Since 2017, Jersey City rents have risen 33 to 45 percent in nominal dollars, depending on the source. Consumer prices in the New York area rose 34 percent over the same stretch. So when we account for inflation, an apartment that turned over this year rents for just about the same as in 2017 (Apartment List) or up to 8 percent more (Zillow), according to rental sites.

Confusingly, the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey data seems to tell a different story. Its survey of renters across the city shows the median rent up about 19 percent after inflation over a five-year span. So what is going on? In this article, we explain how the gap between those answers is mostly due to Jersey City’s new buildings, which have added lots of new housing supply in the face of historic levels of demand for housing.

How much have Jersey City rents increased? In short, asking rents in Jersey City have risen about as fast as wages in the New York area and no faster than rents nationwide over the past decade. But there’s a much more nuanced story to tell when looking at these data sets together that has important policy implications.

The NY Times reports nearly zero rent growth, inflation-adjusted

In January 2026, the New York Times reported that Jersey City’s median asking rent was $2,650 in December 2025, up from $1,995 in 2017, citing StreetEasy [NYT]. That is a 33 percent increase in nominal terms. Over the same period, both wages and consumer prices in the New York area rose 30 percent. After inflation, the New York Times figure works out to about 2 percent over eight years, or 0.24 percent annually. It is a point that Stephen Jacob Smith, a housing researcher and former journalist, made at the time using a national inflation calculator.

StreetEasy’s figure is a raw median of whatever is listed that month. A Zillow spokesperson told us the numbers cover “all rentals listed on StreetEasy, regardless of size,” with no weighting. Any given month that is heavy with new luxury listings pushes it up; conversely, a month heavy with older, cheaper walk-ups pulls it down. To get a steadier read, we compared three sources that handle the problem of measuring rent growth differently.

Three measures, three answers

We took inspiration from a recent post by Jonathan Robinson comparing Los Angeles rents across sources, and we did the same for Jersey City, Hoboken, Newark, and New York City:

• Apartment List compares lease prices on the same apartments over time, then anchors the result to Census rent levels. It reflects new leases.
• Zillow’s Observed Rent Index (“ZORI”) also compares repeat listings of the same units, weighted to stand for the whole rental stock rather than just what is on the market.
• The Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (“ACS”) asks a sample of all renter households what they pay, including long-time tenants, rent-controlled apartments, and subsidized units. We use the five-year estimates, which pool five years of responses, and compare 2015-2019 with 2020-2024. Those periods don’t overlap, and their midpoints are 2017 and 2022.

We adjusted all three for inflation using the BLS consumer price index for the New York area, including shelter. Rent is part of the price index, but including it reflects the full costs of living households face. Using the index that excludes shelter changes the results by a point.

Because Apartment List and ZORI track listings, those listings include apartments when they turn over, so long-time tenants, rent-controlled units, and subsidized households very rarely show up in their data sets. The ACS data covers all renters, but its headline median and gross rent data need to be broken into bands to tease out the effects of new supply.

Why the ACS number runs ahead

Readers unfamiliar with these data sources might expect the ACS number to come in lower than the listing sites. It includes tenants who have stayed put for years, rent-controlled apartments whose increases are capped, and about 11,700 Jersey City households in public housing or using vouchers, whose rent is set at roughly 30 percent of income. All of that should hold the ACS median back.

Instead, it runs well ahead. Between 2017 and 2022, both listing sites show Jersey City rents up about 6 percent after inflation. Over the matching ACS periods, the median rose from $1,401 to $2,007, or 19 percent after inflation. Why?

The difference is what Apartment List and ZORI measure versus the ACS data. The listing sites compare an apartment to itself. The ACS median moves whenever the mix of apartments changes.  Jersey City’s apartment mix has changed a lot. In 2011-2015, about 8,100 apartments in the city rented for $3,000 or more a month in today’s dollars. By 2020-2024, about 21,300 did, mostly because of new, market-rate “luxury” apartments added to the city’s housing supply; roughly a third came from older apartments repricing, whether after renovations or through rent increases in buildings with four or fewer units, which make up about 40 percent of older rental units and are exempt from rent control. If a city adds 13,200 expensive apartments, then the median rent in ACS will rise even if no existing tenant pays a dollar more on their current lease. The ACS data is largely a measure of who lives in Jersey City and what they pay to live here. In short, Jersey City added more residents and more of them live in newer, more expensive buildings.

This change in the ACS median rent data leads to the kinds of “folk” economic conclusions that new supply is making rents more expensive when, in reality, new supply is keeping rents from rising faster and helping to preserve lower rents despite historic levels of demand for housing. We discuss this in depth later.

Where more gets built, the gap between data sources is bigger

The size of the gap tracks how much each city builds. From 2017 through 2022, Jersey City permitted 67 new homes per 1,000 residents, about three times the rate in Hoboken (22), Newark (21), or New York City (16). Through 2025 the total reaches about 26,300 units, 78 percent of them in buildings with five or more apartments. In Hoboken and New York, where little new housing gets built, the ACS median and the listing sites agree within 1 or 2 percentage points. In Jersey City they are 14 points apart.

