Where Rents Are Falling: US Counties Ranked, Updated Monthly

Most rental pro formas assume rent goes up 2% to 3% a year, every year. The tables below list the counties where that assumption is wrong right now: places where typical rent is lower than it was twelve months ago. They rebuild themselves each month from Zillow's county rent index, so what you see is current and not a snapshot from the day this was written.

Counties where rents are falling the most

This first table covers counties with at least 100,000 residents, ranked by the size of the year-over-year drop.

August 2026 compared with the same month a year earlier, counties with at least 100,000 residents. Rent fell in 29 of the 595 counties in this group. Source: Zillow Observed Rent Index, refreshed monthly.

The largest counties with falling rents

Small counties can swing on a handful of listings. This table applies the same ranking to counties with at least 500,000 residents, where a decline reflects thousands of leases.

August 2026 compared with the same month a year earlier, counties with at least 500,000 residents. Rent fell in 11 of the 139 counties in this group. Source: Zillow Observed Rent Index, refreshed monthly.

Why rents fall

Rent declines at the county level almost always trace back to one of three things.

• New supply. A wave of apartment deliveries forces every landlord nearby to compete on price and concessions. This is the most common cause, and it shows up first in fast-growing Sun Belt and Mountain West counties that permitted heavily a few years earlier.
• A demand shock. A major employer leaves, a university shrinks, or migration into the area slows after a boom.
• A reversal after a spike. Counties where rents jumped 20% or more in a single year often give some of it back. The decline is the market correcting, and rent can still sit far above where it was five years ago.

The cause matters more than the number. A supply wave passes once the new buildings fill, usually within two or three years. A demand loss can last a decade.

How to underwrite a rental where rents are falling

Falling rent does not make a market uninvestable. It changes which deals work.

1. Set rent growth to zero for the first two or three years of your projection, then a modest rate after that. If the deal only works with growth from day one, the deal does not work.
2. Underwrite to today's achievable rent, and check it against listings that actually leased. Asking rents lag on the way down because landlords cut price last and offer free months first.
3. Raise your vacancy assumption. In a soft market, units sit longer between tenants. One extra vacant month costs about 8% of a year's rent.
4. Stress test the debt. Run the numbers at a rent 5% below today's and confirm the property still covers its mortgage.

You can run all four of those in the single family calculator or the multifamily calculator. For the full method, see break-even occupancy, which tells you how far rent and occupancy can slide before a property stops paying for itself.

What falling rents mean for buyers

Soft rents and soft prices often arrive together, and that is when sellers negotiate. If you are buying for a ten-year hold in a county with a temporary supply glut, a lower purchase price locks in for the life of the deal while the rent weakness passes. The discipline is to buy on numbers that work at today's rent and treat any recovery as upside.

To compare a specific county's rent level against its home prices, use the county market pages or the Market Map.

How these rankings are built

• Source: the Zillow Observed Rent Index for counties, covering all home types, smoothed and seasonally adjusted. Zillow publishes it monthly.
• Comparison: the latest published month against the same month one year earlier. Counties without a reading in both months are left out.
• Counties whose index moved more than 30% in a year are left out. In a smoothed index, a swing that large is nearly always a data revision or a thin sample and not a real market move.
• The index tracks asking rents on listed units. It is smoothed, so it turns later than the market does, and it does not capture concessions such as a free month.
• Zillow revises recent months. A county near zero can move on or off this list from one update to the next.

For the opposite list, see where rents are rising fastest.