The American Cities Where Renters Are the Majority

Homeownership is often described as the American default — and nationally it is: 65.0% of occupied homes are owner-occupied. But that average hides a large club of cities where the default runs the other way. We computed the renter share of every US city with at least 20,000 residents and found that in 439 of them — 19.2% of all 2,290 cities that size — renting households outnumber owning ones.

At the extreme end the imbalance is dramatic. In Fort Hood, TX, 99.7% of households rent; in Cudahy, CA it is 88.2%. The table below ranks the 100 most renter-dominated cities in the country.

The 100 Most Renter-Dominated US Cities

Limited to places with at least 20,000 residents.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey (ACS) 5-Year Estimates.

Three Kinds of Renter City

Read down the list and three distinct types of city appear. The first is the military town: Fort Hood sits atop the ranking because virtually all base housing is rented, whatever a household earns. The second is the dense urban core or inner-ring suburb — places built out with apartment stock generations ago, where the housing that exists is simply not for sale. The third, and the one growing fastest, is the high-cost coastal city, where median home values reach many multiples of local incomes and ownership is arithmetically out of reach for a typical earner.

The third type explains why California dominates the list. In most of its renter-majority cities the barrier is not preference but price: the median home value across the top 100 ($357,800) is well above the national median of $303,400, and in many entries the home-value-to-income ratio exceeds levels at which a conventional mortgage is realistic.

What Renter-Majority Status Signals

A renter-majority housing market behaves differently: population turns over faster, local tax bases lean on commercial and landlord-held property, and household wealth accumulates more slowly, because home equity is the main savings vehicle for middle-income Americans. None of that makes these cities worse places to live — several of the country's highest-income communities appear on this list — but it does make them structurally different from the ownership-dominated suburbs that surround them. For the ownership side of the ledger, see homeownership rates by state.

How We Did This Analysis

We computed the renter share (renter-occupied households ÷ all occupied households) for every US place with at least 20,000 residents — 2,290 cities — using ACS 5-Year Estimates, then counted those above 50% and ranked the top 100. Household counts refer to occupied housing units; vacant and seasonal units are excluded.

All figures come from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS) 5-Year Estimates. Because estimates pool five years of survey responses, small differences between closely ranked entries may fall within the survey's margin of error. Learn more on our methodology page or at data.census.gov.