Fastest-Rising Metro Rents, FY2025–2026

The fastest-rising metro

Ogden, UT MSA posts the largest one-bedroom FMR increase in the set, +47.2% year over year. Its one-bedroom benchmark moved from $870 to $1,281 a month, a $411 step in a single fiscal year. For a voucher holder that translates directly into a higher payment standard, which can expand the set of units a voucher will cover, but it also signals that the underlying market the FMR tracks has tightened. A move of this size in one year outpaces general inflation by a wide margin and tends to cluster in metros absorbing in-migration faster than they are permitting new supply.

How broad the increases are

Among the 25 metros in the rising query, 25 recorded a positive one-bedroom FMR change and the average move was +21.1%. That the typical metro at the top of this list is rising well above a normal cost-of-living adjustment shows the increases are not confined to one or two outliers; the rent floor is being repriced upward across a band of markets at once. When FMRs rise broadly, HUD's voucher program costs rise with them, because the federal subsidy fills the gap between thirty percent of a household's income and the payment standard tied to FMR. A wide rising band is therefore both a market signal and a budget signal.

Where the rent floor is easing

The second chart and the discussion here turn to the other tail. Lyon County, NV HUD Metro FMR Area shows the sharpest decline in the set at -21.5%, its one-bedroom FMR slipping from $1,370 to $1,076 a month. 25 metros in the falling query posted a negative change. A falling FMR reads like good news for affordability, and sometimes it is, reflecting genuine softening where new supply has caught up with demand. But a decline of this kind frequently traces back to methodology rather than the market: a refreshed ACS sample that revised a prior overshoot, a corrected base year, or the removal of a temporary adjustment. Treating every FMR drop as a rent cut would misread the data, which is why the next section keeps the market and the method separate.

Market movement versus methodology

The single most important caveat in reading these rankings is that HUD rebases FMRs each year rather than measuring them fresh. The blend of an ACS base and a CPI rent trend factor means a metro can jump or fall because its statistical inputs were updated, independent of what landlords are charging this month. The way to use this page well is to treat a large rise such as the +47.2% in Ogden, UT MSA as a flag for further investigation rather than a settled fact, and to cross-check it against the metro detail page and against independent rent indices before concluding the market itself moved that much. The dollar figures and percentages here are precise reflections of the published FMR schedule; the interpretation of why they moved requires the context the methodology section supplies.

Source provenance

The rent figures originate from U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, specifically the fiscal-year 2025 and fiscal-year 2026 Fair Market Rents schedules for metropolitan areas. PlainRent ingests both published vintages and computes the year-over-year change automatically, so there is no static export carrying stale numbers. The methodology page documents the source URLs, the vintage dates, and how the data is processed.