One caveat on the permit data: Jersey City stopped reporting to the Census Bureau’s Building Permits Survey in mid-2023, so its recent figures are estimates.

Newark is the city to watch, but its data isn’t clear yet. Its building boom came later than Jersey City’s: permits in buildings of five or more units went from 361 in 2019 to 1,843 in 2025. Most of those apartments opened after the period the current ACS figures cover. Meanwhile, the two listing sites disagree about Newark more than any other city here. Apartment List has Newark rents down 10 percent after inflation since 2017; Zillow has them up 28 percent. The next few Census releases, which will start to count the new buildings, should show whether Newark follows Jersey City’s pattern.

One big, happy regional housing market

Comparing like for like, Jersey City’s rents move with the rest of the region. The clearest test was the COVID-19 pandemic. When offices closed and people left the urban core in 2020, rents fell everywhere all at once: Apartment List shows Jersey City down 13 percent between February and December 2020, and New York City down 19 percent. When offices, schools, and restaurants reopened in 2021, people came back and rents rebounded just as fast, up 41 percent from the bottom in Jersey City by mid-2022 and 50 percent in New York by mid-2023.

That was a quick series of demand shocks hitting the whole region at the same time, and, naturally, it hit hardest in the most urbanized places closest to the Manhattan job market. Since then, after-inflation rents in Jersey City, Hoboken, and New York have tracked each other closely. That is consistent with one regional housing market, where what renters pay in Jersey City is correlated with how much housing gets built across the region, not only within city limits.

What the tax increase could do

The 2026 budget raised the municipal levy over 15 percent, and county and school increases (around two-thirds of the tax bill) came in around the same. Most property owners saw their total tax bill go up about 15 percent. Whether renters will feel the tax hike depends on who owns their building.

Large institutional landlords already price their units to the market, often with revenue-management software. Their rents are likely optimized by what renters across the region will pay for a comparable apartment based on available supply and demand for new housing. For tenants in those buildings, a bigger tax bill doesn’t necessarily change what they will pay in rent. Smaller landlords who own two- to four-family houses and older walk-ups often charge less than the market would bear, especially to long-time tenants, and those buildings are exempt from Jersey City’s rent control. They have room to raise rents, and a tax increase is a reason to use it. Landlords of older rent-controlled buildings can’t pass taxes through directly; their only route is a hardship application to the city.

This wouldn’t be the first time that tax hikes were passed along to renters. After state school aid cuts pushed Jersey City’s school taxes up beginning in 2019, rents in older buildings rose faster than inflation, by roughly 10 to 25 percent depending on the building’s age. Unfortunately, the pandemic rebound and the 2018 revaluation make it confoundingly difficult to definitively say how much of those rent hikes were due to taxes. As mentioned earlier, however, about 40 percent of the city’s older rental stock is in buildings with four or fewer apartments and operated by smaller landlords who are more sensitive to tax hikes.

If the tax increase reaches tenants, it will reach the older, cheaper apartments first, which are the ones the listing sites see least due to less turnover and the ones lower-income renters tend to depend on most for their housing needs.

Who benefits from all the new housing?

A common argument in Jersey City is that luxury construction comes at the expense of housing lower-income renters can afford. ACS data lets us check, because it counts every rented apartment by what it rents for. We compared 2011-2015 with 2020-2024, the two non-overlapping five-year periods that span the building boom, with everything in 2024 dollars to compare the time periods.

Jersey City added about 19,600 rented apartments. Apartments renting for $2,000 or more grew by about 24,200; those under $2,000 fell by about 4,600. Within that:

• $3,000 or more (affordable to households earning about $120,000 or more, roughly 112 percent of area median income for a two-person household): up 13,200.
• $1,500 to $1,999 ($60,000 to $80,000, about 56 to 75 percent of AMI): up 2,500.
• $1,000 to $1,499 ($40,000 to $60,000, about 37 to 56 percent of AMI): down 5,900.
• Under $1,000 (under $40,000): down 1,200.

Most of the loss between $1,000 and $1,500 is existing apartments getting more expensive, not apartments disappearing. Zillow’s same-unit index for Jersey City rose about 12 percent after inflation from 2015 to 2022, enough to push a $1,400 apartment past $1,500.

Jersey City added more renters across income levels

Jersey City hasn’t added only high earners according to the ACS data. There are more renters at almost all income levels, which runs counter to narratives about mass displacement and gentrification. At the same time, high demand for housing and lagging supply still leave many households cost-burdened, which means slowdowns in housing production will be particularly painful for lower- and middle-income households.

Between 2011-2015 and 2020-2024, renter households earning $50,000 to $75,000 (in 2024 dollars) grew by about 3,300, or 35 percent, faster than the 28 percent growth in renters overall. Those earning $75,000 to $100,000 grew by about 1,200, or 16 percent. The city kept drawing renters well below the incomes the new towers are built for.

