Record Number of Households Pay More than Half of Income on Rent

The Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University recently released its annual State of the Nation’s Housing Report. The latest report reveals that 11.4 million households paid more than half their incomes for housing in 2014. This is the first time the United States has seen so many residents paying such a large portion of their income on rent. The number of cost-burdened renters, who pay more than 30 percent of their income on housing, reached 21.3 million.

The report finds that rent burdens are increasingly common among moderate-income households, especially in the nation’s 10 highest-cost housing markets, where three-quarters of renters earning $30,000–$45,000 and half of those earning $45,000–$75,000 paid at least 30 percent of their incomes for housing in 2014.