Manhattan Rents Crack $5K Median in July, a New Record
New York City rents have spent the last 18 months setting new records.
July added to that streak. Median rent for a new, brokered, market-rate lease in Manhattan reached $5,000, the highest on record, last month, according to appraiser Jonathan Miller’s report for The Real Deal. Manhattan’s average rent, at $6,306, and average rent per square foot at more than $101, also reached new highs.
As usual, high demand is chasing low supply. Elevated mortgage rates have put tremendous pressure on rents, Miller said, as would-be purchasers stayed put in rental units. New York policy decisions mean next month is likely to be more of the same.
“The growth rate of the median is double the rate of inflation,” Miller said. “The prognosis for a continuation of this trend is high.”
Manhattan median rents began their record-setting streak in February 2025, powered by faltering supply. In the past year and a half, inventory has been nearly halved. Some of that is due to interest rates rising in 2022, constricting the pipeline of newly built rentals.
“We don’t have a lot of new product coming into the market,” Miller said.
Median rent in Brooklyn for July reached $4,500 — not a record, but a nearly 17 percent increase year over year.
Critics have claimed the specifics of New York’s newest tax abatement program for rentals, called 485x, are also limiting supply. The program sets a construction wage floor for large projects, which developers complain makes big, dense developments too expensive to build.
Other policies, including the FARE Act and a rent freeze for rent-stabilized apartments, may also place some additional pressure on rents. The FARE Act, requiring brokers to collect payment from the party that hired them went into effect in June 2025, shifting the burden of payment from tenants to landlords who may charge higher rents to offset that expense over the course of a lease.
A rent freeze in rent-stabilized apartments, championed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, may similarly push market-rate rents higher, as costs continue to swell and landlords hope to make up the difference where they can.
“Not everybody in the open market world is fabulously wealthy,” Miller said. “I’m hoping that in the near term, there’s some awareness from the administration of how serious affordability challenges are to New Yorkers that don’t have the benefit of a rent freeze.”
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