Average Rent in Massachusetts: ZIPs, Leasing & First-Lease Cash

What the rent evidence changes for a rental decision

Use the ZIP benchmark to choose where to investigate, not to price an unmatched apartment. In Greater Boston verify the net lease offer; in Worcester confirm the property and lawful units; across Massachusetts identify who engaged the broker and budget the owner’s actual agreed fee separately from recurring NOI.

Worcester small rental buildings

A registered property and a rent-ready lawful unit answer different questions

Worcester’s current owner guidance requires all rental properties in the city to be registered annually, with updated owner and property-manager contact details. This is a city program, not a requirement established by the Greater Boston market report.

A familiar three-decker layout does not by itself establish the legal unit count, completed permitted work or a first-payment date. Registration is an important record to reconcile, but its presence alone cannot substitute for a condition and lawful-use investigation.

Decision. Match the registry entry to the parcel, owner and management contact. Obtain the building’s lawful-unit and outstanding-work records before counting every advertised unit in year-one collections. Schedule repairs and leasing from the documented condition.

What could change it. A current entry with verified lawful units and completed work can reduce uncertainty. An annual registration submission without those records leaves the income start and repair budget unresolved.

Records to obtain. Current city registry entry, parcel identity, lawful-unit records, permits, inspection or violation records and funded repair scope.

Read the source reports

• Worcester information for property owners — Current municipal rental-registry guidance reviewed October 24, 2026; City of Worcester only.

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.

12 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.

Separate recurring rent performance from first-lease cash needs

Hypothetical apartment: $3,000 rent, 4% annual vacancy/noncollection, half a free month, $10,500 operating costs, $19,500 debt and $1,500 reserves. These inputs are not a Massachusetts or Boston property estimate. The worksheet returns recurring income and cash; the separate figure subtracts the assumed one-time broker fee. Initial repairs, acquisition cash and refundable deposits require their own treatment.

Initial calculated result: $33,120 collected rent, $22,620 NOI before debt/reserves, and $1,620 cash after debt/reserves. Change the assumptions below to test your own budget.

Continue with the right geography and tool

• Boston metro rent research — Continue into the published metro’s dated neighborhood and leasing analysis.
• Massachusetts cap-rate research — Compare valuation with a verified recurring income budget and separate first-lease cash.
• House-hack calculator — Model owner occupancy and financing for a small multi-unit property using its actual rent and costs.
• 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.

Massachusetts rent questions

How these rent figures are calculated

State: Massachusetts · USPS MA · Census state FIPS 25. 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 2026-10-24. 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.