Renters under 25 are now more likely to be cost-burdened than any other age group in the country, including retirees. Sixty percent of renter households headed by someone under 25 spent more than 30 percent of their income on rent in 2024, according to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies’ America’s Rental Housing 2026 report, edging out the 58 percent rate among renters 65 and older. Nationally, the numbers are nearly as stark: the U.S. Census Bureau found that 49.7 percent of the country’s 42.5 million renter households, roughly 21 million homes, paid more than 30 percent of income toward housing in 2023, with the typical renter now handing over a median 31 percent of earnings just to keep a roof overhead.
A worse deal than the generation before
The youngest renters have historically carried a heavier load than their older peers, but the gap has widened. Back in 2000, the median rent-to-income ratio for renter households headed by someone under 25 sat at 30.8 percent, according to a Census 2000 brief on renter housing costs. A median sitting right at the 30 percent line meant roughly half of that group, mostly the tail end of Gen X and the oldest Millennials, were paying above the affordability threshold and half below it. Today’s equivalent isn’t a coin flip. It’s 60 percent of under-25 renters over that same line, a clear majority rather than a rough split.
The same 2000 Census brief put the national median rent burden for all renters at 25.5 percent that year, down slightly from 26.4 percent in 1990. By 2023, that national median had climbed to 31 percent, per the Census Bureau’s most recent American Community Survey figures. Rent has outpaced income growth for years, and young renters, who tend to earn less early in their careers and have the least savings to fall back on, have absorbed more of that gap than anyone else.
The Harvard report also noted that severe burdens, renters spending more than half their income on housing, have climbed alongside the broader trend, with 12.1 million households now in that category nationwide. Housing economists at JCHS have pointed to a persistent shortfall of units affordable to lower earners as new construction skews toward higher rents, leaving little relief in the pipeline for renters entering the market in their early twenties.
For a 23-year-old signing a first lease this year, the math is simply different than it was for a 23-year-old doing the same thing a generation ago. Wages for entry-level jobs haven’t kept pace with rents in most metro areas, and the youngest renters are the ones with the least room in their budgets to absorb the difference. Whether that gap narrows depends largely on whether more affordable units get built in the coming years, something both the Census data and the JCHS report suggest hasn’t happened yet.
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