The only group of households that shrank was renters earning under $35,000, down about 1,500. Some of that decline is likely households whose incomes rose. The ACS data counts households by income at a point in time. A family that goes from $30,000 to $45,000 moves from one group to the next, which is good news. The survey can’t tell rising incomes apart from households leaving the city altogether. Some of each is likely, but we are unable to provide a more detailed breakdown from the available data.

While the growth in moderate-income households is a positive sign that Jersey City has been able to maintain its income diversity, it also shows that demand for housing is high across income levels. The groups that grew fastest below $100,000 are the ones stretching the most to stay. Among renters earning $50,000 to $75,000, the share spending 30 percent or more of income on rent rose from 50 percent to 66 percent, which shows many moderate-income households are cost-burdened. Among those earning $75,000 to $100,000, it rose from 27 percent to 40 percent.

Without the new buildings, the squeeze would be worse

ACS data can’t show what would have happened if all the new housing supply hadn’t been built. Research on other cities can directionally give us ideas, though. Asquith, Mast and Reed found that large new apartment buildings in low-income neighborhoods lowered rents on nearby older units by 5 to 7 percent. In San Francisco, Kate Pennington found that new construction cut rents within 100 meters by 2 percent and reduced nearby renters’ risk of being pushed to a lower-income neighborhood by 17 percent. Evan Mast traced who moves into new buildings and who takes the homes they leave: every 100 new market-rate units opened up the equivalent of 70 units in below-median-income neighborhoods and 40 in the poorest ones.

The mechanism is relatively straightforward. Jersey City gained about 15,300 renter households earning $120,000 or more, and much of that demand comes from the region, as the pandemic swing showed. The 13,200 added apartments renting for $3,000 or more gave most of them somewhere to go besides an older building in the Heights or Greenville. Every high earner in a new tower is one fewer bidder for a $1,600 apartment. Even with all that construction, middle-income renters are paying more. Without it, those 15,300 households would have been competing directly for the older stock. More supply is clearly needed as competition for housing across income levels continues to put upward pressure on rents.

Below $1,000, only subsidized housing remains

The apartments under $1,000 are now almost all subsidized housing. HUD data show about 11,700 Jersey City households in public housing, using vouchers, or living in project-based Section 8 buildings in 2024, paying an average of $506 a month. Nearly all of them pay under $1,000. If we subtract the households receiving housing assistance, the city’s unsubsidized apartments under $1,000 went from about 2,200 in 2011-2015 to about 400 in 2020-2024.

Assisted households grew from about 11,000 to 11,700, and their average payment held steady after inflation ($496 in 2015, in 2024 dollars, versus $506). What disappeared was the private market below $1,000, which is a clear indication that state and local officials should consider investing more resources in Housing Choice Vouchers to help extremely low-income households meet their housing needs.

Put together, growth at the top of the housing market did not come out of the bottom. New high-end apartments housed most of Jersey City’s new high earners, and the subsidized stock held. Renters at most income levels grew in number, but the middle pays more, and the unsubsidized market for households earning below about $60,000 shrank as older apartments repriced in a tight regional market. Below $40,000, a household without a voucher or a public housing unit now has almost nothing to rent.

What this data can’t tell us

These are citywide numbers, and changes within neighborhoods could be sharper. Five-year ACS estimates are smoothed and run several years behind. Converting older rent brackets to today’s dollars means assuming how rents are spread within each bracket. Some voucher holders may report their full contract rent to the Census Bureau rather than their own share. We have tried for over a year to get the city’s rent roll data, which would allow a more granular study, but our OPRA requests have gone unfulfilled. Moreover, none of this data predicts future rent growth, either. Home prices also tell a different story from rents over the past decade, and we’ll cover them in a future piece.

Three answers to the rent question

“How much have rents gone up in Jersey City?” has three different answers because it is really three different questions being asked. For someone renting the same kind of apartment since 2017, rents rose about as fast as everything else (i.e., inflation). For the city as a whole, the median rent rose a lot, but only because Jersey City built thousands of expensive apartments and people moved in to fill them because of high demand for high-end “luxury” rental housing. For a household earning under $40,000 without a voucher, the market-rate apartments that household could once find are almost completely gone.

If the worry is that new towers are making the rest of the city more expensive and causing rents to grow faster than inflation, the like-for-like rent data doesn’t show it. If the worry is that Jersey City has run out of market-rate housing that its lowest-income families can afford, the data does show that. Below about $40,000 a year, a household without a voucher or a public housing unit has almost nothing to rent.

There is a clear case for more vouchers and direct rental assistance, which go to the households that need help, unlike rent control, which benefits whoever holds the lease regardless of income. At the same time, slowing new market-rate construction would not bring more low-cost apartments onto the market [Expanding Rent Control is a Costly Mistake]. It would put more middle-income renters in competition for the older stock, push more households into cost burden, and likely stall the growth in moderate-income renters that Jersey City has seen over the past decade.