How we count rents

Where the listings come from.

• Apartment listings on Apartments.com (the base rent) and Zillow (the listed rent) in Washington state and 11 metro areas elsewhere (each one is on the rent data page), collected every two weeks.
• A listing counts for 45 days after it was last seen. Every page says the days its listings were actually collected, never the start of the window. The Washington pages and /rent cover the days listings were collected for the current build; a metro's page covers its own collection days; and each monthly report keeps the days of the build it was written from, so the Seattle report's days (listings from Aug 16, 2026 to Sep 28, 2026) are older than the live pages' and do not change.
• Each apartment counts once. A unit listed on both sites, or seen in several weeks, is one row: the building plus its unit number, and the latest sighting wins. A listing with no unit number stays its own row.
• Market-rate apartments only. Whole houses, furnished units, single rooms let on their own (a “3 bedroom” under 360 sq ft, or under 300 sq ft for any home of 2+ bedrooms: rooms A, B and C of one house), income-restricted units whose listing says so (MFTE and other affordable-housing programs) and rents we found while researching a renter's own lease are left out, and so is any listing without a bedroom count or with a base rent outside $300 to $15,000 a month.

When a number is shown, and when a place gets a page.

• Every figure comes from 2 or more buildings, and no building is ever named.
• A bedroom count needs 10 or more listings; with fewer, the page says “not enough listings”.
• A Seattle neighborhood or district gets a page with 80+ listed apartments in 5+ buildings. Neighborhoods and districts are the City of Seattle's Neighborhood Map Atlas boundaries: Broadway, for example, is one small neighborhood inside the Capitol Hill district, and each has its own page and sample.
• Beyond Seattle and Tacoma, the cities with a page are the top 20 in Washington by listed apartments, among cities with 20 or more buildings listing (a town whose whole sample is a few complexes is left out).
• Outside Washington, a metro area's pages are its principal cities, the ones its Census metro area is named for. Each publishes once its 1 bedroom median rests on 30+ listings, and only when those listings are spread out: no ZIP code holds more than 50% of them and no building more than 25%, and the metro's first city spans 10+ ZIP codes. Otherwise its page says it is on hold and shows no figure.
• A city or district page is published only when its 1 bedroom median rests on 30+ listings, and when it says something its parent does not: a 1 bedroom median at least $50 from the state's or Seattle's, or fewer than 80% of its listings. A page that does not qualify waits for a later build.

What each figure means.

Median asking rent

Half of the listings ask more, half ask less. The rent map shows averages over listing rows, which run a little higher; the two are not mixed.

The price table

Listed 1 bedrooms counted in $250 steps. The cheapest and dearest listings are grouped into “under” and “and up” rows, and a step with listings from only one building joins the step next to it.

Rent per square foot

The median of each listed 1 bedroom's rent divided by its size, from units of 300 sq ft or more.

The same-plan gap

Where a building lists two or more units of the identical floor plan (same plan name, bedrooms, bathrooms and square feet), the gap is the highest asking rent minus the lowest. Shown with 20+ plans behind it. Floor, view and move-in date explain some of it.

Listed share

Of each building with 50+ apartments built by 2024, the share of its apartments listed in the window. It is not a vacancy rate: a listing can be a unit that comes free in a few weeks.

Since the last build

The 1 bedroom median against the previous build, about two weeks earlier. Two snapshots are not a trend.

How this compares with other published Seattle numbers.

Different sources measure different things, so their Seattle numbers differ. Ours is a median of current asking rents on listed apartments, which leans toward the buildings that list the most units at once.

Their figures as they published them, read on Sep 30, 2026. Zillow's 1 bedroom page could not be read, so its all-home index is shown instead.

What these numbers are not.

• Not signed leases: what someone pays after a renewal or a negotiation can be lower or higher.
• Not net of move-in specials: a “6 weeks free” offer is not taken off.
• Not a forecast, and not advice about any one apartment. Compare your own rent with your own neighborhood's number, and the quick check does that with the listings nearest you.