Rent vs. buy across America's largest metros

Is it cheaper to rent or buy in the biggest US metros right now?

In most of them, renting — if the renter invests what they save. Nationally, Zillow's typical home is worth $371,774 and rents for $1,962 a month, a price-to-rent ratio of 15.8. Run through our model at 6.5% with 20% down, renting wins by about $45,000 over 10 years; the typical rent would have to be $2,207 a month (+12%) before buying came out ahead. The median metro's ratio is 17.2, and the spread is enormous: from 11.8 in Jackson, MS to 34.4 in San Jose, CA, where renting wins by $914,000.

Verdicts use our default assumptions with only the metro's home value and rent changed: 20% down, a 30-year fixed at 6.5%, 3% appreciation, 2.5% rent growth, 7% investment return, property tax at 1.1% of value, standard deduction. See the caveats below before treating any single row as advice.

Which metros most favor renting?

The West Coast and the mountain metros, by a wide margin. The ten highest price-to-rent ratios among the 97 largest metros, and what the model says about each:

Where does buying still win?

Where the ratio is lowest — mostly the Midwest, the South and the Rust Belt. The ten lowest price-to-rent ratios; note how thin some of the buying margins are even here:

"Rent that flips it" is the tipping-point rent: the monthly rent at which buying and renting-and-investing end the 10 years with equal net worth, and how far the metro's typical rent sits from it. A negative percentage means the typical rent is already above the threshold — buying is winning.

How should I read these verdicts?

As a screen, not a decision. Five things the table cannot know about you or your market:

• A typical home is not a typical rental. ZHVI describes the middle tier of all homes in a metro; ZORI describes asking rents across all rental types, apartments included. The ratio compares a market's homes with its rentals, not the same dwelling — treat it as a market-level indicator and use the calculator for the actual house and the actual comparable rent.
• Property tax is held at 1.1% everywhere. Effective rates vary several-fold by state. Where they run well above the default (Illinois, New Jersey, Texas and much of the Northeast), the buy verdicts here are optimistic; where they run well below it (much of the West and South), they are pessimistic. Insurance is likewise a flat $2,500 a year — Florida, Louisiana and wildfire-exposed California cost far more.
• Appreciation and rent growth are the national defaults ( 3% and 2.5%). A metro that appreciates faster than that favors buying more than shown; one that is losing population, less.
• The horizon is 10 years and the down payment is 20%. Both move the answer — see the key numbers for the full horizon-by-rate matrix and how PMI actually ends for smaller down payments.
• Taxes assume the standard deduction and no state income tax. High earners itemizing in high-tax states should run their own case — the engine models the 2026 SALT and mortgage-interest caps once you tell it to itemize.

The direction of every bias above is stated so you can correct for it; the "Run it" links exist so you do not have to.

Where does the data come from, and how often is it updated?

Home values and rents are Zillow Research's public series, retrieved from zillow.com/research/data: the Zillow Home Value Index (all homes, mid-tier, smoothed and seasonally adjusted) and the Zillow Observed Rent Index (all homes plus multifamily, smoothed and seasonally adjusted), both for the month ending 2026-07-31. Zillow publishes monthly; we refresh the file when we rebuild, and the as-of date on this page is the truth about what it currently shows. Every derived column — ratio, verdict, gap, break-even, tipping rent — is computed at build by the same open-source engine as the calculator, covered by 159 automated tests and documented on the methodology page.

The table is downloadable as CSV and published under CC BY 4.0; the underlying home values and rents remain Zillow's and should be credited to Zillow Research. If you reuse a verdict, carry the assumptions with it.