Pay day seriously pales compared to rent day — and it’s only getting worse.
A new report has found that, since 2019, rent has gone up on average 1.5 times faster than wages in 44 out of the nation’s 50 largest metros, and nowhere more so than in New York City.
According to an analysis by StreetEasy of data from Zillow, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and its own site, the Big Apple has seen the greatest gap in rent growth relative to wage growth in recent years.
Specifically, the city watched wages go up 1.2% between 2022 and 2023, while rents went up 8.6%, a 7.4 percentage point difference.
That’s far more than any of the other top 10 wage-rent growth gap cities. Boston, which came in second place, had a 6.8 point difference (with its wages going down by 1% and its rents going up by 5.8%) and Cincinnati, which came in third, had a 6.4 point difference (wages went up .9% while rents went up 7.3%).
The other ranking cities all had percentage point differences of 5.6 or lower.
Interestingly, these cities are also mostly all along the East Coast, with Memphis, Tennessee the farthest west of any.
However, when looking back slightly farther, to 2019, the greatest gaps appear to have occurred more in the South and Midwest.
The metro areas that saw the most significant wage-rent gaps between 2019 and 2023 — with a focus on pre-pandemic times — included Atlanta, Phoenix, and Kansas City, Missouri.
Taking the gold for biggest point difference during those years was Tampa, Florida with a 34.7 point difference, wages having gone up 15.3% and rent by 50% over the period.
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