When the rent was due in 2025, a fifth of Americans weren’t able to pay on time.
According to a new report from the Urban Institute, 20% of surveyed Americans aged 18 to 64 said that, at some point in 2025, they couldn’t pay their full rent on time. That’s the highest share of rent troubles recorded since the Urban Institute’s Well-Being and Basic Needs Survey began asking this question in 2019, and a marked increase from 2024.
Lurking under that bleak rent outlook is another signal of a flailing middle class: In the year leading up to December 2025, middle-income renters, who earn between 200% to 400% of the federal poverty line, were much more likely to say they were struggling to pay rent.
The lowest-income renters surveyed, earning below 200% of the federal poverty line, or $53,300 for a family of three, remain the most likely to have trouble paying their rents. Yet the middle-income share reporting rent payment problems rose from around 14.3% in 2024 to 21.6% in 2025, the biggest jump among all income brackets.
Recent research shows middle-income workers increasingly identify as working class, as they struggle to pay bills and stack multiple jobs in hopes of stability.
A separate analysis from the Richmond Federal Reserve found that middle-income Americans are now more likely to hold multiple jobs than their lower-earning counterparts, and college-educated Americans now make up half of the multiple jobholder workforce. And middle-income Americans’ consumer sentiment has switched from tracking with their higher-income peers to mirroring lower-income earners, suggesting that they’re feeling similar economic pressures.
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When middle-income workers are locked into financial situations generally associated with lower earners, like renting instead of owning their home, it can put downward pressure on the poorest Americans.
“We used to have a lot of moderate and middle-income households entering into home ownership and not competing for the same rental units,” said Kathryn Reynolds, one of the Urban Institute report’s authors.
While lower-income households still struggle the most, a layer of struggling middle-income households might worsen their prospects. Those middle-income earners seek out cheaper units, and landlords feel more inclined to rent to higher earners with better credit scores — a dynamic Reynolds found in her previous research on renters.
“That just puts even more pressure on that group of lowest-income households, in terms of competition for units that are really moderately priced,” Reynolds said.
And, as prices stay high and the cost to borrow money increases, the things that might alleviate those middle and lower-income economic pressures — like the costs of necessities falling, or more housing being built — might only become harder to enact.
“It’s going to be a difficult problem to solve,” Reynolds said.
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