Gross rental yield (Census)
A year of local market rent measured against local home value, the standard gross yield used to compare rental markets.
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Gross rental yield is a standard property-investment measure: the rent a property produces over a year, set against what the property is worth. It describes how much rent a market generates per dollar of housing value, which is what separates markets where rents carry the price from markets where the price rests on expected appreciation.
This is our own estimate. It is not a figure the Census Bureau publishes. We combine two measures the Bureau does publish for the same tract and the same estimate period — median gross rent and home value (Census) — and the Bureau is the source of that original data only. It is not responsible for our calculation.
Gross rent is the Bureau's fullest rent concept: "the contract rent plus the estimated average monthly cost of utilities (electricity, gas, and water and sewer) and fuels (oil, coal, kerosene, wood, etc.) if these are paid by the renter (or paid for the renter by someone else)." It "is intended to eliminate differentials that result from varying practices with respect to the inclusion of utilities and fuels as part of the rental payment." Value is the owner's own assessment: "the respondent's estimate of how much the property ... would sell for if it were for sale" (ACS Subject Definitions).
Metrics in this family#
Gross rental yield
The current yield, from the most recent ACS 5-year vintage.
Gross rental yield trend
Change in the yield over 2 or 4 years, selectable in the tool. Because the yield is a rate, its trend is reported as a change in percentage points rather than as a percentage change, which keeps places that started at different levels comparable.
Considerations#
The word gross is doing real work. This is rent before taxes, insurance, maintenance, management, financing, and vacancy, none of which the ACS measures. It is not a return on investment and it is not comparable to a net yield.
The two inputs describe different parts of a tract. Median gross rent covers renter-occupied units; median home value covers owner-occupied units. In most places rental units and owner-occupied units are not the same kind of housing, so the yield compares the rent of one stock with the value of another rather than the rent and price of a single property.
Both inputs are medians, so this is a ratio of medians and describes the tract in aggregate rather than any specific property.
A value is produced only where the Bureau published both inputs for the tract. Tracts that are overwhelmingly owner-occupied often lack a published median rent, and tracts that are overwhelmingly renter-occupied often lack a published median value, so coverage is thinner here than for either input on its own.
Trend windows are shorter than on most other families because both inputs must come from the same estimate period, and the run of comparable periods on current tract boundaries is still short. The 4-year window compares the 2020–2024 estimate period with the 2016–2020 period; the 2-year window compares 2020–2024 with 2018–2022. Those periods overlap, so short-window movement is damped.
Census tract boundaries were redrawn for the 2020 census — see geography.
References#
- 1ACS Subject Definitionshttps://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/tech_docs/subject_definitions/2024_ACSSubjectDefinitions.pdf