Original research · HUD FMR + Census ACS

Highest Rent-Burden Counties, FY2026

PlainRent ranks the US counties where rent burden is highest - the annual HUD Fair Market Rent as a share of county median household income - and shows how many cross HUD's 30 percent cost-burden line on the FMR benchmark alone.

71.2%
Highest county burden - Bronx County
100
Counties over 30%
100
Counties ranked

Research period:

Compiled by PlainRent on 2026-06-02

Research question

In which US counties does the HUD fiscal-year 2026 Fair Market Rent consume the largest share of local median household income, how many counties cross HUD's 30 percent cost-burden line on the FMR benchmark alone, and why can a high-rent county be less burdened than a low-rent one?

How the burden number is built

The rent-burden figure on this page is a ratio. For each county we take the HUD fiscal-year 2026 two-bedroom Fair Market Rent, multiply it by twelve to get an annual rent figure, divide by the county median household income, and express the result as a percent. A county where the annual two-bedroom FMR equals one third of median household income reads as 33.3 on this scale. The one-bedroom version of the same calculation appears in the ranking table so readers can compare unit sizes within a single county.

The 30 percent line is the long-standing federal definition of housing cost burden. A household paying more than 30 percent of its income toward rent and utilities is considered cost burdened; above 50 percent it is severely cost burdened. Those thresholds were written for actual household spending, so applying them to an FMR-over-median-income ratio is an approximation, not a household-level measurement. It does, however, identify which county-level rent environments are structurally stretched relative to local earnings, which is the question this page sets out to answer.

Every number rendered below comes directly from the current dataset for 2026, combining county rent and income figures to compute the burden ratio. No statistic on this page is hardcoded. When HUD publishes a new FMR vintage or the Census income estimates are revised, the ranking, the chart bars, and the prose around them update automatically.

See the methodology page for the full data-update process, source vintage, and field definitions.

Highest 2-bedroom rent burden, FY2026

Annual 2BR FMR as a percent of county median household income - longer bars mean rent eats more of local income

% of median income

What this shows In Bronx County, NY the annual two-bedroom FMR of $34,920 runs to 71.2% of the $49,036 county median household income, the highest rent-to-income ratio in this 100-county result. Each bar past the 30% mark sits above HUD's cost-burden line.

Source U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development As of Fiscal year 2026

The most rent-strained counties

Every row is rendered from the live 100-county result returned by the burden query in the frontmatter. Burden columns are the percent of median household income consumed by the annualized FMR for each unit size.

# County State Median income 2BR FMR/mo 1BR burden 2BR burden
1 Bronx County NY $49,036 $2,910 65% 71.2%
2 Randolph County GA $25,425 $1,028 37% 48.5%
3 Santa Cruz County CA $109,266 $4,214 36.2% 46.3%
4 Kings County NY $78,548 $2,910 40.6% 44.5%
5 Greene County AL $31,495 $1,140 33.1% 43.4%
6 Miami-Dade County FL $68,694 $2,436 34.9% 42.6%
7 Presidio County TX $29,014 $1,015 33.5% 42%
8 Jackson County SD $26,686 $929 37.1% 41.8%
9 Prairie County MT $45,192 $1,548 32.1% 41.1%
10 Queens County NY $84,961 $2,910 37.5% 41.1%

Highest 1-bedroom rent burden, FY2026

The same calculation for a one-bedroom unit - a smaller unit lowers the ratio but rarely clears the 30% line in these markets

% of median income

What this shows Even for a one-bedroom, Bronx County, NY runs to 65% of the $49,036 county median household income. Dropping a bedroom trims the burden but, in the most strained counties, not below HUD's 30% cost-burden line.

Source U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development As of Fiscal year 2026

Source: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development - HUD Fair Market Rents FY2026 + Census ACS County Median Household Income. Updated automatically when HUD and Census publish new source data.

Findings

How many counties cross the cost-burden line

Of the 100 counties in this result set, 100 cross HUD's 30 percent cost-burden threshold on the two-bedroom FMR alone, which is 100% of the counties measured here. 1 of them sit above the 50 percent severe-burden mark, meaning the annual two-bedroom FMR would absorb more than half of the local median household income before a single utility bill. The median burden across the set is 34.5% and the mean is 35.6%, so the typical county in this ranking is already pressing against the federal affordability line rather than sitting comfortably below it. Because the denominator is the all-household median rather than the lower renter median, these figures describe a floor: the same FMR weighed against what renters actually earn would push the ratios higher.

The most strained county

Bronx County, NY tops the ranking. Its two-bedroom FMR of $2,910 a month annualizes to $34,920, set against a county median household income of $49,036, for a burden of 71.2%. The one-bedroom burden in the same county is 65%, the gap between the two showing how much a household saves by trading a bedroom for a smaller unit. A figure this far above the 30 percent line signals a county where the rent floor set by federal voucher standards is fundamentally out of step with what local wages support, the kind of structural mismatch that drives doubling-up, long commutes from cheaper outlying counties, and persistent waitlists for assisted units.

Why the dollar rent and the rent burden point in different directions

Within this high-burden ranking, the dollar rent and the burden ratio often disagree. A coastal county with a two-bedroom FMR near $2,910 can sit lower in the table than a rural county whose headline rent is a fraction of that, because burden is a ratio: a small rent measured against a small median income is a larger share than a large rent measured against a large income. That is why the strained tier mixes expensive metros with low-income rural counties, and why a reader scanning only the dollar FMR column would misread which places are genuinely hard to afford. The burden column is the corrective. The policy implication is direct: voucher payment standards anchored to FMR stretch a household's own contribution least exactly where rents most exceed local earnings, which is where assistance is needed most.

Source provenance

The rent figures originate from U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, specifically the fiscal-year 2026 Fair Market Rents schedule, joined against county median household income from the Census American Community Survey. PlainRent ingests the published vintage and computes the burden ratio automatically, so there is no static export carrying stale numbers. The methodology page documents the source URL, the vintage date, and how the data is processed.

What this analysis cannot tell us

Rent burden here uses the HUD Fair Market Rent as the numerator, not a household's actual contract rent. FMR is a 40th-percentile recent-mover benchmark used to set voucher payment standards, so it understates what a typical sitting tenant pays in a tight market and overstates it in a soft one. The denominator is county median household income across all households, owners and renters together; renter households usually earn less than the county median, so a burden computed against the all-household median is a floor, not the figure a median renter would face. Annualizing monthly FMR by multiplying by twelve ignores utility allowances, security deposits, application fees, and seasonal lease pricing. County median income is sourced from Census estimates with their own sampling margins, and small-population counties carry wider error bands. None of these figures account for household size, the presence of children, transportation costs, or local tax burden, all of which shape true housing affordability beyond the rent-to-income ratio shown here.

Related data

Sources