What you need to earn to afford rent

The advice is always framed the same way, that rent should stay under 30% of your gross income. Renters usually have the opposite question. The rent is a known number, and what they want to know is how much they'll need to earn to make it work.

So here's how it works in reverse. Take the rent, multiply by 12, divide by 0.30, and you get the salary the rule wants behind it. Divide that by 2,080 working hours and you get the wage.

The shortcut worth memorizing is that the salary is always 40 times the monthly rent, and the hourly wage is a hair under 2% of it. A $2,000 apartment wants an $80,000 salary. A $1,250 apartment wants $50,000, and you can do the rest in your head or with a calculator.

Where the number bends

The 30% line is a guideline, not a law of nature, and two things move it in practice.

Landlords often want to see more than you're planning for. Many require your gross monthly income to be three times the rent, which is stricter than the 30% rule, since 3x monthly works out to about 33% of income going to rent. On a $1,500 apartment, the 30% rule says $60,000 a year is comfortable, but a landlord using 3x monthly wants you to show $54,000 a year, or $4,500 a month, before they approve you. The two numbers answer different questions, one about your budget and one about their risk.

The 30% rule also gets harder to hold the less you earn. Someone making $32,000 who spends 30% on rent has about $1,867 a month left for everything else, and you're not doing much on that. Someone making $120,000 spending the same 30% has $7,000 left, which isn't tight at all. The percentage is identical and the lived experience isn't, which is why lower earners routinely stretch past 30% out of necessity rather than choice.

If your number lands above what the rule suggests, the usual levers are a roommate, a smaller unit, or a cheaper area, and our data on what splitting rent saves by city shows how much the first one moves things. To pressure-test a specific apartment against your pay, our guide to the 30% rule walks through it, and a good rent-to-income ratio covers where the line should sit.

Sources

• Calculations use the standard 30% affordability rule, gross annual income, and a full-time year of 2,080 hours

• RentDataNow, rent affordability guidance