Rent is often the largest monthly expense, and where you live shapes a lot of the rest of your life. We at Zumper publish rent data so you can see what the market looks like before you decide to move, which means we care a lot about getting the numbers right.
Where the data comes from
Our data comes from the rentals listed on Zumper, which add up to more than 1 million active listings across the U.S. in a typical month. Some are posted directly by landlords, property managers and brokers, and verified by our team. Others come from listing partners, including MLS providers.
We only look at long-term rentals. Short-term stays, furnished corporate housing and rooms in shared homes are excluded.
What we measure
We use asking rents, which are the prices property owners are advertising to the next tenant. Asking rents differ from what current tenants pay, which tends to trail the market, and they’re the figure that matters if you’re apartment hunting right now.
Beyond the asking rent, we capture rich data on each listing, including any required monthly fees, such as amenity, trash, or utility packages, that renters must pay on top of rent. Where a property provides complete fee data, Zumper shows a total monthly price, which is the base rent plus all required monthly fees. As fee transparency is more widely adopted, changes in these figures over time will partly reflect broader coverage. We use this data to show what rent costs once those fees are included, giving renters a clearer picture of what they’d actually pay each month.
To track how rents change, we follow the same homes over time. Units come back on the market periodically as tenants move out, and when one does, we compare its new asking rent with its previous listed rent. A one-bedroom listed at $1,600 in March 2025 that returns in May 2026 at $1,680, for example, reflects a 5% increase for the exact same unit. Its size, location, and finishes haven’t changed, so the difference mostly comes down to the market.
Because each home is compared only with itself, our index tracks market-level price changes, not which listings happen to be on the market in a given month. One unit doesn’t say much about a whole city, but across the U.S. we see this happen well over a million times a year. Our index relies on a statistical model that combines these comparisons to estimate how rents moved in each city, month by month, so the quirks of individual units largely wash out. It’s the same basic idea behind the Case-Shiller Home Price Index, which has tracked home prices this way for decades. New construction is included too, once a new building’s apartments return to the market after their first tenants.
Making sure it’s really the same unit
We match on the building, the unit number and bedroom count, so we can recognize a home even when a different company lists it the second time.
We only count a comparison when the unit was off the market long enough that it most likely rented in between. We exclude comparisons that don’t look real, such as implausible rent changes or batches of listings that drop off and reappear because of technical issues.
Turning it into dollars
The model tells us how fast rents are changing, but most people want to know what a one-bedroom actually costs so we publish rents in dollars. Each month’s rent starts from the previous month’s published rent and moves with the change measured across repeat rentals.
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