Dear reader,
We’ve considered a number of cost-of-living-related measures in recent weeks, such as egg prices, school lunches and child care. In today’s edition, we’re looking at perhaps the worst offender, the trend breaking bank accounts across the country: The rent is still too damn high.
If it feels as if this phenomenon is getting worse, it’s not just you. We asked Mihir Zaveri, who covers housing for The Times across the New York City metro region, to explore the percentage of Americans officially considered “rent-burdened,” and what that figure tells us about the state of the nation’s housing crisis.
— Matt Thompson
How many Americans are rent-burdened?
A household is considered rent-burdened if it spends more than 30 percent of its income on rent and utilities.
That decades-old definition is often woven into federal and local housing policy. Take the federal housing voucher program, for example. Households with vouchers are expected to spend up to 30 percent of their income on housing costs, with the government covering the rest.
In 2024, the most recent year with reliable data from the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly half of all renter households in America — 22.7 million — were rent-burdened. That’s the highest number on record, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, up nearly 9 percentage points since 2001.
Dig further, and the data seems bleaker. The center, in a report released earlier this year, found that the share of rent-burdened households increased in all but six states over the last five years. The label applies to more than half of all renter households in California, Florida and 10 other states.
About 12.1 million “severely rent-burdened” American households spend more than half their income on rent and utilities, the center found, an increase of 1.5 million since the beginning of the pandemic.
The trend is also creeping up the income spectrum. Almost half of renters earning between $45,000 and $74,999 were rent-burdened, twice the equivalent share in 2001, according to the center.
“The biggest trend is, it’s happening everywhere, across all these income groups,” said Whitney Airgood-Obrycki, a senior research associate at the center.
In short, more people in more places are devoting more of their income to housing, leaving less available for food, transportation and other needs, let alone any wants.
How did we get here?
There are two ingredients to rent burden: income and housing costs. It is possible for rents to go up and the share of rent-burdened Americans to fall, if incomes are generally rising faster.
But we mostly haven’t seen that in America. Here, rent increases have generally outpaced growth in renter incomes, Ms. Airgood-Obrycki said.
It is notoriously complicated to unravel exactly what’s driving income trends, or even to decide the right measure to use.
But the ever-more-familiar mismatch of housing supply and demand is driving costs up, experts and economists say. More households are trying to rent, particularly as homeowners, eyeing higher interest rates, are staying put. So the demand for renting is generally going up, yet construction hasn’t kept pace, prompting rents to rise.
What does rent burden leave out?
Rent burden can be a good yardstick to gauge how American renters are doing, but it doesn’t capture the full picture.
“It’s just become a heuristic over time more than anything,” said Brad Greenburg, the executive director of the New York University Furman Center, which analyzes housing and urban policy.
Some take issue with the implication that a household spending less than 30 percent of its income on rent is unburdened by it.
Also, burden means something different to low-income households than to middle- or high-income households, which would have far more absolute money left over after spending 30 percent of their incomes on rent.
Measures of household income often obscure the effects of things like food stamps or tax credits that reduce the tax burden on families with children. And “gross income” does not account for money a family might need to sock away for retirement, or might owe in taxes.
What does it mean?
The overall trend tells us that America’s housing affordability challenges are getting worse.
That is likely to mean a growing strain on the social safety net, and more housing insecurity for people with lower incomes. It might mean a rise in eviction filings — in 2025, landlords already filed one eviction case for every 13 renter households, according to The Eviction Lab. Severe rent burden and homelessness are correlated: When households are increasingly stretched thin by rising housing costs, it is easier for them to lose their homes.
The problem is increasingly preoccupying politicians on the left and right, from Congress down to City Councils.
What can I check out next?
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Housing costs are increasingly animating debates in Washington, with both Republicans and Democrats pitching plans to improve affordability.
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One way to get around private landlords raising rents? Public housing. From Philadelphia to San Francisco to New York, more officials are thinking of ways to invest in and build housing with public dollars.
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Rents have been falling in Austin. What’s the city’s secret?
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From 2022: The housing shortage used to be a problem primarily affecting coastal cities. That’s no longer the case.
— Mihir Zaveri
Your turn
Test your knowledge: In 2025, The Times looked at how much space average residents of the most populous U.S. cities could afford without spending over 30 percent of their income. The reporter found that most households in those urban areas can afford no more than _____ square feet of living space.
Tell us your thoughts: Have you been affected by the rising cost of living expenses? If you rent, is your place affordable, or are you rent-burdened? Please email your thoughts to [email protected].
Following up: Last week in this newsletter, we wrote about the number of shelter beds in the United States. But The Times also published this essay and photo portrait of a now mostly defunct shelter that is highly worth your time. Elizabeth Harris and Sara Hylton took us into the former Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital, which ultimately attained notoriety as the 30th Street Shelter and Intake Center, a facility for single men without housing. The once-grand edifice underwent an evolution over the course of the 20th century that echoes the shifts in how New York City has approached homelessness over the years.
Mihir Zaveri contributed reporting.
The Headway initiative is funded through grants from the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as a fiscal sponsor. The Woodcock Foundation is a funder of Headway’s public square. Funders have no control over the selection, focus of stories or the editing process and do not review stories before publication. The Times retains full editorial control of the Headway initiative.
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