Rent Rankings
Every HUD Fair Market Rent ranking PlainRent publishes, in one place.
- Cheapest Rent (1-Bedroom) The 50 most affordable US counties and metros by 1-bedroom FMR.
- Cheapest 2-Bedroom Rent The most affordable counties for 2-bedroom units.
- Cheapest 3-Bedroom Rent The most affordable counties for larger, 3-bedroom families.
- Cheapest Studio Rent The most affordable counties for studio (0-bedroom) units.
- Most Expensive Rent The highest-cost US counties and metros by 1-bedroom FMR.
- Rent Burden Rankings Counties where rent consumes the highest share of local household income.
- Rent Growth Rankings Counties and metros with the fastest year-over-year rent increases.
How These Rankings Are Built
Every ranking on this page is computed directly from HUD's published Fair Market Rent schedule, the same federal data that sets Housing Choice Voucher (Section 8) payment standards nationwide. Counties and metro areas are ranked using the current fiscal year's FMR figures, so a "cheapest" or "most expensive" placement reflects the official federal benchmark, not a survey estimate or a proprietary index. See our methodology for the full calculation.
Bedroom Size Changes the Ranking
A county's rank can shift noticeably between the 1-bedroom, 2-bedroom, 3-bedroom, and studio rankings, larger unit sizes are scarcer in some markets and more common in others, so the relative cost premium HUD assigns to each bedroom count is not uniform across the country. Check the specific bedroom-size ranking that matches your household, rather than assuming a county's 1-bedroom rank applies to every unit size.
Rent Burden vs. Raw Rent Level
The cheapest and most expensive rankings sort purely by dollar amount. The rent burden ranking answers a different question: how much of local income does that rent actually consume? A county can have a moderate raw rent and still rank as severely rent-burdened if local incomes are low, and a high-rent county can rank as comparatively affordable if local incomes are high. Cross-reference both rankings before drawing a conclusion about affordability.
Year-Over-Year Growth Is a Separate Signal
The rent growth ranking measures the percentage change in FMR from the prior fiscal year, not the current dollar level. A county can be inexpensive in absolute terms while still ranking among the fastest-growing, which is often an early signal of a market tightening before it shows up in the raw cheapest/most-expensive lists.
What the 40th Percentile Actually Means
HUD defines Fair Market Rent as the 40th percentile of gross rents paid by recent movers into standard-quality units in a given area. In practical terms, if every rental in a county were lined up from cheapest to most expensive, the FMR would fall at the point where 40% of units cost less and 60% cost more. That construction has two consequences for how you should read a ranking: FMR is not an average, and it is not the cheapest unit available, it is a specific, federally defined benchmark designed to represent a modest but not bottom-tier rental. A county ranked "cheapest" has the lowest 40th-percentile benchmark in the dataset, not necessarily the lowest advertised listing price you would find on a private rental site.
How Renters Use These Rankings When Relocating
These rankings are most useful as a first filter, not a final decision. If you are comparing several states or metro areas for a move, start with the cheapest-rent ranking to identify candidate counties, then cross-check the rent burden ranking to see whether the local wage base actually supports that rent level, and finally look at the rent growth ranking to gauge whether the market is heating up or cooling off. A county that is cheap today but growing quickly may not stay cheap through the length of a typical lease, while a county with flat or declining growth offers more predictable long-term costs.
Why Federal FMR Differs From Private Listing Sites
Private rental listing platforms aggregate whatever is currently advertised, which skews toward turnover units, newer construction, and properties actively being marketed, categories that tend to price above the broader existing-lease market. HUD's Fair Market Rent instead draws on Census Bureau American Community Survey rent data covering the full occupied rental stock, including long-tenured tenants paying below-market rent under existing leases. That difference in methodology is why a county's FMR can read noticeably lower than what a live listing search in the same county might suggest, both figures are accurate for what they measure, they simply measure different populations of renters.
Section 8 and Payment Standards
Public housing authorities use the FMR figures behind these rankings to set payment standards for the Housing Choice Voucher program, typically between 90% and 110% of the published FMR, though some Small Area FMR metros vary this by ZIP code. A voucher holder relocating to a county near the top of the cheapest-rent ranking will generally find their voucher covers a larger share of the total rent than in a county near the top of the most-expensive ranking, holding household size and bedroom count constant.
How Often These Rankings Update
HUD publishes a new Fair Market Rent schedule once per federal fiscal year, typically in the fall, ahead of the October 1 start of the new fiscal year. PlainRent updates every ranking on this page as soon as the new schedule is loaded, so a county's position can shift from one fiscal year to the next even if nothing about the local rental market itself has changed, revised methodology, updated Census input data, or a boundary redefinition for a metro area can all move a county's relative rank without reflecting a real shift in what renters actually pay.