Rent got easier to afford in Oakland and Seattle, but worse in cheaper US cities

Rent takes a bigger share of the local paycheck now than it did in 2020 in 108 of the 155 large US cities that we measured. The interesting part is where the renting got easier to afford is full of the metros everyone called unaffordable.

Oakland leads the easier to afford list. Rent there rose 7.2% since January 2020 while median household income climbed 37.9%, so the share of income going to rent fell from 39.7% to 30.9%, a drop of 8.8 percentage points and matching the golden 30% income for rent ratio. Seattle, Denver and Los Angeles all moved the same way.

None of those cities got cheap per se, and Los Angeles rent still eats 40.6% of a median income while Glendale takes 37.1%, both far past the 30% line. What's changed is that local pay in those metros grew faster than rent did, and in Oakland it grew more than five times faster.

The cities that got worse are the so-called affordable ones

The steepest deterioration since 2020 shows up in mid-size and Rust Belt cities that people move to precisely because the rent looks "manageable."

New York is the outlier here, since it was already the most stretched city on the list at 55.9% and got worse, reaching a whopping 61.6% income for rent. Everything else in the table started comfortable or close to it, since Akron and Fort Wayne were both under 23% in 2020, which is genuinely affordable, and they've both crossed 25% on the way up.

This matches with what we found looking at Cleveland, where rent rose 51% while local pay rose 32%. Cheap cities attracted demand from people earning higher incomes from somewhere else, rents repriced toward what those new deeper pocket arrivals could pay, and local wages didn't move to match. Cleveland itself sits on the worse list, climbing from 36.8% to 42.1%.

Expensive metros ran mostly the opposite way. Their rent growth stalled or stayed modest through the period while high-wage hiring kept lifting incomes, so the ratio improved even though the dollar rent didn't get any friendlier, and that's the split we mapped in the great rent divergence, seen through paychecks (income) instead of pure prices.

Across all 155 cities the average shift was 1.23 points worse, so the typical big-city renter's handing over a bit more of each paycheck than before the pandemic. The average hides the interesting part, because the burden itself is moving from the coasts toward the middle of the country. If you're weighing a move to a cheaper metro, check what rent costs against local wages rather than against your current rent, because the affordable-city math isn't what it was six years ago. Our rent burden rankings show where every city stands today.

Sources

• RentDataNow rent history (Zillow Observed Rent Index, January 2020 and June 2026) for 155 US cities with at least 150,000 residents

• US Census Bureau, American Community Survey, median household income, 2019 and latest vintage