A one-bedroom renter moving from Toledo, Ohio to San Francisco would need to more than quadruple their housing budget just to keep a similar-sized apartment. Toledo’s overall median rent sits at $916 a month as of August 2026, the lowest of the 100 largest U.S. cities tracked by Apartment List. San Francisco’s median rent is $3,844, the highest in that same ranking, a gap of nearly $2,930 a month between the two ends of the list.
The Cheapest and Most Expensive Ends of the Ranking
Toledo’s $916 median sits alongside four other Midwest and Sun Belt cities rounding out the most affordable end of Apartment List’s August 2026 national rent report: Wichita, Kansas at $1,039; Cleveland, Ohio at $1,045; Tucson, Arizona at $1,050; and Detroit, Michigan at $1,054. All five affordable cities sit within about $140 of each other, clustered well below the $1,390 national median rent Apartment List reported for the same month.
San Francisco’s $3,844 median is not close to the rest of the expensive end of Apartment List’s ranking, either. San Jose, California is second at $3,132, Irvine at $3,092, Fremont at $2,968, and Arlington, Virginia rounds out the top five at $2,612. San Francisco runs more than $700 above the next city on the list, a wider gap at the top than the entire spread among the five cheapest cities combined.
Carried across a full year, the difference between the two cities is stark: renting at Toledo’s median costs roughly $10,992 annually, while renting at San Francisco’s median costs roughly $46,128, a difference of about $35,000 a year for what Apartment List defines as the same category of modest rental housing in each market.
Why San Francisco Is Pulling Away From Every Other City
San Francisco’s rent level is not just the highest in the country right now; it is also rising the fastest. Rents in the city climbed 26 percent over the twelve months ending in August 2026, by far the sharpest increase Apartment List measured anywhere in its San Francisco rent report. Apartment List’s research team ties that surge to a wave of newly created, high-paying technology jobs tied to the AI industry, which has fueled what the company’s own research has called a renewed housing frenzy in the Bay Area. Nearby San Jose is a distant second nationally for rent growth, up 7.9 percent over the same period, reinforcing that this is a story centered on the Bay Area rather than a broader statewide trend. Nationally, the median rent is still down 3.6 percent from its mid-2022 peak, which makes San Francisco’s reversal look even sharper by comparison: while most of the country has spent three years drifting down from that peak, Bay Area rents are now climbing back toward it.
Meanwhile, a Cluster of Sun Belt Cities Is Still Getting Cheaper
While the Bay Area pulls away at the top, several large Sun Belt metro areas are still seeing rents fall. Apartment List’s San Antonio rent report shows the metro logging the nation’s sharpest year-over-year decline among large markets, down 5.1 percent, a trend the company links to a construction boom that added apartment supply faster than demand could absorb it. Austin, once the epicenter of that same construction wave, has cooled to a milder 2.9 percent annual decline as the new supply gets absorbed. Denver, Phoenix, Tampa and Charlotte round out the other large metro areas Apartment List identifies as still working through that same glut of new units, though the company notes all of them appear to have bottomed out and are no longer falling as fast as they were a year ago. Toledo does not show up on either the fastest-growing or fastest-falling lists; its low rent reflects a market that has simply stayed cheap and comparatively stable rather than one experiencing a sharp swing in either direction.
What the National Median Obscures
The $1,390 national median rent Apartment List reported for August, up just 0.1 percent from July, describes a market that looks close to flat in the aggregate. The city-by-city numbers show that stability is an average of genuinely different local conditions: a shrinking pool of Sun Belt metro areas still absorbing a supply boom, a Bay Area market re-accelerating on tech hiring, and a wide band of Midwest cities like Toledo, Wichita, Cleveland, Detroit and Tucson that never saw the kind of price swings the coasts did in either direction. The national multifamily vacancy rate, which fell to 7.1 percent in August according to Apartment List’s vacancy index, is easing for the first time since late 2021, but that easing is not happening at the same pace in every city on this list. Units nationally are also taking longer to fill: the typical apartment now spends 32 days on the market before it is leased, a sign that even as prices firm up, landlords in most cities are still competing hard to fill vacancies rather than pushing rents higher…