Rent Is Now Squeezing the Middle Class, Too, New Survey Finds

The share of middle-income American renters who could not pay their rent in full or on time rose sharply last year, according to a brief published Wednesday by the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan Washington research organization. Among renters ages 18 to 64 earning between roughly the federal poverty level and four times that amount, 21.6 percent reported missing or being late on a rent payment at some point in 2025, up from 14.3 percent the year before.

The finding comes from the Urban Institute's Well-Being and Basic Needs Survey, an annual, nationally representative poll of more than 10,000 working-age adults conducted each December. Across all working-age renters, regardless of income, 20 percent reported a missed or late rent payment in 2025, the highest rate recorded since the survey began tracking the question and up from 16.5 percent in 2024.

Lower-income renters remained the most likely to fall behind, at 27.8 percent, but the size of the jump among middle-income households was what stood out to the report's authors. "This increase among middle-income renters is a big and important shift that reflects overall challenges with affordability in the country," said Samantha Batko, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and one of the brief's four co-authors.

The strain was not confined to rent. Just over 20 percent of working-age renters also said they were unable to pay their full gas, oil or electric bill at some point in 2025. Homeowners, by contrast, have reported stable mortgage-payment ability for roughly seven consecutive years, the researchers found, suggesting renters are absorbing a disproportionate share of recent cost pressure.

The survey results echo, and extend, a longer-running trend documented in federal data. A Census Bureau analysis of the American Community Survey found that nearly half of the nation's roughly 42.5 million renter households — about 21 million — spent more than 30 percent of their income on housing in 2023, the threshold the bureau uses to define a household as "cost burdened." A separate Congressional Research Service brief prepared for lawmakers found cost burden rates climbing further among renters in 2024, even as burden rates for homeowners held roughly flat.

Researchers point to several likely drivers behind the newest numbers: rents that rose faster than incomes across much of the country during the past several years, elevated costs for groceries and utilities, and thinner savings cushions left over from the pandemic-era stimulus period. The Urban Institute brief does not attribute the shift to any single cause, noting instead that the pattern held across regions and was not limited to renters in high-cost metro areas.

• 20.0% of all working-age renters missed or were late on rent in 2025, versus 16.5% in 2024
• 21.6% of middle-income renters missed or were late on rent in 2025, versus 14.3% in 2024
• 27.8% of lower-income renters missed or were late on rent in 2025
• 20.7% of working-age renters could not fully pay heating or electric bills in 2025

The Urban Institute's survey is not a one-time snapshot; it has tracked renter and homeowner payment behavior annually since 2019, giving researchers a consistent baseline for comparison. That history is part of why Batko and her co-authors, Michael Karpman, Grace Koch and Kathryn Reynolds, describe the middle-income shift as notable rather than noise: the jump of more than seven percentage points in a single year is the largest year-over-year change the survey has recorded for that income group.

The findings arrive as housing costs remain one of the most persistent sources of financial strain cited in consumer surveys nationally, alongside food and utility prices. Whether the trend continues into 2026 will depend in part on rent growth, which has cooled somewhat in many metro markets over the past year even as affordability, measured against income, has not meaningfully improved for renters already stretched thin.