Rental Vacancy & Days-on-Market Benchmarks (2026)
US rental vacancy is 7.3% (Census, Q2 2026) and units take 34 days to lease. October 2026 benchmarks by state, rents, concessions and vacancy cost.
By Yas Rajah
· 9 min read
Contents
The US rental vacancy rate is 7.3% (Census Bureau, second quarter 2026), and the typical unit took 34 days to lease in September 2026 (Apartment List). Vacancy has climbed from a 5.6% low in late 2021 and is now flattening, but leasing has slowed: 34 days is the longest September reading Apartment List has recorded since it began tracking in 2019. The Census figure stays the latest official one until the third-quarter release on 28 October 2026.
What’s changed (October 2026): the market has turned a corner on price and occupancy but not on speed. RealPage reports apartment rents up 0.9% year over year in the third quarter, “the first sign of positive annual rent growth since 2nd quarter 2025”, with occupancy steady at 95.4%. Apartment List’s vacancy index has eased from a 7.3% peak in February to 7.0% in September. Yet units are sitting longer, not shorter.
Here’s the take this data supports: in a soft market, days-on-market is the only lever you fully control, so marketing speed, not luck, decides whether your unit is the one that leases. The searches around this topic are full of investor “rules” (the 2% rule, the 7% rule, the 50% rule), but those are about buying deals, not filling them. Below are the operational benchmarks for 2026, each with the period it covers.
US rental vacancy rate: the trend
Vacancy bottomed during the 2021 rental frenzy and has drifted up about 1.7 points since. The quarterly series (Census HVS, Table 1):
| Quarter | US rental vacancy |
|---|---|
| Q4 2021 | 5.6% (recent low) |
| Q4 2022 | 5.8% |
| Q4 2023 | 6.6% |
| Q4 2024 | 6.9% |
| Q4 2025 | 7.2% |
| Q1 2026 | 7.3% |
| Q2 2026 | 7.3% (latest; Q3 due 28 October 2026) |
Census says Q2 2026 is “not statistically different” from a year earlier (7.0%) and “virtually the same” as Q1, so read this as a steady climb to a plateau rather than a sudden jump. The supply side explains the plateau: developers completed about 318,000 apartments in the year to Q3 2026, “roughly 46% below the late 2024 peak” (RealPage, October 2026).
Two private measures put vacancy lower than Census because they count only professionally managed apartments, while Census counts all rental housing:
| Source | Measure | Latest reading | Period |
|---|---|---|---|
| Census HVS | All rental housing, vacancy | 7.3% | Q2 2026 |
| Apartment List | Stabilized multifamily, vacancy | 7.0% (peak 7.3% in Feb 2026) | September 2026 |
| RealPage | Conventional apartments, occupancy | 95.4% (so 4.6% vacant) | Q3 2026 |
What should you focus on to lease faster in 2026?
4 questions, 15 seconds. Find your priority.
Question 1 of 4
What's your biggest challenge right now?
Question 2 of 4
How many days does your typical vacancy take to lease?
Question 3 of 4
Where are your properties?
Question 4 of 4
Do you currently syndicate to multiple listing portals?
Your answer
Prioritize response speed
The 34-day national average (Apartment List, September 2026) is your benchmark, and speed is the lever you control. In the classic lead-response study, leads contacted within 5 minutes were 21× more likely to qualify than leads contacted after 30. Get your unit in front of renters everywhere, then answer inquiries immediately. That's how you beat the market while vacancy sits at 7.3%.
Learn tactics to lease fasterYour answer
Expand your listing visibility
Your unit needs to be everywhere renters search. Syndicate to the major rental portals to reach the whole market at once. With 39.2% of Zillow rentals offering a concession (August 2026), a well-marketed unit that leases fast is worth more than a slightly higher price that sits, and visibility is how you get there first.
