Out-of-town renters are piling into Buffalo, Chicago and Houston

Out-of-town rental searches are climbing fastest in Buffalo, Chicago, and Houston, according to Zillow, followed by New Orleans and Dallas. In Salt Lake City, Raleigh, Hartford, and Nashville, searches from outside the metro now outnumber local ones.

Cheap compared to what?

A rent figure only means something next to an income, so here are the destination cities against what renters who already live in them earn.

Buffalo has the second-lowest rent in that table and the third-worst burden. New Orleans, at $1,648, takes 59.2% of what its renters earn, which is the heaviest load of any large city in our data. Both of them look like bargains to someone browsing from New York City, where the typical apartment runs $4,170, and that's exactly the problem.

That's the distinction the search data flattens, because a $1,423 rent is cheap relative to where the searcher is leaving and expensive relative to the people living there.

Chicago is not considered affordable now

Chicago sits in the top three for out-of-town search growth while costing $2,395 a month and rising 8.0% over the past year, the fastest of any city on this list. Its renters already spend 53.6% of income on housing.

Mischa Fisher, Zillow's chief economist, actually draws the line himself. "When we see strong out-of-town interest flowing into a smaller market, it's often an affordability story," he said. "When the flow goes the other direction, into a major metro, it's frequently regional pull, people drawn to a big city's job market or opportunities from nearby."

Our numbers put Chicago firmly in that second bucket while Buffalo and Houston belong in the first, so lumping them together as cheap destinations gets the mechanism wrong.

Where the move actually works

Austin at 28.6% of renter income is the only city on the list where the typical renter actually clears the 30% affordability line, and McKinney, Texas comes close at 30.2% on a $1,806 rent against $71,690 in renter income.

It isn't a coincidence that those two show up as genuinely affordable. RentCafe ranked McKinney first and Austin third in its best cities for renters list, which weighs income and employment growth alongside cost, and 37 of its top 50 are in the South.

Raleigh at 33.8% and Dallas at 35.1% are the next tier, workable rather than comfortable. Both also have flat rent right now, with Raleigh at 0.0% and Dallas at 1.0% over the past year, and that matters more for a mover than the headline price does.

Why this is happening now

Part of it is that rents have stopped falling. Apartment List reported August rents turning positive month over month for the first time in four years, though still slightly below August 2025. On the ownership side the National Association of Realtors put the median existing-home price at $434,100 in July, which keeps would-be buyers renting longer and adds demand to the same pool.

Fisher's read is that rental searches lead home sales. "Renting is often how people try out a new community before committing," he said, describing a surge in out-of-town browsing as a signal that newcomers may follow.

If that pipeline holds, the cities absorbing it are the ones whose renters are already stretched hardest, and that's where this gets uncomfortable. New Orleans and Buffalo haven't got slack to give, and an influx of higher-income arrivals into a market where locals already pay half their income tends to end one way. We watched that play out in Cleveland, where locals got priced out, and mapped the wider pattern in the great rent divergence.

Sources

• CNBC (September 8, 2026), for the Zillow search data, Fisher interview, and Apartment List and NAR figures

• US Census Bureau, American Community Survey, table B25119, median renter household income, 2023 five-year estimates

• RentDataNow city rent data, anchored to the Zillow Observed Rent Index, June 2026