RentLens updates: September 2026
September was about making forecasts easier to read and easier to trust. Every forecast now comes with a month-by-month table, our monthly market updates score their own track record in public, and Pro is now free to try for 30 days.
What’s new
Forecast by month, with the changes worked out for you. The Forecasts tab now has a “Forecast by month” table under the chart for every metro and state. Each row shows the expected rent, its likely range, and three ways of reading the move: month over month, year over year, and the cumulative change since the last observed month. The same table now appears on every metro page at rentlens.co/rent, so you can read the trajectory as numbers as well as a line.
| Column | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| MoM | The change expected from one month to the next |
| YoY | How that month compares with the same month a year earlier |
| Cumulative | Total change since the latest observed rent |
Try Pro free for 30 days. New subscribers now start with a 30-day free trial of Pro: the full twelve-month forecast for every market, the complete month-by-month tables, and everything else Pro includes. Cancel before the trial ends and you won’t be charged.
Forecasts you can check. Each monthly market update on the blog now opens with a scorecard. It sets the numbers we published the month before against the rents that actually printed, metro by metro, and names our closest call and our biggest miss. We also now publish a forecast for a metro only once it has at least a full year of observed rent history. Newer markets show how many months they have so far and get a forecast as soon as they reach twelve.
A roomier Explorer. Clicking a market on the map now opens a detail panel with a full-width chart, a monthly table, and a line marking where rent stood a year ago. The panel header is more compact, so the chart gets more of the screen. A clear “Full report” button takes you to the market’s page, and a Close control returns you to the map. The six-month outlook now names the month it is measured from, and hovering over a headline stat explains what it means.
Market pulse
The typical US metro rent sits at $1,547 as of August 2026, up +3.6% ▲ year over year across the metros we track consistently over that period. Summer growth held steady instead of cooling, and the national call we made a month ago landed almost exactly on target.
Looking ahead, our proprietary ML models expect 605 of 607 forecast metros ▲ to be more expensive twelve months from now, by +4.1% ▲ on average. That is a broad, steady climb, not a handful of hot spots pulling the average up. A Pro subscription shows which markets lead, how wide the range is in each, and the full month-by-month path, and it now starts with a 30-day free trial.
Explore the interactive forecast at rentlens.co →