Set up rental listing syndicationYour answer
Check your rent against the market
In soft markets like the Sun Belt (Texas at 13.3% vacancy), price matters most. ShowMojo found units priced wrong at launch sat 51 to 58 days, against 24 to 29 for units priced right. Zillow's typical rent is $1,948, up 2.5% a year, and about 4 in 10 listings offer a concession. If your unit is taking over 40 days, check your rent against comps first.
Explore rental marketing strategiesGet new posts on rental market data
New posts on vacancy, days on market and rents, with the source and period for every number.
No spam, unsubscribe anytime.
Average days on market
The best national anchor is 34 days from listing to lease for units leased in September 2026 (Apartment List’s list-to-lease index), up from 32 in August. Apartment List calls it “the longest that we’ve seen in any September going back to 2019”, with January 2026’s 41 days the all-time record. Other datasets measure different things, so they land on different numbers:
| Source | What it measures | Days | Period |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apartment List | Listed to leased, its marketplace | 34 | September 2026 |
| ShowMojo | Average days on market, 1.7M+ leased units | 32.76 | Q2 2026 |
| RentCafe (Yardi data) | Average vacant days, buildings of 50+ units | 42 (40 a year earlier) | April–June 2026 |
| Hemlane | Median days on market, its listings | 24 | August 2026 |
There’s no clean, primary national split by property type, so anyone quoting precise days-on-market “by unit type” is usually estimating. Treat about a month as the market midpoint: lease meaningfully faster and you’re beating the market; drift past it and you’re paying for the market’s softness. Fall makes it harder, because Apartment List says time on market “has now begun to trend up” into the slow season.
Vacancy by region: Sun Belt soft, coasts tight
The regional split is the clearest story in the data, and it’s stable at the state level (Census HVS by state, Q2 2026):
- Highest vacancy (softest): Texas 13.3%, South Carolina 12.3%, Louisiana 12.1%, Iowa 10.4%, Mississippi 9.8%. These are mostly the Sun Belt oversupply markets, where the rent cuts are concentrated too.
- Lowest vacancy (tightest): Vermont 3.9%, Washington 4.0%, Alaska 4.3%, California 4.4%, Maine 4.4%, New Hampshire 4.4%. That’s the Pacific Northwest, the Northeast and California.
The private data agrees and adds the Midwest to the tight side. RealPage says the South is “the only U.S. region with annual rent cuts and the only region with occupancy below 95%”, while the Midwest led all regions for rent growth (+2%) in Q3 2026. RentCafe’s peak-season ranking put Chicago ahead of Miami as the most competitive large rental market in the country.
A caveat on metro-level figures: Census’s quarterly numbers for individual metros carry large margins of error and swing wildly quarter to quarter, so lean on state-level data for hard claims. The Sun Belt versus coasts pattern holds up in every source above.
Rent growth and concessions
The market is soft but not falling apart, and landlords are competing on incentives, not just price:
- Zillow’s observed rent index is $1,948, up 2.5% year over year (Zillow, August 2026), and 39.2% of rentals on Zillow offered a concession, down 0.6 points on July but up 2.5 points on a year earlier.
- Apartment List’s median is $1,388, down 0.4% year over year (September 2026). Its annual figure has been “trending up for five straight months” since bottoming at −1.6% in April.
- RealPage’s average effective apartment rent is $1,915, up 0.9% (Q3 2026), with 22.7% of apartments offering a concession.
The three differ because they measure differently. Zillow’s is a repeat-rent asking index across all rentals; Apartment List’s is the median of its marketplace listings; RealPage’s is effective rent (after concessions) in professionally managed buildings. They agree on direction: soft, tightening slowly, with concessions still common.
The practical read: about 4 in 10 Zillow listings carry a concession, so a well-marketed unit that leases fast is worth more than a slightly higher asking price that sits.
What a vacancy actually costs
Vacancy is pure loss. There’s no discount, just days. The daily math, using current rents:
- At Zillow’s $1,948/month (August 2026), a vacant unit loses about $64 a day ($1,948 × 12 ÷ 365, the same 365-day rate a lease can use to prorate rent).
