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Rent Affordability Calculator

By the AverageRentCost Editorial Team · Last updated: October 2026

How much rent can your income carry? The standard yardstick used by housing agencies is the 30% rule: gross rent — lease rent plus utilities — should take no more than 30% of gross income. This calculator applies that rule to your income and checks the result against HUD's FY2027 Fair Market Rents for the counties we cover in depth, so you can see which unit sizes sit within budget in each market, and what income a 2-bedroom at the FMR actually takes.

How the 30% rule works

The 30% standard dates to U.S. housing policy of the early 1980s and is still the line HUD uses to define a cost-burdened household. The math is simple: multiply your gross annual income by 0.30 and divide by twelve to get your monthly rent budget. A household earning $60,000, for example, has a budget of $1,500 a month. The rule is a guide, not a law of nature — it ignores debts, childcare, commuting costs, and the fact that in expensive markets many households spend more and compensate elsewhere — but it is the benchmark landlords, lenders, and voucher programs all recognize, which makes it the right common language for comparing counties.

A worked example: Los Angeles County

Take Los Angeles County, California, where the FY2027 2-bedroom FMR is $2,964. At the 30% rule that rent implies an income of $118,560 a year — about $57 an hour full-time. A household earning $70,000 has a 30% budget of $1,750 a month: in Los Angeles that covers an efficiency at the FMR ($2,151) with room to spare, but leaves a 2-bedroom $1,214 over budget — exactly the trade-off the calculator above lays out county by county. The full Los Angeles figures are on the Los Angeles County rent page.

Where the rents in this calculator come from

Every rent figure here is a published HUD Fair Market Rent for fiscal year 2027 — the gross-rent benchmark set for the Housing Choice Voucher program — not a scrape of current listings. That makes the results stable and comparable: the same measure, the same fiscal year, every county. FMRs cover utilities, so if a lease charges utilities separately, treat the FMR as the combined ceiling. For the complete county tables for a whole state, start from the state index; for background on the method, see how we source and check our numbers.

How to read these figures: Fair Market Rents (FMRs) are gross-rent benchmarks published by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for the Housing Choice Voucher program. They include utilities and are set near the 40th percentile of rents paid by recent movers — they are not advertised asking rents, and the rent on a specific home can be higher or lower. Census ACS medians describe what surveyed renter households reported paying. See our disclaimer for details.

Sources: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Fair Market Rents FY2027 (county-level data file, effective October 1, 2026), huduser.gov; U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2024 1-year estimates, table B25031 (median gross rent), census.gov. Last verified: October 2026.