By Sarah Abdelhadi and Dan Emmanuel, NLIHC
2025 National Renters Survey
On June 23, NLIHC published the 2025 National Renter Survey report, the first from NLIHC to comprehensively capture the distinct housing-related experiences of renters with varying incomes, racial identities, and accessibility needs across the U.S. This report examines renters’ housing-related experiences and opinions often overlooked by other national data sources. Data were collected from a randomly selected group of thousands of renters across the country from July to December 2025. We asked renters to answer questions about their experiences with moving, housing costs, and attempts to access housing assistance, household accessibility needs, and safety or quality issues in their current homes. This valuable resource provides additional support to the powerful stories that tenant advocates share about their lived experiences and can be used alongside existing national data on housing and renters from sources like the U.S. Census Bureau.
To read the full report or to access key findings, charts, and tables, visit: https://nlihc.org/national-renter-survey.
“One-quarter of renters who were denied housing assistance reported they were never told why their applications were turned down.” – 2025 National Renter Survey
Out of Reach 2026
NLIHC released Out of Reach 2026: The High Cost of Housing on July 23. Published annually, Out of Reach highlights the mismatch between the wages people earn and the price of decent rental housing in every state, metropolitan area, and county in the U.S. The report’s central statistic, the Housing Wage, is an estimate of the hourly wage a full-time worker must earn to afford a modest rental home at HUD’s Fair Market Rent (FMR) without spending more than 30% of their income on rent.
This year’s report finds that, nationally, a full-time worker must earn a Housing Wage of $34.73 per hour to afford a modest two-bedroom rental home and a Housing Wage of $29.19 to afford a modest one-bedroom rental home. Workers with everyday jobs in healthcare, construction, food services, and retail are all falling short of the one- and two-bedroom Housing Wages. In fact, the median hourly wage for 18 of the 25 most common occupations in the country is lower than the two-bedroom Housing Wage. Seventeen of the most common occupations have median wages lower than the one-bedroom Housing Wage. Altogether, more than half of all wage earners cannot afford a modest one-bedroom rental home while working full-time, and at least 60% cannot afford a modest two-bedroom rental home.
NLIHC interviewed tenants and other housing stakeholders to better understand the everyday realities underlying the data in Out of Reach 2026. Their messages were clear: a job no longer guarantees housing stability; tenants are making impossible choices between paying for rent and other essentials; housing providers are overwhelmed and struggling to meet demand; and the Trump-Vance administration’s ongoing dismantling and rollback of critical affordable housing programs and resources have only made things worse.
To read the full report and explore its national, state, and local data, please visit https://nlihc.org/oor.
“Funding for housing assistance has historically been overshadowed by other discretionary priorities like defense, leaving housing programs underfunded.” – Out of Reach 2026