Graph and download economic data for Median Sales Price of Houses Sold for the United States (MSPUS) from Q1 1963 to Q2 2025 about sales, median, housing, and USA.

Key information about House Prices Growth

• US house prices grew 3.3% YoY in Sep 2025, following an increase of 4.1% YoY in the previous quarter.
• YoY growth data is updated quarterly, available from Mar 1992 to Sep 2025, with an average growth rate of -12.4%.
• House price data reached an all-time high of 17.7% in Sep 2021 and a record low of -12.4% in Dec 2008.

Context

The purpose of this dataset is to provide updated data on the Zillow Observed Rent Index (ZORI). Most of the Zillow datasets on Kaggle have not been updated in four years, and no other dataset except one contains information related to rent. Providing updated data on this will also allow the community to analyze the effects of COVID-19 on rent prices, which could not be done with previous available data sets.

Content

Zillow Observed Rent Index (ZORI): A smoothed measure of the typical observed market rate rent across a given region. ZORI is a repeat-rent index that is weighted to the rental housing stock to ensure representativeness across the entire market, not just those homes currently listed for-rent. The index is dollar-denominated by computing the mean of listed rents that fall into the 40th to 60th percentile range for all homes and apartments in a given region, which is once again weighted to reflect the rental housing stock. Details available in ZORI methodology. https://www.zillow.com/research/methodology-zori-repeat-rent-27092/

This dataset contains two files. The Metro dataset looks at the median rent prices for large US cities. The ZIP code dataset breaks the US cities down by their ZIP codes. Note that the region IDs in both datasets are only used for tracking purposes. Also, some of the ZIP codes under the Region Name are less than the standard five-digit zip code and unreliable. Even if you add zeros in accounting for possible formatting mistakes. It is recommended to remove these entries since there is no way to identify which ZIP code the entry actually represents. These entries are left in here in case some analyst can solve the issue.

Acknowledgements

Zillow provides many useful open source datasets that relate to housing, which can be found at Zillow Research Data. https://www.zillow.com/research/data/ This dataset was also prompted by an older dataset I came across that only lacked updated data. https://www.kaggle.com/zillow/rent-index Thumbnail and banner picture is from this pixabay artist https://pixabay.com/users/pexels-2286921/

Inspiration

1. Where are the cheapest and most expensive ZIP codes to live?
2. We all know rent increases overtime, but has it been increasing at a faster rate since 2014?
3. If rent has been increasing at a faster rate, what year did it increase the fastest?
4. What cities or ZIP codes are increasing rent the fastest and by how much?
5. Did rent continue to increase during the COVID-19 pandemic, and was it at a faster or slower rate than previous years?

VITAL SIGNS INDICATOR
Rent Payments (EC8)

FULL MEASURE NAME
Median rent payment

LAST UPDATED
January 2023

DESCRIPTION
Rent payments refer to the cost of leasing an apartment or home and serves as a measure of housing costs for individuals who do not own a home. The data reflect the median monthly rent paid by Bay Area households across apartments and homes of various sizes and various levels of quality. This differs from advertised rents for available apartments, which usually are higher. Note that rent can be presented using nominal or real (inflation-adjusted) dollar values; data are presented inflation-adjusted to reflect changes in household purchasing power over time.

DATA SOURCE
U.S. Census Bureau: Decennial Census - https://nhgis.org
Count 2 (1970)
Form STF1 (1980-1990)
Form SF3a (2000)

U.S. Census Bureau: American Community Survey - https://data.census.gov/
Form B25058 (2005-2021; median contract rent)

Bureau of Labor Statistics: Consumer Price Index - https://www.bls.gov/data/
1970-2021

CONTACT INFORMATION
vitalsigns.info@mtc.ca.gov

METHODOLOGY NOTES (across all datasets for this indicator)
Rent data reflects median rent payments rather than list rents (refer to measure definition above). American Community Survey 1-year data is used for larger geographies – Bay counties and most metropolitan area counties – while smaller geographies rely upon 5-year rolling average data due to their smaller sample sizes. Note that 2020 data uses the 5-year estimates because the ACS did not collect 1-year data for 2020.

1970 Census data for median rent payments has been imputed from quintiles using methodology from California Department of Finance as the source data only provided the mean, rather than the median, monthly rent. Metro area boundaries reflects today’s metro area definitions by county for consistency, rather than historical metro area boundaries.

Inflation-adjusted data are presented to illustrate how rent payments have grown relative to overall price increases; that said, the use of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) does create some challenges given the fact that housing represents a major chunk of consumer goods bundle used to calculate CPI. This reflects a methodological tradeoff between precision and accuracy and is a common concern when working with any commodity that is a major component of CPI itself.