People are increasingly struggling to pay rent

We’re almost at the start of a new month, and for many Americans, that means it’s time to pay rent. With rising costs across the economy, meeting those monthly payments is becoming increasingly difficult.

A new analysis from the Urban Institute finds that one in five working-age renters struggled to pay rent last year. They either didn’t pay in full or were late with a payment at some point in 2025.

For more, “Marketplace Morning Report” host Kimberly Adams spoke with Samantha Batko, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and one of the co-authors of the paper. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Kimberly Adams: What are some of your key findings about renting in this study?

Samantha Batko: What we're finding is that the number of renters who had problems paying rent increased between 2024 and 2025. And of particular interest is that while lower-income renters remain the renters who are the most likely to report these challenges, the share of renters that are middle-income reporting these challenges grew by the largest margin in that year.

Adams: How concerned should we be about that? Like, what does it tell us about the broader economy that those middle-income households are struggling more to keep up with rent payments?

Batko: I think that what that tells us is what we've been seeing through a lot of different economic indicators — that living in America is becoming less affordable.

When you think about rent payments for a household, families have a lot of competing expenses: they have rent; they have food; they have gas for their vehicles; they have healthcare; and then they have unexpected expenses — things like where there's a healthcare incident and they have a large bill, or they have to do a car repair. And every month, households that have trouble meeting that budget ledger are going to make choices about what they spend money on or don't spend money on.

And as things generally get more expensive, they will be able to afford less of those things in total, and they'll be making those more difficult decisions about occasionally making a late or partial rent payment in order to be able to afford food or medicine.

Adams: When that middle income segment is struggling, how does that trickle down and impact lower income households?

Batko: When middle-income renters struggle, they will seek more affordable housing, and so they will move into units that may be less desirable to them — maybe in like a different part of town or farther away from their work, but are more affordable. They will therefore displace lower-income renters who have less availability to move in the market because of their financial constraints. And so, lower-income renters will be pushed out of the rental market even more than they're already being pushed out.

Adams: I guess this all comes down to the housing shortage as well. I mean, do you see any differences depending on housing availability in these numbers?

Batko: The survey doesn't look specifically at housing availability. What we do know from other research is that across the country, there is not any state in which a minimum wage worker can afford a two-bedroom apartment. So, these challenges paying rent would almost be expected given that information.

We did see differences across regions. So, while the challenges of paying rent in the West and the Northeast had grown incrementally over a number of years, the largest increase that we saw from 2024 to 2025 was in the South, with a steep increase in problems reported by renters in paying rent.