PiggyRent October 2026 Seattle rent report: method and limits
https://piggyrent.com/rent/reports/seattle-2026-10

What this is
- Asking rents on apartments listed for rent, not what anyone signed or pays. Move-in specials are not taken off.
- Listings on Apartments.com (base rent) and Zillow (listed rent) in Washington, listings from Aug 16, 2026 to Sep 28, 2026 (a 45-day window), built Sep 30, 2026.
- Each apartment counts once: a unit listed on both sites, or seen in several weeks, is one row (the building plus its unit number; the latest sighting wins).
- Market-rate apartments only. Left out: whole houses, furnished units, income-restricted units whose listing says so (MFTE and other affordable-housing programs; 357 Seattle listings this month), rents found while researching a renter's own lease, listings without a bedroom count, and base rents outside the rent map's band.

Figures
- Median asking rent by bedroom count. Every figure comes from 2 or more buildings and 10 or more listings; no building is named.
- Seattle neighborhoods are the City of Seattle's Neighborhood Map Atlas small neighborhoods; districts are its large ones. "Seattle" overall is every listing with a Seattle address, which includes a few just outside the city limits.
- Same-plan spread: where one building lists 2 or more units of the identical floor plan (same plan name, bedrooms, bathrooms and square feet), the spread is the highest asking rent minus the lowest. 451 of 994 Seattle floor-plan groups span at least $100 (45%); 218 span $200 or more; the median spread is $78. 991 of the 994 groups were all seen on the same day, so the spread is not a price change over time.
- Floor, view, finishes and move-in date explain some of any spread. It shows that a building's first price is not its only price; it does not measure what anyone saved or overpaid.
- Listed share: of each building with 50+ apartments built by 2024, the share of its apartments listed in the window. Not a vacancy rate.

Limits
- Listings lean toward large professionally managed buildings, which list many units at once; small landlords and word-of-mouth rentals are under-represented.
- Two weekly builds share most of their listings, so a week-to-week difference is not a trend. This is the first report; a comparison starts with the report built from the next refresh (the rent data is updated every two weeks).
- An income-restricted unit whose listing does not say so cannot be told apart and stays in.

Files
- seattle-neighborhoods.csv, wa-cities.csv: median asking rent and listing count by bedroom count. An empty cell has too few listings to show.
- same-plan-spread.csv: floor-plan groups by spread band.
- The PNG charts carry their own n and dates. Credit: "PiggyRent (piggyrent.com)".

Questions: hello@piggyrent.com (The PiggyRent team). We'll run any cut of the data we have.