Apartment List’s September 2026 national rent report holds a count that cuts against the usual rent story: of the 100 largest U.S. cities, 46 show lower rents than a year earlier. The company published the report on September 29, 2026, and it covers September data. The 46 is Apartment List’s own tally from its own index, and it sits beside a national figure that is also down, a median rent of $1,388 that is 0.4% below a year ago.
Where the 46-of-100 count comes from
The sentence in the Apartment List National Rent Report is plain: “Among the 100 largest cities in the U.S., 46 have seen rents fall year-over-year.” The month is September 2026, the comparison is with September 2025, and the set is the company’s own list of the 100 largest cities. Nothing here is a government tally, and no government agency has endorsed or audited the count.
Apartment List says its index combines public data with the millions of listings active on its marketplace and uses a same-unit, repeat-transaction model intended to account for composition bias. In plain terms, the index tries to follow the same kinds of apartments over time instead of comparing a luxury tower this year with a studio last year. A count of falling cities is only as good as that index, and it speaks for the company’s measurement and no one else’s.
The count also tallies cities rather than renters. A city counts once whether it has a few hundred thousand residents or several million, so 46 of 100 is a statement about how widespread declines are across places, not about how many tenants saw a lower rent.
Garland, San Antonio and Arlington lead the declines
The report names the steepest year-over-year drops, and all three are in Texas. Garland falls 4.4%, San Antonio 4.3% and Arlington 4.0%. Those three are a representative slice of the 46, not the full list, and the report does not need the full list to establish the count. What they show is that the decline is not a rounding error in a few cities; the biggest drops run about four percent in a year.
The national picture moves in the same direction at a gentler pace. The report puts the national median at $1,388, down 0.1% in September from August and down 0.4% from a year earlier. A median that has slipped for a year and a count of falling cities just short of half fit together: a modest national dip is what a country would show when nearly half its large cities are falling and the rest are not rising fast enough to offset them.
San Francisco, Oakland and Boise run the other way
The same report lists the largest increases, and they are large. San Francisco is up 26% over the year, Oakland up 16% and Boise up 11%. The distance between Garland’s 4.4% drop and San Francisco’s 26% gain is roughly 30 percentage points, which is why a single national percentage hides so much.
The remaining 54 of the 100 largest cities are, by the arithmetic of the count, not among the 46 with a year-over-year fall. The report’s headline count does not say how many of those 54 are flat and how many are rising, and it should not be read as saying all of them are climbing. It says only that 46 fell.
A vacancy index of 7.0% sits behind the softer rents
Apartment List reports its vacancy index at 7.0% as of September 2026. The report places that figure alongside the falling national median, and the two readings point the same way: more empty units and slower rent growth tend to travel together. The report is a description of conditions in the company’s data, though, not a forecast of what any lease renewal will cost next month.
The government’s shelter index still shows a 3.0% annual rise
A competing official gauge tells a different story, and the gap is worth stating plainly. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ consumer price index release for August 2026, published on September 11, says the shelter index increased 3.0 percent over the last year. It also reports that the shelter index rose 0.3 percent in August after rising 0.1 percent in July, and that the index for owners’ equivalent rent rose 0.2 percent in August “as did the index for rent.”
The two readings are not in conflict, and neither one corrects the other. The BLS shelter index covers a different month, August rather than September. It is also a broader basket, because shelter includes owners’ equivalent rent as well as rent paid by tenants, while Apartment List’s report is a rent index built from its marketplace data. A private index showing a 0.4% annual decline and a federal index showing a 3.0% annual increase for shelter are measuring different things at different times.
What one month’s count can and cannot establish
The 46-of-100 figure is a single month’s reading. It can say that, in Apartment List’s September 2026 data, nearly half of the 100 largest cities had a lower rent than a year before. It cannot say how long that has been true, which neighborhoods inside a city moved, or what any specific lease costs. A tenant’s own rent is set by a lease, not by a citywide index.
It also cannot be turned into a verdict on the whole rental market. The count’s strength is its clarity: a fixed set of 100 cities, a fixed comparison with a year earlier and a stated source. Its limit is the same clarity, because a count of 46 hides the size of each move, from Garland’s 4.4% decline to San Francisco’s 26% increase.
The controlling record is Apartment List’s September 29, 2026 report: 46 of the 100 largest cities with lower rents year over year, a $1,388 national median, a 0.4% annual decline and a 7.0% vacancy index.
Lease terms stay put when a citywide rent count moves
A report that nearly half the largest cities have cheaper rents than a year ago says little about a lease already signed, and rent is only one line in what a household pays to keep a home. The relief programs that sit outside the rent figure, including credits that reach renters and help with heating and cooling, run on applications and renewal dates of their own.
The Senior Property Tax & Home-Cost Relief Kit is an 11-page kit that pairs the circuit-breaker credit that includes renters with an application log and renewal calendar, so those separate deadlines can be tracked in one place.
Open The Senior Property Tax & Home-Cost Relief Kit to line up renter-side help →
This piece was drafted with AI assistance; the figures were checked against Apartment List’s September 29, 2026 rent report and the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ August CPI release.
