A renter in San Antonio is paying 4.3% less than a year ago. A renter in Las Vegas is paying 3.6% less. In San Francisco, the same comparison runs the other way, with rents up 26%. Those are the year-over-year figures in Apartment List’s September rent report, published Sept. 29, and they show how little a single national rent number says about any one household.
San Antonio and Las Vegas on the downside
Apartment List’s National Rent Report ranks metro areas by their change in rents over the past twelve months. San Antonio, Texas, at -4.3%, and Las Vegas, Nevada, at -3.6%, both sit on its list of the largest declines. Each percentage point on a rent bill scales with the rent itself, so the arithmetic is easy to run on a round number: on $1,000 a month, 4.3% is $43 and 3.6% is $36. Over a 12-month lease, that comes to $516 in San Antonio and $432 in Las Vegas per $1,000 of monthly rent.
Those are averages for each metro, not quotes. An individual building can still raise a renewal price while the market around it softens, and the report does not say how many landlords in either city are cutting rents versus offering concessions.
The rest of the falling list
San Antonio and Las Vegas are not alone at the bottom of the ranking. According to the same report, the largest declines were in Garland, Texas, at -4.4%, San Antonio at -4.3%, Arlington, Texas, at -4.0%, Las Vegas at -3.6% and Aurora, Colorado, at -3.3%. Three of the five are in Texas, and two of those, Garland and Arlington, are Dallas-area cities. The data on that page do not explain why Texas dominates the list, and no cause is asserted here.
What the list does show is a group of cities where average rents are lower than a year ago by more than the national decline. Across the country, the same report has rents down 0.4% from a year earlier and a median of $1,388 a month.
San Francisco, Oakland and Boise on the upside
The fastest increases are on the opposite coast and in the interior West. Apartment List puts the annual rent change at +26% in San Francisco, +16% in Oakland and +11% in Boise, Idaho, followed by Virginia Beach, Virginia, at +8.6% and Norfolk, Virginia, at +7.8%. Using the same $1,000 example, 26% adds $260 a month, or $3,120 over a year, for each $1,000 of monthly rent at the start.
The San Francisco jump stands out even in a list of large increases. It is more than one and a half times Oakland’s 16%, and it is more than six times the size of San Antonio’s decline. Zillow’s August rent report, a different measure that covers all rentals, found that the gap between renting and buying was $5,413 a month in San Francisco, among the widest of any metro it tracks. That gap describes what a typical buyer pays compared with a typical renter, not what rents are doing, but it is a reminder that housing costs in the Bay Area sit far above the national picture.
What the spread means for a household budget
The distance between -4.3% and +26% is about 30 percentage points, which is the spread a renter might face depending on the metro. A retiree on a fixed income in San Francisco or Oakland can face a much larger increase than the rest of the country, while a similar household in San Antonio or Las Vegas is in a metro where the average rent is lower than a year ago. Moving costs, lease terms and the length of a tenancy all still matter more than any one month of city data.
The Census Bureau’s Housing Vacancies and Homeownership survey adds national context. Its second-quarter 2026 release put the national rental vacancy rate at 7.3%, unchanged from the first quarter, a level that leaves room in the market overall. Apartment List’s own national vacancy reading for September was 7.0%.
Reading the ranking with care
A few cautions apply to any ranked list of cities. The percentages are changes, not price levels: a city can post a large increase from a low base or a small decline from a high one. The lists also name only the five largest movers on each end, so a metro that is not on them, such as a mid-sized city near the national average, is not represented at all. And a metro-wide change is an average, so it says nothing certain about what one landlord will charge a sitting tenant.
The source of every figure in this article is the Apartment List report published Sept. 29, 2026: San Antonio at -4.3%, Las Vegas at -3.6%, San Francisco at +26%, and a national median of $1,388 a month, down 0.1% from August and 0.4% from a year ago.
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AI tools helped draft this article, and its figures were checked against the sources linked above.
