Joint Center for Housing Studies’ Rental Housing Report Finds Worsening Affordability Despite a Cooling Rental Market

By Raquel Harati, NLIHC Research Analyst 

The Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS) of Harvard University released the latest version of its biennial report, America’s Rental Housing 2026, on March 12th. The report highlights consistent affordability concerns for renters across the country despite cooling rental market costs, slowing rental demand, and rising vacancy rates in some areas. A record-high 22.7 million renter households were cost-burdened in 2024, meaning that almost half of all U.S. renter households were spending more than 30% of their income on housing costs. The authors highlight that recent federal policy changes have put even more pressure on renter households trying to make ends meet with major funding cuts to SNAP and Medicaid. The report calls for coordinated policy and funding actions across all levels of government and sectors to solve the severe housing challenges renters face. 

The report explores numerous topics that impact rental housing stability, including affordability, energy efficiency, preservation, and increasingly frequent climate disasters. On the supply side, the report shows that new multifamily housing construction slowed in 2025 to 416,000 units, down from 547,000 units in 2022 due to rising construction and labor costs. Between January 2020 and December 2025, the prices of all material inputs to new residential construction rose by 42% compared to just 7% growth in the previous five-year period of 2014 to 2019. These rising construction costs have led, in part, to the rising cost of rent. The authors found that although asking rents in the last quarter of 2025 were 0.6% lower than the same time period in 2024, longer-term trends still have asking rents shifting upwards with the number of units renting for less than $1,400 a month decreasing by 9.3 million units in the decade between 2014 and 2024. Out of the 9.3 million lost units, 2.5 million had rented for less than $600 a month, a critical decrease of 30% in the already limited affordable housing supply for renters with the lowest incomes. Renter households with incomes under $30,000 were found to have a record low of $210 leftover after paying their housing costs, down 60% from 2001. 

The report finds that the median age of rental units in the U.S. is 45 years. With an aging housing stock comes the need for reinvestment and repairs. The authors found that 3.6 million (8%) of renters across the country live in moderately to severely inadequate units, with renters with lower incomes more likely to live in substandard housing. In 2023, 10.3% of renter households earning less than $15,000 lived in inadequate housing compared to just 5.8% of renters with incomes of $75,000 or more. Disasters also present a threat to existing rental stock. More than 18 million rental homes are located in areas of moderate to high hazard risk.  

The authors emphasize that broader economic uncertainty is likely to continue dampening demand and cooling the rental market, however these short-term shifts are unlikely to make significant improvements in terms of affordability for most renters. Instead, the report concludes that affordability challenges are structural given the mismatch between rents and renter incomes, a continued loss of lower cost rental units, as well as chronic underfunding for federal rental assistance, that leaves three out of four households who qualify without any assistance. In this context, recent reductions to federal funding and the workforce are expected to place additional strain on renters and an increased reliance on state and local governments. The report discusses this shift providing both a great challenge to localities due to competing priorities, limited budgets, and staff capacity, but also as an opportunity for local innovation that we are beginning to see. Concluding that as the nation’s intersecting rental challenges—of unaffordability, rising construction costs, aging supply, and disaster risks—continue to grow, only a coordinated bipartisan approach at all levels of government and across multiple sectors will alleviate these issues.  

The full report can be found here.