- Across the 34-day national time-on-market, that’s roughly $2,180 in lost rent on a single vacancy, before any turnover spend (make-ready, marketing, screening).
Turnover costs (paint, cleaning, listing, screening) vary too much by market to state as a single figure, so the defensible number is the lost-rent line above. Model your own with the calculator below.
The lever you control: speed to lease
You can’t move the vacancy rate. You can move your price, how fast you respond and how widely you market. Price comes first: in ShowMojo’s Q2 2026 data, units priced wrong at launch sat 51 to 58 days, against 24 to 29 for units priced right.
Speed of reply comes next. In the classic Lead Response Management study, the odds of qualifying a lead were 21× higher when contacted within 5 minutes versus 30 (Oldroyd, McElheran & Elkington, HBR, 2011). That study measured general sales leads, not rentals, so treat it as a principle rather than a rental measurement.
The principle holds: a renter inquiry answered in minutes, on a listing that’s already everywhere renters look, is how you lease in under 34 days instead of over it. Get the unit in front of the whole market fast (syndicate it to the major rental portals) and answer inquiries immediately. In a 7.3%-vacancy market, that’s the difference between the benchmark and beating it. (See the tactics in how to lease a vacancy faster and the deeper dive in how long it takes to rent out a property.)
FAQ
What is a good rental vacancy rate? Nationally, rental vacancy is 7.3% (Census, Q2 2026), so anything meaningfully below your state’s rate is healthy. State rates ran from 3.9% (Vermont) to 13.3% (Texas) in Q2 2026, so a “good” rate is relative to your local market, not the national average. For an individual landlord, the operational goal is a low physical vacancy: re-leasing within the national 34-day time-on-market or faster.
How long should it take to rent out a property? About 34 days was the national average from listing to lease in September 2026 (Apartment List). Leasing within three to four weeks puts you at or ahead of the market. Consistently taking longer than five weeks points to a pricing or marketing problem: ShowMojo found mispriced units sit about twice as long as correctly priced ones.
Is the rental market softening in 2026? It softened into early 2026 and is now stabilizing. Census vacancy has held at 7.3% for two quarters, Apartment List’s vacancy index has fallen from 7.3% in February to 7.0% in September, and RealPage reports the first annual apartment rent growth (+0.9%) since mid-2025. Units are still taking longer to lease, though: 34 days in September 2026.
Which markets have the highest and lowest vacancy? By state in Q2 2026, the Sun Belt is softest: Texas (13.3%), South Carolina (12.3%) and Louisiana (12.1%) lead, driven by heavy apartment construction. The tightest markets are in the Pacific Northwest, Northeast and California: Vermont (3.9%), Washington (4.0%) and California (4.4%). Metro-level figures swing sharply quarter to quarter, so state data is the more reliable guide.
When is the next Census rental vacancy release? The third-quarter 2026 Housing Vacancies and Homeownership release is scheduled for 28 October 2026, according to the Census Bureau’s Q2 press release.
Free syndication & listing marketing
List Once. Syndicate and Market your listings. Everywhere.
Reallyo sends your rental to Zillow, Apartments.com and the rest of its 19-site rental network, then turns it into a listing page, a video, social posts and flyers. Free for one active listing, no card.
Sources
Checked 15 October 2026.
- Rental vacancy rate, by state, and next release date: U.S. Census Bureau, Housing Vacancies and Homeownership (HVS), Q2 2026 (released 28 July 2026); quarterly series; by state; press release PDF.
- Time on market, vacancy index, median rent: Apartment List national rent report (October 2026 report, September data).
- Occupancy, effective rent, concessions, completions: RealPage 3Q26 U.S. Apartment Update (6 October 2026).
- Rent index and concessions: Zillow August 2026 Rent Report (16 September 2026).
- Days on market and pricing: ShowMojo Q2 2026 Data Talk; RentCafe peak-season 2026 rankings (Yardi data, April–June 2026); Hemlane August 2026 report.
- Speed-to-lead: Oldroyd, McElheran & Elkington, HBR (2011).
