Two out of every five rental listings on Zillow offered some kind of concession in July, whether that’s a free month, waived fees, or a gift card for signing a lease. That’s up from roughly one in three a year ago, even as rents themselves are rising at their fastest pace in more than a year. The two trends aren’t a contradiction; they’re the same story told from opposite ends of a construction cycle that’s now winding down.
For a renter shopping right now, that combination is worth understanding before it flips. Concessions are a leftover benefit from a supply boom that has already peaked, not a permanent feature of the market, and the runway behind them is shorter than it looks.
39.8% of listings, and climbing fastest in the biggest deal markets
Nationally, 39.8% of rental listings carried a concession in July, up nearly 4 percentage points from a year earlier, according to Zillow. The share is far higher in specific metros where new apartment supply landed hardest and fastest: Charlotte tops the list at 68.1% of listings, followed by Denver at 67.2% and Dallas at 65.6%, with Austin, Salt Lake City and Raleigh all also above 65%. In each of those markets, landlords built more units than renters could immediately absorb, and concessions became the tool for filling those buildings unit by unit.
By contrast, concession rates stay low in metros that didn’t see the same building surge. In New York, only 17.5% of listings carry a concession, and in Boston it’s 28.4%. Those cities never had the same glut of newly delivered apartments competing for the same pool of tenants, so landlords there never needed to compete as hard on price to keep units filled.
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What a concession is actually worth in dollars
A concession isn’t the same thing as a lower rent, and the two shouldn’t be compared as if they were. Most commonly it takes the form of one to two months free on a 12-month lease, or a waived application and administrative fee that can otherwise run several hundred dollars upfront. Spread across a full year, a single free month on a $1,900 lease works out to roughly $158 shaved off the effective monthly rent, even though the sticker price on the listing looks unchanged to anyone comparing prices at a glance. That gap between advertised rent and effective rent is exactly why the concession rate matters as much as the headline asking-rent number when a household is actually budgeting a move.
The construction wave that created these deals is over
The reason concessions became common in the first place traces back to construction decisions made two to three years ago. The Census Bureau and HUD’s joint New Residential Construction report shows permits for buildings with five or more units running at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 490,000 in July, down roughly 31% from the 2022 peak. Fewer new buildings breaking ground now means fewer landlords a year or two from now competing to fill up a freshly delivered property, which is the exact condition that produces a concession in the first place.
Zillow’s own economists frame the current moment as an inflection point: rents are already reaccelerating even while concessions are still climbing, because the buildings leasing up today were permitted back when supply was still surging toward its peak. The deals on offer right now reflect decisions made years ago, not what’s coming down the pipeline next.
How to read a concession offer before signing
A useful habit is converting any concession into an effective monthly rent before comparing two listings, rather than comparing sticker prices alone. Divide the total value of the concession, whether it’s free weeks or a waived fee, across the full lease term, then subtract that from the advertised rent. A listing with a higher sticker price but a stronger concession can easily be the cheaper option once the math is done, and property managers are generally willing to negotiate the concession itself, not just accept whatever is posted, especially on units that have been sitting vacant for more than a few weeks.
Why the deals aren’t gone yet, but won’t stay this good
None of this means concessions vanish overnight. A landlord who still has vacant units to fill this fall will keep offering free weeks and waived fees regardless of what’s happening with permits two years out, and the markets with the deepest concession rates today, like Charlotte and Denver, have enough recently delivered supply still absorbing into the market that deals there should persist longer than the national average suggests. But the pipeline behind those deals is narrowing, and a renter negotiating a lease this year has more leverage than that same renter is likely to have when the lease comes up for renewal down the road.
For a household with a lease expiring soon, the practical takeaway is about timing: asking for a concession now, while 39.8% of the market is still offering one, costs nothing and can meaningfully lower the effective rent on a new lease. Waiting a year on the assumption that today’s deal-friendly market will still be there is a bet against the same construction data that explains why concessions showed up in the first place.
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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