Average rent in Illinois:
rent growth must survive the expense budget.

Northeastern Illinois dominates the covered ZIP sample

The seven full northeastern counties contain 202 of 270 same-month ZIPs, with a pooled median of $2,072. The 68 tracked ZIPs in other Illinois counties have a median of $1,206. This is a comparison of covered samples. It does not estimate what the state would cost without Chicago, or tell you how many Illinois households pay each rent.

Scroll horizontally for all columns. Rounded shares may not sum to exactly 100%.

Compare the Illinois county sets that fit your search

Cook, its northeastern neighbors and the rest of Illinois are broad starting points. The local cuts below separate Rockford, central Illinois and the Illinois sides of the St. Louis and Quad Cities areas. They are selected whole-county comparisons, not official metro boundaries or a complete set of Illinois regions.

September 2026 · equal ZIP weighting · first four rows are a selected preview, not a ranking. Scroll sideways for all columns.

Metro East here means Madison and Saint Clair counties; Missouri is outside the sample. Rock Island County is only part of the Quad Cities, with Iowa excluded. Missing counties or a small ZIP count should prompt more local comp research rather than a statewide substitute.

The McLean and Champaign county ZIP medians are $1,394 and $1,291. Those all-size county samples cannot price a particular campus-area bedroom, furnished lease or academic-year tenancy. Match the dates and lease length, and calculate all months you must pay.

Pooled medians are calculated from individual ZIPs, never by averaging county medians. Comparison rows use 270 eligible ZIPs sharing the newest included month; 0 eligible observations fall outside that month. Dollars are rounded only for display.

Find Chicago, Aurora and other Illinois city groups

City groups follow postal-city labels rather than municipal boundaries. A Chicago city lookup is narrower than Cook County; an Aurora or Naperville postal label does not by itself identify a single county. Keep the city page for its local ZIP spread, then check the actual home’s location.

Source: shared eligible ZORI ZIP indices. Only cities meeting the existing three-ZIP threshold get a page. Coverage order is not an affordability or investment ranking.

Search Illinois ZIP rent benchmarks

Use a ZIP or postal city, then narrow by county. Each row carries its own observation month. An absent ZIP is missing data, not zero rent or evidence of no available homes. Expand the table to inspect the complete eligible sample.

For bedroom-specific gross-rent references, open the HUD rent lookup. FMR/SAFMR references, adopted payment standards and approved unit rents are different measures from asking-rent ZORI. No demand, vacancy or achievable rent is inferred from a ZIP index.

When comparing real listings, match bedrooms, floor area, property type, condition, parking, pets, included utilities and the full lease term. A refundable deposit affects cash needed; a nonrefundable fee affects the cost of that lease. Obtain the written amounts and payment dates.

A cheaper monthly trip can still leave the first lease more expensive

For a Chicago-area address comparison, quote the whole route before deciding what rent premium transit access can cover. Include feeder service, the correct Metra zones, station parking and your actual on-site days. Downstate readers can use the same arithmetic with their own local service and driving quotes; the sample does not assume Chicago fares apply statewide.

Use NITA’s fare and payment guide, the CTA fare chart and Pace fare details to check the products covering your trip. Metra fares use zones; different passes and add-ons have different validity. The calculator’s transit amount is a user assumption, not a quoted pass price.

Travel time, accessibility, reliability and the ability to make the whole trip matter alongside cash. This model does not establish that you can sell a car or avoid all ownership costs. Households can explore renting versus buying; owners can inspect Illinois county market evidence and use verified rent comps in the rental cash-flow calculator.

Read-only freshness audit, October 20, 2026: the shared database’s 270 eligible state ZIPs matched the upstream September 2026 observation month. No upstream ZIP was missing from storage and no matched stored observation lagged the source. Storage also held 57 older June–August observations outside the current sample; 56 stored ZIPs were absent from the downloaded file. These are dated audit counts, not a promise of future coverage. The lookup’s displayed dates and counts follow the shared validated refresh. Quarterly apartment research elsewhere on this page uses its own named sources, periods and cohorts.

Source dates, coverage and limitations

Current eligible observations cover these months:

• September 2026: 270 ZIPs.

0 included observations have unknown dates. The table follows the shared monthly rent publication; historical retained rows are kept separately and excluded from current estimates. The comparison sections use only the newest common month. County-unspecified ZIPs, if any, remain separately labeled rather than assigned to a region.

Coverage is selective. ZIPs are not equally populated, county assignment is not an address boundary match, and neither the seven-county cut nor the local comparisons represent every home in those areas. Positive extremes are retained rather than silently trimmed. No bedroom rent, square-foot price, growth, future return or tenant demand is supplied by this dataset.

Sources: Zillow source data and ZORI methodology. Geography and transport sources are cited beside their uses. The coverage graphic uses shared observations; the trip diagram and worksheet use labeled hypothetical inputs. Photo credit and source appear with the image.

Content and usability reviewed October 20, 2026: Illinois market theses, primary-source research, investor income stress, body photography and retained city/ZIP lookup. Automated data updates do not advance this editorial date. About RentalCalcs · Report a data issue.