Apartment rent prices in the United States continue to slide amid fresh supply making its way into the market.
The national rent median fell 0.2% in January and now stands at US$1,353.
This was the sixth consecutive month that rents declined and the fourth consecutive winter with a pronounced off-season dip, according to research from Apartment List.
However, the rent blog site warned that this could turn around.
“This was the most modest dip since last August, signalling that the market is beginning to creep out of the off-season and will likely return to positive rent growth in the months ahead,” Apartment List said in a blog post.
There was also a 1.4% year-over-year drop in rent growth.
In a blog post, Apartment List also said that the softer market conditions were driven by a historic surge of multifamily construction.
This surge hit its peak in 2924 when over 600,000 new multifamily units hit the market. This declined in 2025 to 500,000 units and is expected to slow down even further in 2026.
Despite the sharp pullback, the number of units expected to hit the market is still above the long-run average, indicating that the supply boom isn’t quite done.
The national vacancy rate was 7.3% in January, which was a record high for Apartment List’s index, which dates back to 2017.
Units are also taking an average of 41 days to get leased, which is four more days than in January 2025.
Apartment List also found that January rents declined month-over-month in 39 out of 54 large metropolitan areas in the country and were down year-over-year in 32 of them.
Austin had the nation’s steepest decline, with rent falling 6.3% in the last 12 months and dipping 20% from its peak in 2020.
Austin is also permitting new homes at the fastest rate out of all the major metropolitan areas.
Austin is not alone in exhibiting this trend; among the ten metros with the sharpest year-over-year rent declines, many also rank among the highest in terms of multifamily permits (e.g. Denver, Phoenix, San Antonio, Tampa, and Raleigh).
On the other side of the coin, Virginia Beach metro currently has the fastest rent growth, with prices up 5% year-over-year.
San Jose and San Francisco round out the top three fastest-growing areas as the AI boom created a wave of high-paying tech jobs there.
Related content
