With mortgage rates near 7.5%, is renting the new long-term housing reality?

Mortgage rates are close to 7.5%. The daily rate index from Mortgage News Daily hit 7.45% a few weeks ago on September 24, up from 7.26% a day earlier, while Freddie Mac's weekly survey, which trails daily moves, came in at 7.03%, up from 6.95% the week before.

Put that rate against Census figures for the 20 largest US cities and the monthly payment on a median-priced home beats median rent in every one of them. In San Francisco the mortgage would run about 3.5 times the rent. Philadelphia is the closest call, and it's still $125 a month more to own.

A mortgage costs more than rent in all 20 of the biggest cities

The table uses each city's median home value and median gross rent from the Census Bureau's 2020-2024 American Community Survey, pulled from CensusEasy. The mortgage figure assumes 10% down and a 30-year fixed loan at 7.45%, and it counts principal and interest only. Property taxes, homeowners insurance, and mortgage insurance would push every payment higher, and because the survey averages five years of data, its home values run below what homes sell for today.

San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and San Jose sit at the top, where the payment on a median home runs about three times median rent or more. The gap is narrower in Houston, Fort Worth, and San Antonio, where the mortgage runs 1.1 to 1.3 times rent, and Philadelphia, Indianapolis, and Columbus land in the same range. Owning still costs more there every month, and it takes a down payment of $23,570 to $30,300 in those three Texas cities just to get in the door.

The gap grew because home prices climbed faster than anything else. Between the Census surveys covering 2015-2019 and 2020-2024, the middle-of-the-pack increase across these 20 cities was 61.3% for median home value, 34.4% for median gross rent, and 31.4% for median household income. Home values outgrew rent in 18 of the 20 cities and outgrew income in 19.

The biggest home-value jumps came in Phoenix (78.7%), Fort Worth (78.6%), and Charlotte (75.1%). San Francisco, where rent rose faster than home values, and Chicago, where the two rose at the same pace and incomes outran both, are the exceptions.

National Census numbers show who's doing the renting. Renter households headed by someone 65 or older grew 25.8% between 2015 and 2024, to about 8.0 million, while the total number of renter households grew 5.5%, to 46.1 million. Older householders now head 17.4% of renter households, up from 14.6%. Part of that reflects the baby boom generation aging past 65, and we've looked at what that means for retirement budgets in the best places to rent in retirement.

Renters are also moving less. In the 2019 survey, 67.2% of renter households had moved into their home in 2015 or later, roughly the prior five years. In the 2024 survey, the share who'd moved in since 2020 was 63.8%. A smaller share of renters are new to their homes, which fits with people staying in rentals longer, a trend we covered in why so many people are stuck renting longer than they planned.

None of this has pushed the renter share of households up. Renters made up 34.7% of US households in 2024, a little below 35.9% in 2019, since owner households grew faster, from 78.7 million to 86.6 million. We ran the rent-versus-buy numbers city by city at a 7% rate in why renting beats buying at 7% mortgage rates, and looked at where the math favors renters most in the cities where renting still beats buying.

Sources

• Mortgage News Daily (September 24, 2026), for the daily rate index and Freddie Mac's weekly figure

• CensusEasy city profiles, for median home value, median gross rent, and median household income from the US Census Bureau's American Community Survey 5-year estimates, 2015-2019 and 2020-2024

• US Census Bureau, American Community Survey 1-year estimates for 2015, 2019, and 2024, tables B25003 (tenure), B25007 (tenure by age of householder), and B25038 (tenure by year householder moved in)