The Most — and Least — Expensive Metros for New Renters

Upset renter — Damir Khabirov / Shutterstock.com

This story originally appeared on HireAHelper.

The COVID-19 outbreak is poised to cause major migration shifts across the U.S.

According to recent data, 22% of U.S. adults changed their residence or knew someone who did because of the pandemic. This represents a stark reversal from the longstanding trend of Americans staying put and could have far-reaching effects on local populations and economies.

Prior to COVID-19, geographic mobility in the U.S. reached historic lows. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that between 2018 and 2019, only 9% of Americans changed their address. By contrast, the geographic mobility rate hovered around 20% throughout the 1950s and 1960s before beginning its decline.

Despite the overall drop in mobility, people who moved in 2019 were more likely to do so for work-related reasons than in years past. For example, between 2018 and 2019, 12.1% of those who moved indicated a new job or job transfer was their primary reason for moving, compared with 9.5% in 1999.

These mobility trends are likely to reverse course sharply in the wake of COVID-19, especially as more companies allow for remote work. Pew Research Center data suggests that people have moved as much already in 2020 as in all of 2019.

As the need to live in close proximity to work has shifted for many Americans, more affordable housing is a particularly strong draw for residents looking to move. To find the most and least expensive locations to sign a new rental agreement, researchers at HireAHelper, a marketplace for local moving companies, analyzed median rental prices and wage statistics across the United States.

Using this data, HireAHelper calculated how many hours the typical renter would need to work to sign a new rental agreement. For this calculation, the researchers assumed that a renter would need to pay three months of rent upfront (i.e., first month’s rent, last month’s rent and a security deposit).

For example, the national median cost of a two-bedroom rental is $1,293 and the median wage is $19.14 per hour. This means that a typical renter would need to have $3,879 saved to sign the rental agreement, which would require 203 hours of work.

Here are the 15 most expensive and 15 least expensive metros in which to sign a new rental agreement.

Methodology

Young woman renter packing up to move house — Dmytro Zinkevych / Shutterstock.com

The rental price data used in this report is from HUD’s 50th Percentile Rent Estimates. State- and national-level estimates were aggregated from county-level data. Median wage statistics are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment Statistics.

To find the number of work hours needed to sign a two-bedroom rental agreement in each location, researchers assumed that a renter would need to pay three months of rent upfront (i.e., first month’s rent, last month’s rent, and a security deposit). This total amount was then divided by the location’s median hourly wage.

Locations were ordered by the resulting statistic. In the event of a tie, median monthly rent was used. Only metropolitan areas with at least 500,000 residents were included in the analysis.