Adding a single bedroom to a home can mean a monthly payment jump of nearly $21,000 in one Florida city, according to a new national analysis, while homeowners in a small Illinois city might barely notice a difference of $16. The gap illustrates just how unevenly America’s housing costs are distributed as families weigh whether to move up in bedroom count or stay put and renovate instead.
The findings come from a study by financial technology company Lower, which analyzed more than 1 million active single-family home listings across 255 U.S. cities with populations of at least 100,000, as reported by ABC 17 News. Lower captured its listings data on July 15, 2026, and calculated dollar and percentage premiums by comparing median list prices for two-, three-, four-, and five-bedroom homes in each market. The analysis required a minimum of 10 active listings in each bedroom tier to be included, and it ultimately produced full monthly payment estimates for 251 cities with complete property tax and homeowners insurance data.
Fort Lauderdale, Florida, posted the largest bedroom-upgrade premium in the entire study, with an estimated $20,991 monthly increase tied to adding a bedroom, per the same report. The city’s four-bedroom-to-five-bedroom purchase-price premium alone reached $3.1 million. That extreme jump lines up with Florida’s insurance climate broadly, where statewide homeowners premiums averaged $8,292 a year in 2025, an 18% increase over 2024 and the highest in the nation, according to Insurify.
Why Coastal Florida Costs So Much More
Fort Lauderdale’s broader housing market backs up the scale of the premium. As of August 2026, three-bedroom rental apartments in the city averaged $4,556 a month, and $1,500 a month wasn’t even enough to rent a studio, according to Apartments.com. Housing costs in Fort Lauderdale sit 76% above the national average by that same measure, a backdrop that helps explain why moving up even one bedroom tier there carries such an outsized cost compared to other metro areas…