Average Rent in Indiana: ZIP Benchmarks & Lease-Up Research

What the rent evidence changes for a rental decision

Price an Indianapolis rental from the competing lease offers and collections you can document. In Bloomington, resolve the permit and lease calendar before counting a full year of income. Neither decision is settled by Indiana’s ZIP median.

Hamilton County versus the regional average

The northern-suburb delivery corridor needs its own comparables

HUD’s January 2025 profile identifies 1,875 completions in Carmel/Zionsville/Westfield and 910 in Fishers/Noblesville during 2024. It reports Q4 2024 apartment vacancy including lease-up of 14.3% and 11.2%, respectively. These are older submarket observations, not current Indiana vacancy.

A state or metro median can conceal the amount of directly competing new inventory. The historical concentration identifies where to investigate concessions; it cannot establish that those vacancies persist in October 2026.

Decision. For a Hamilton County purchase, revisit those competing projects and record present availability, incentives and lease starts. Compare a suburban apartment with a similar service level, rather than importing central Indianapolis rent or professionally managed house rent.

What could change it. The earlier deliveries may now be occupied, and house demand can differ from apartment demand. HUD’s separate single-family series uses a different cohort and units; no house-to-apartment premium is calculated here.

Records to obtain. Current competitor availability, floor plan, effective lease cost, delivery status and subject renewal history.

Read the source reports

• HUD Indianapolis housing market profile — As of January 1, 2025; apartment observations Q4 2024; pp. 4–5; CoStar and Cotality inputs.

Compare rents across these county groups

These analyst-selected sets use the listed county labels and the same September 2026 observation month. Each ZIP receives one equal vote. They are not official metro definitions, exhaustive regions or bedroom comparisons.

41 distinct county labels appear in the current sample; geographic coverage is incomplete and uneven. Only currently available observations from the same latest month enter these comparisons. Older retained records and missing ZIPs do not enter as zero rents.

Can a modest incentive absorb the first-year cash margin?

Hypothetical one-apartment offer: $1,350 monthly face rent, 8% annual vacancy/noncollection, half a free month, $5,200 operating costs, $7,200 debt service and $1,000 reserves. These are editable assumptions, not Indianapolis survey estimates. The free month applies only to the occupied share.

Initial calculated result: $14,283 collected rent, $9,083 NOI before debt/reserves, and $883 cash after debt/reserves. Change the assumptions below to test your own budget.

Continue with the right geography and tool

• Indiana acquisition and cap-rate research — Compare asking yields with verified income instead of valuing a property from the ZIP median.
• Marion County rental research — Check county evidence with its own observation dates and geography.
• ZIP and bedroom HUD rent reference — a different measure from asking-rent ZORI; a PHA must still establish its payment standard and approve the actual contract.
• Property income calculator — use signed comparables and actual expenses for the subject property.

Indiana rent questions

How these rent figures are calculated

State: Indiana · USPS IN · Census state FIPS 18. Zillow supplies postal ZIP observations with city and county labels. We filter to valid positive rents in this state and the latest common observation month, sort the values, and take the middle value, or the mean of the two middle values for an even count. Means are the sum divided by included ZIPs. No population, household or rental-unit weighting is added.

The all-home, all-bedroom ZIP series is smoothed, not seasonally adjusted. A bedroom rent cannot be inferred from it. Membership can change after a refresh, so a change in this page’s median is not a matched-sample rent-growth rate. This edition does not publish a ZIP-sample growth claim.

Data: Zillow Research · ZORI method · National ZIP source CSV. The state benchmark is our ZIP-based calculation, not a provider-published statewide estimate. Occupied-unit Census rent, listing medians, effective broker rents and HUD gross-rent references answer different questions and are not blended here.

The observation month identifies the rent data available for this comparison. Historical or missing latest observations stay out of the current sample. Check the date before comparing a property with a newly advertised offer.

Market and legal sources below were reviewed 2026-10-21. Their own periods are shown next to each claim. Broker samples and boundaries are not fully disclosed; surveys may share underlying providers and should not be treated as independent experiments. The market interpretation is conditional research, not a property-level income guarantee. Recheck local rules, signed comparable leases and actual expenses before using an illustration in a transaction.