How we compute median rents

Listings come from three public rental listing sites:

• Redfin rentals
• Zillow rentals
• ApartmentHomeLiving (AHL)

We only use listings with a map location, a US address and a link back to the source page. Every listing on our rental map links to the site where it was advertised; availability and final terms are set there, not by us.

• The dataset is rebuilt and republished once a day from the latest complete collection run of each source.
• Redfin is collected nationwide every day.
• ApartmentHomeLiving is collected nationwide every one to two days.
• Zillow is collected area by area on a rolling schedule, and a full national pass takes two to three weeks. The Zillow part of the data is therefore refreshed gradually, and a Zillow listing can be up to that old.
• The date shown with each figure is the date of the most recent collection run used.

The same rental is often advertised on more than one site. We count it once:

• Within a source, a listing is identified by that site's own listing ID.
• Across sources, two listings are the same rental when their normalized street address (including unit number) and five-digit ZIP code match. Normalization lowercases the address, strips punctuation and abbreviates common words (Street → st, Avenue → ave).
• When a rental appears on several sites, the record is kept from the first source in the order Redfin, Zillow, ApartmentHomeLiving. Missing price or bedroom details are filled from the duplicates, and links to every source are kept.
• Listings with no street address or ZIP code cannot be matched and are counted as they are.

• Asking, not signed. It is the monthly rent advertised on the listing, before any concession, fee or negotiation. Signed-lease rents are often lower, especially where landlords offer free weeks.
• Single-price listings only. A listing advertised as a range (for example “$1,200–$2,400, 1–3 beds”, typical of apartment buildings with several open units) is shown on the map but left out of the medians, because a range cannot be placed in one bedroom bucket at one price.
• Bedroom buckets. Studio, 1 bedroom, 2 bedrooms, and 3 or more bedrooms.
• Minimum sample. A bucket's median is published only when the city has at least 20 qualifying listings in it. The sample size is shown next to each figure as “n”.
• Implausible prices removed. Prices outside $300–$30,000 a month are treated as errors (deposits, sale prices, typos) and ignored.
• One listing, one vote. Each rental counts once in the median regardless of how many identical units a building advertises.

A city gets a page once it has at least 50 current listings. City names come from the listing addresses, so they follow postal city names rather than official municipal boundaries.

A city page is opened to search engines only when it has at least 100 listings and medians in at least two bedroom buckets. Smaller city pages stay available on the site and on the map but are marked noindex, because a page built on a handful of listings says too little to be worth finding through search.

• Listings, not the housing stock. The figures describe what is on the market today. Units that rarely turn over, rent-controlled apartments and informal rentals are under-represented.
• Source mix varies by city. In some cities one source supplies most of the listings. In 1,225 of the indexed cities, more than half of the listings come from ApartmentHomeLiving. AHL mostly lists professionally managed apartment communities, so those cities lean toward that kind of rental.
• New construction skews high. New buildings lease up through heavy advertising, so they are over-represented among listings and tend to pull medians up compared with what existing tenants pay.
• Rooms and shared housing. Zillow listings flagged as rooms for rent are excluded. Some room rentals on other sources are listed with the bedroom count of the whole house and a single-room price; they can pull the 3+ bedroom median down in college towns.
• Range-priced buildings are missing from medians. Because ranges are excluded, medians lean toward single-unit rentals (houses, condos, individual apartments) more than the map does.
• Stale listings. Sources do not always remove rented units promptly, and Zillow data can be up to a few weeks old (see the update schedule).

• rents.csv: one row per city with listing count, the four medians, the sample size behind each, whether the city page is indexed, and the data date.
• rents.json: the same data with license, citation and field descriptions.

Both files contain aggregate statistics only. Individual listings are not published as data; they belong to their source sites.

Cite figures as “Easy Rental rent data, easyrental.ai, October 2026” and link to the city page the figure came from, for example easyrental.ai/market/ca/fremont. Please give the bedroom bucket and note that the figure is a median asking rent.

The aggregate statistics (listing counts and median rents) are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). You may reuse them, including commercially, as long as you credit Easy Rental as shown above. The license does not cover listing text, photos or other content from the source sites.

If a figure looks wrong, email leasing@easyrental.ai with the city and bedroom bucket. Owners and agents who want a listing taken off the map can use the listing removal form.

Easy Rental is operated by Ankutv Inc. See About.