Austin rent peaked four years ago and still hasn't recovered

Rent headlines usually cover the last month or the last year, which doesn't give much information if you're negotiating rent. A more useful question if you're signing a lease is whether the market you're in has ever come back from its high, because the ones that haven't are where a renter still has room to push.

We checked every big city's current rent against its all-time peak in our 11 years of monthly data. Seven are still meaningfully below a peak set at least 18 months ago.

The markets that corrected

Austin is in a category by itself. Rent there peaked in July 2022 at $1,784 and sits at $1,615 today, so four years later a renter is paying 9.5% less than the market's high point. In dollar terms that's $169 a month, or $2,028 a year.

Dallas peaked one month after Austin and has clawed back most of its ground, down just 2.1%.

What being below peak actually tells you

The first is leverage. A landlord in a below-peak market is competing with the memory of higher rents and with real vacancy, so asking for a concession is a normal conversation rather than a long shot. That's less true in a city printing new highs every month.

The second is that these markets are almost all Sun Belt and Mountain West cities that built aggressively. Austin, Phoenix, Denver and their neighbors approved a lot of apartments during the boom, those buildings opened after demand cooled, and prices adjusted. It's the clearest evidence available that supply moves rent.

The third is timing, because being below peak isn't the same as falling now. Phoenix and Denver have largely flattened rather than continuing down, so the correction has mostly already happened. The discount is available today, and waiting another year probably won't deepen it.

Below peak doesn't mean cheap. Denver at $1,877 is still expensive by national standards, and Austin at $1,615 costs far more than it did in 2020, when it was $1,384. These cities got less expensive than their own worst moment, not affordable.

Everywhere else the peak is right now, since most big cities set their high-water mark in the past few months, which is the opposite situation and calls for a different approach at renewal time. Our guide on negotiating rent when you have leverage covers how to use a soft market, and where rent is actually dropping tracks the current month-to-month picture.

Sources

• RentDataNow city rent data, monthly, 2015 through 2026, anchored to the Zillow Observed Rent Index

• Peak is the highest monthly figure on record for each city. Only cities with populations above 300,000 and peaks at least 18 months old are included