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15 Cities Where Many Renters Pay Under $1,000 a Month
By Pete Grieve MONEY RESEARCH COLLECTIVE
There are still many places that offer the city lifestyle without the sky-high rents you’d see in San Diego or Miami.
Finding an apartment in a major U.S. city for less than $1,000 per month has become more difficult lately, but in some metros, such as Oklahoma City and Pittsburgh, three-digit rent is still the norm.
In the country’s 50 largest metropolitan areas, 32.1% of renters paid less than $1,000 per month in 2023, according to a report released last week by real estate company Redfin. (The analysis relies on Census data and counts apartments in buildings with at least five units.)
That share is down from about 50% in 2012.
“Rising rents have made it increasingly difficult for people to find housing in America,” Sheharyar Bokhari, senior economist at Redfin, said in the report.
Asking rents have increased 20% from pre-pandemic levels, with the median asking rent up to $1,634, according to Redfin. The lack of cheap apartments is creating challenges for lower-income residents: Folks on tight budgets are coping with high rents by living with more roommates or compromising for other less-than-ideal living situations (think longer commutes and less square footage.)
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View RatesThe good news? There are still many places that offer the mid-to-large size city lifestyle without the sky-high rents you’d see in San Diego or Miami.
The lowest-cost cities for renters
Here are the 15 cities with the highest share of rents under $1,000:
- Oklahoma City, Oklahoma: 64.3%
- New Orleans, Louisiana: 63.5%
- Cleveland, Ohio: 63.4%
- Louisville, Kentucky: 57.6%
- Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: 55.8%
- Buffalo, New York: 55.2%
- Cincinnati, Ohio: 54.9%
- St. Louis, Missouri: 53.9%
- Memphis, Tennessee: 53.5%
- Milwaukee, Wisconsin: 49.5%
- Detroit, Michigan: 49.3%
- Providence, Rhode Island: 47%
- Indianapolis, Indiana: 46.7%
- Birmingham, Alabama: 44%
- Kansas City, Missouri: 43%
Cheap apartment listings are disappearing
The availability of sub-$1,000 rent deals is shrinking in some of America’s more affordable cities.
The median rent in Cleveland, for example, was up 11.1% in a year as of last month, according to the report, which also mentions Cincinnati and Louisville as similar examples. These are cities people have flocked to recent years precisely because they’re more affordable.
Two-fifths of the renters in these large metros who pay less than $1,000 monthly have lived in their current spot for at least five years, and you can’t necessarily find those deals any more in the rental market. Redfin’s analysis found that only 7.5% of apartment listings have asking rents under $1,000.
“Renters paying under $1,000 often stay put because moving would mean paying more,” the Redfin researchers wrote in the report.
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Pete Grieve is a New York-based reporter who covers personal finance news. At Money, Pete covers trending stories that affect Americans’ wallets on topics including car buying, insurance, housing, credit cards, retirement and taxes. He studied political science and photography at the University of Chicago, where he was editor-in-chief of The Chicago Maroon. Pete began his career as a professional journalist in 2019. Prior to joining Money, he was a health reporter for Spectrum News in Ohio, where he wrote digital stories and appeared on TV to provide coverage to a statewide audience. He has also written for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Sun-Times and CNN Politics. Pete received extensive journalism training through Report for America, a nonprofit organization that places reporters in newsrooms to cover underreported issues and communities, and he attended the annual Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in 2021. Pete has discussed his reporting in interviews with outlets including the Columbia Journalism Review and WBEZ (Chicago's NPR station). He’s been a panelist at the Chicago Headline Club’s FOIA Fest and he received the Institute on Political Journalism’s $2,500 Award for Excellence in Collegiate Reporting in 2017. An essay he wrote for Grey City magazine was published in a 2020 book, Remembering J. Z. Smith: A Career and its Consequence.