In Denver last month, 71.9% of studio, one-bedroom and two-bedroom rental listings carried some kind of concession, the highest share among the 50 largest U.S. metro areas Realtor.com tracks. That works out to roughly seven in ten listings offering a discount that never shows up in the advertised rent. The number reflects a metro area still absorbing an unusually large wave of new apartment construction, and it puts Denver just ahead of Austin, Las Vegas, Nashville and San Antonio, the only other large metros to clear 67% in August.
Denver’s 71.9% Concession Rate Leads the Nation
The Denver-Aurora-Centennial metro posted a median asking rent of $1,771 in August, down 3.2% from a year earlier, even as many landlords layered a concession on top of that already-lower price. Denver’s combined rent decline and concession rate were both the steepest among the five highest-concession metros in the report.
Nationally, 43.5% of listings across the 50 largest metros offered a concession in August, up from 40.4% a year earlier, the highest share Realtor.com has recorded since it began publishing the monthly report, according to its August rental report. Austin followed Denver at 70.7%, then Las Vegas at 69.6%, Nashville at 69.0% and San Antonio at 67.9%; concession rates rose year over year in 39 of the 50 metros the report tracks, led by Houston, Cincinnati and New Orleans.
“Renters are entering the fall with more choices and more negotiating power than they had at the height of the rental market,” said Jiayi Xu, senior economist at Realtor.com. The report projects a typical seasonal cooling in monthly rents through the fall, with year-over-year declines likely to continue as new supply continues working through the market.
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A Two-Year Building Boom Created the Backlog
Denver’s concession rate is less a story about renters gaining sudden leverage than one about a construction boom finally meeting its ceiling. Multifamily vacancy in the metro reached 9.09% in the second quarter of 2026, according to Moody’s data cited in a J.P. Morgan Denver multifamily market update, with rent down 3.50% year over year over the same period. Class A buildings, where most of the new construction landed, carried a 9.75% vacancy rate, compared with 7.92% for older affordable and workforce housing.
The imbalance traces back to a building spree between 2022 and 2024. The Denver-area apartment market ended 2025 with more than 34,000 empty units and a vacancy rate of 7.6%, the highest in 16 years, the Apartment Association of Metro Denver said in data reported by the Colorado Sun. Scott Rathbun, president of Apartment Insights, which compiled the figures, said landlords are lowering rents and adding incentives simply to fill units, calling the discounting the largest concession by percentage in 19 years in the association’s records. Within the seven-county metro area, Arapahoe and Denver counties tied for the highest vacancy rate at 8.2%, while Boulder and Broomfield sat lower at 6.5%. Douglas County carried the highest average rent, at $1,950, while Adams County was lowest, at $1,620, even before any concessions were layered on top.
Multifamily developers built roughly 125,000 units in the Denver area over the past decade, about a third of the region’s existing apartment stock, much of it concentrated in the 2022-to-2024 window. New complexes still leased up quickly, but not quickly enough to prevent a backlog once so many buildings opened close together.
What Counts as a Concession on a Denver Lease
A concession is not a lower advertised rent; it is an added incentive that reduces what a renter actually pays without changing the number posted on a listing. In Realtor.com’s August data, 30.6% of studio, one- and two-bedroom listings nationally included a period of free rent, and waived or reduced fees were the single most common type of concession offered.
A companion survey of independent landlords by Avail, part of the Realtor.com network, found that among landlords facing high vacancy and weak demand, 33.3% actively offered a concession, 25.9% considered one and 24.1% chose to lower the base rent instead. Among those who offered or considered an incentive, 37.9% picked reduced or waived fees, 30.7% added amenities and 25.0% offered free rent.
Security deposits were treated differently: 65.7% of landlords surveyed said they would not waive one, and fewer than 1% of listings managed by institutional landlords dropped the deposit as part of a concession package. In Denver specifically, Rathbun described concessions running up to three months free on newer properties, a discount steep enough to pull down asking prices at older buildings nearby.
For a renter comparing two similar Denver units, the gap between a listing’s sticker price and its effective cost can run into thousands of dollars a year once a concession is factored in, since a few months of free rent or a waived application fee lowers the total paid over a lease term without changing the number in the listing itself.
Where the Supply Glut Goes From Here
The pipeline that created the backlog is already narrowing. Developers pulled back on new Denver-area projects as interest rates stayed elevated, and roughly 20,000 planned units in the area have been unable to break ground and could lose their approvals, according to the Apartment Association’s data. J.P. Morgan’s Denver update, published in July, described a market absorbing the increased inventory through the rest of 2026, with leasing beginning to pick up and rents starting to stabilize.
Alex Ducas, an executive director at J.P. Morgan’s commercial term lending group, said the metro is beginning to see leasing pick up, rent stabilize and investors looking to acquire again after two years of oversupply. J.P. Morgan’s outlook also pointed to office-to-apartment conversions as a potential source of new affordable and workforce housing on Denver’s west side, a segment that has held up better than the Class A towers driving most of the current vacancy.
For now, Denver renters are the clearest beneficiaries of that timing. Nationally, Realtor.com’s August report found rents 3.7% below their summer 2022 peak but still 15.4% above August 2019 levels, a reminder that even a metro leading the country in concessions is negotiating down from an elevated baseline, not back to what renters paid before the pandemic.
Where a Property-Tax Rule Meets an Actual Deadline
None of the numbers in a rental report tell a homeowner on a fixed income which local property-tax exemption she already qualifies for, or when the renewal paperwork for it is due again next year. The same tight household budgets pushing Denver renters to negotiate free rent are pushing older homeowners nearby toward missed exemption windows and unfiled circuit-breaker credits. The relief usually exists somewhere in a county statute; the form that claims it does not fill itself out.
The Senior Property Tax & Home-Cost Relief Kit is an 11-page kit built around an application log and renewal calendar for tracking exemption deadlines from one year to the next.
Compare deadlines against an application log and renewal calendar in The Senior Property Tax & Home-Cost Relief Kit.
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