Boston Data Desk · Updated Monthly

Boston Rental
Market Data

Name: Boston Rental Market Data — Spot Easy
Creator: Spot Easy
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Real rent numbers from verified, licensed real estate agents — not estimates, not national averages. Published monthly, free for anyone to use.

Median asking rent — Greater Boston

Studio

$2,295

↓ $5 vs. last month

1 BR

$2,750

no change

2 BR

$3,395

↑ $5 vs. last month

3 BR

$3,900

↓ $100 vs. last month

Boston rent doesn't make sense until you see the actual numbers. Each month we publish asking prices from licensed agents' active listings — Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, Brookline, and the surrounding cities. Not national estimates.

This Month's Rent Report

Live · Monthly

Boston Rent Index

Allston, Jamaica Plain, South End — the price gap between them is bigger than most people expect. Each month we publish a neighborhood-by-neighborhood breakdown with sample sizes, so you can see exactly how much data is behind each number.

Published on the 1st of each month

Boston Rent & Housing Reports

Live · Updated Monthly

01

Boston Rent Index

What does a 1-bedroom go for in Allston this week? A studio in Fenway? Median asking rents for every major Boston neighborhood, plus building-type and triple-decker breakdowns.

$3,395 2BR median · Greater Boston +$5 vs. last month
02

Sept 1 Countdown

Most Boston leases start September 1. Nowhere else in the country works this way. We track how many Sept 1 units are listed right now and what they're asking.

29 days until Sept 1 3,325 units already listed
03

Boston Broker-Fee Index

What share of Boston listings charge no broker fee — and which neighborhoods lead? Updated monthly from verified active listings by Spot Easy.

79.4% of stated-fee listings have no broker fee · Greater Boston updated monthly

Data Desk

For Journalists & Researchers

Need data for a story?

We publish monthly rental market data sourced directly from our production database — active listings from verified, licensed agents across Greater Boston. All methodology is public.

Covering Boston rent trends? Ask us — we can often pull specific data for your story.

Joel Mundele, CEO — [email protected]

Spot Easy in the Press

Boston Globe

Boston's brutal rental market: the final insult has arrived — bidding wars

June 11, 2023
Boston.com

Boston's rental market and bidding wars

June 12, 2023

How Spot Easy Collects This Data

How we collect this data +

Source: All data is pulled from Spot Easy's live listings database — active rental listings posted by verified, licensed real estate agents. MLS (MlsPin) listings are included.

Geography: Greater Boston — Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, Somerville, Medford, Newton, Everett, Quincy, Watertown, and Malden.

Listings counted: Every listing that was on the market at any point during the reported month, measured from its on-market and off-market timestamps — not a single-day snapshot. Drafts, admin-removed listings, and asking rents below $500 or above $20,000 are excluded. A listing that left the market without a recorded off-market date is excluded rather than estimated, so the count runs conservative.

Deduplication: One listing per unique address + unit + bedroom count, keeping the most recently created record.

Bedroom buckets: Studio / 1 BR / 2 BR / 3 BR / 4+ BR.

Minimum sample size: Cells with fewer than 20 listings are suppressed and shown as —.

Metrics: Median asking rent, 25th and 75th percentile, month-over-month and year-over-year change.

Month-over-month: same neighborhood × bedroom cell from the previous month's snapshot.
Year-over-year: same cell from 12 months prior.

Updated on the 1st of each month. Questions? [email protected]