About the Data

Rent, home value, and housing-tenure figures come from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year estimates. Fair Market Rent figures come from HUD and represent the official benchmark used to set housing voucher payment standards, not actual asking rents on the open market.

"Rent as share of income"

We compute this as (median gross rent × 12) ÷ median household income for the same geography. It is a rough affordability signal, not a household-level statistic — it compares two area-wide medians, not what any one renter actually pays relative to what they actually earn.

Margin of error

ACS is a sample survey. For home value and rent, we display the margin of error directly as "± amount" where available.

Update schedule

Census ACS releases a new 5-year dataset once a year; HUD publishes Fair Market Rents annually.