing its floor, even as prices keep falling in the cities where new construction has been heaviest.
A $1,390 National Median, Still Down From a Year Ago
According to Apartment List’s National Rent Report, the median U.S. apartment rent rose 0.1 percent in August to $1,390, the seventh consecutive monthly increase. Measured against a year earlier, though, rent is still down 0.8 percent nationally, or $11 a month, continuing a pullback that has been underway since the market’s mid-2022 peak. Nationwide, rent has now fallen 3.6 percent, or $52 a month, from that 2022 high point, even though today’s rent levels remain 21 percent above where they stood at the start of 2021.
Underneath that modest national number sits a sharply divided market. The same Apartment List report states plainly that 52 of the 100 largest U.S. cities have seen rents fall on a year-over-year basis, while the other 48 have seen rents rise, sometimes sharply. The single biggest decline is in Garland, Texas, down 5.3 percent over the past year, while the single fastest increase is happening in San Francisco, up roughly 26 percent.
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Where Rents Are Actually Falling
The cities with falling rents cluster heavily in the Sun Belt and Mountain West, the same regions that saw the most new apartment construction over the past several years. San Antonio’s own city-level rent report, updated for August, shows the median rent there at $1,123, down 4.9 percent from a year earlier and running behind both the Texas statewide average decline of 2.5 percent and the national 0.8 percent drop. San Antonio’s broader metro area, which includes surrounding cities like Boerne and New Braunfels, is down 5.1 percent year-over-year, an even steeper slide than the city itself.
Household budgets in these markets are getting real relief. A renter in San Antonio renewing a lease today at the metro’s 5.1 percent lower year-over-year rate is seeing that discount show up every month, unlike a one-time rebate or tax credit that arrives once and disappears.
Where Rents Are Still Climbing Fast
Not every renter is catching a break. San Francisco’s city-level rent report puts the median rent there at $3,844, up 25.6 percent over the past year and now the single most expensive large city in the country, ahead of San Jose and Irvine. Apartment List attributes the run-up to a wave of well-paying artificial-intelligence jobs pulling workers back into the city, reversing years of pandemic-era softness in the Bay Area rental market. A handful of Midwestern cities are also seeing steady, if less dramatic, increases, as renters priced out of the coasts look for relative affordability in markets that never saw the construction boom that hit the Sun Belt.
A Market That May Be Bottoming Out
Two other numbers in the national report point toward a market that is stabilizing rather than continuing to soften uniformly. The national multifamily vacancy rate fell to 7.1 percent in August, down from a peak of 7.3 percent in February and the first decline in that measure since late 2021. At the same time, the typical apartment is taking 32 days to go from listing to lease, the longest stretch for any August on record since Apartment List started tracking the metric in 2019. Falling vacancy alongside slowing time-on-market suggests landlords are gradually absorbing the historic wave of new supply that drove rents down in the first place, even as it takes longer than usual to find a tenant.
What It Means for a Renter’s Budget Right Now
For a household weighing whether to renew a lease or look elsewhere, the practical takeaway is that location now matters more than the national trend line. A renter in one of the 52 cities with falling prices has real leverage to negotiate a renewal or shop competing units, especially with apartments sitting vacant for a record-long August stretch. A renter in a tightening market like San Francisco, by contrast, is facing the opposite dynamic, where a landlord has little incentive to hold rent flat. Apartment List’s own data suggests the seasonal off-season dip typically arrives in the next month or two, which could offer renters in cooling cities another window to negotiate before next year’s peak leasing season resets the market again.
None of this changes the bigger picture for a household budgeting month to month: rent is still the largest single line item for most renters, and a national median of $1,390 sits well above where it stood before the pandemic-era run-up. Whether a household’s own city lands in the 52 with falling prices or the 48 still climbing determines far more about next year’s budget than any single national headline.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
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