Rents. Every rent figure is HUD's Fair Market Rent for FY2026 (the schedule effective October 1, 2025), taken from HUD's open data service. We spot-checked the values against a published FY2026 table (Newark, NJ HUD Metro FMR Area). HUD revised a few areas during the year and has since published FY2027 FMRs, so check HUD for the newest numbers.
Rent outside the US. We use each government's own rent statistics and show them as published:
- United Kingdom: ONS Price Index of Private Rents (PIPR), published 16 September 2026. Average monthly private rents for August 2026 by local authority in England and Wales, by Broad Rental Market Area in Scotland and Northern Ireland. ONS data for Northern Ireland runs two months behind, so those pages show June 2026. PIPR covers new and existing tenancies.
- Canada: CMHC Rental Market Survey, October 2025. Average rents in privately initiated apartment and townhouse buildings with three or more units, for centres of 10,000 people or more. Condos and houses rented privately are not included. CMHC rates each estimate from excellent to poor; we flag poor ones.
- Ireland: the Residential Tenancies Board's Average Monthly Rent Report for Q4 2025 (rents on tenancies registered with the RTB), from the CSO's RIQ02 table, updated 14 May 2026. Areas with too few registrations have no figure. The RTB has since published its Q1 2026 Rent Index nationally; we will add the local figures when the CSO table updates.
- New Zealand: Tenancy Services (MBIE) rental bond data, August 2026: the median weekly rent on new bonds lodged in each council area. We show the monthly equivalent as weekly rent times 52, divided by 12. One month of bonds in a small district is a small sample, so we show how many bonds it is based on.
- Places and postcodes come from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0). UK postcode districts are matched to councils with postcodes.io, which is built on the ONS Postcode Directory.
These sources measure different things (all tenancies, new tenancies, purpose-built rentals), so compare places within a country rather than across countries.
What FMRs mean. HUD sets FMRs at the 40th percentile of gross rent (rent plus utilities) for standard-quality units. They are not asking rents for specific apartments.
Affordability. The 30% of income line is the federal definition of housing cost burden, as described by the Congressional Research Service.
Checked October 17, 2026.