Renter share
The share of occupied housing units that are lived in by a renter.
The share of occupied housing units that are renter-occupied.
The Census Bureau collects tenure at every occupied unit: "The question was asked at occupied housing units. Occupied housing units are classified as either owner-occupied or renter-occupied" (ACS Subject Definitions). A unit that is not owner-occupied under the Bureau's residence test is classified as renter-occupied, including units occupied without payment of rent, which the Bureau tabulates separately as "No rent paid" in its rent tables.
The Bureau states that data on tenure allow planners "to evaluate the overall viability of housing markets and to assess the stability of neighborhoods," and aid in "understanding the characteristics of owner-occupied and renter-occupied units."
Renter share describes the composition of a place's occupied housing, which is what many other housing measures are conditioned on. Rent, rent burden, and renter income all describe only the renter-occupied part of a tract, so renter share tells you how much of the tract those measures speak for.
Metrics in this family#
Considerations#
Renting and owning are the only two categories the Bureau assigns to an occupied unit, so this share and the homeownership rate are two readings of one split rather than two independent facts about a place. Each is published because each answers a different question, but a place high on one is low on the other by definition.
The denominator is occupied units only. Vacant units carry no tenure and are covered instead by vacancy, so a tract with a large seasonal or off-market stock can have a small renter share and still have a large rental building count.
ACS 5-year windows overlap. Each vintage shares four of its five years with the vintage before it, so year-over-year movement reflects smoothed rolling estimates rather than independent annual readings, and turning points appear later than they occurred.
Census tract boundaries were redrawn for the 2020 census. Estimates published on earlier boundaries are carried onto current ones before use, which bears most on the longer trend windows — see geography.
Tracts made up largely of group quarters have few conventional occupied housing units and are not given a share. In tracts with few occupied units the estimate carries a wide margin of error.
References#
- 1ACS Subject Definitionshttps://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/tech_docs/subject_definitions/2024_ACSSubjectDefinitions.pdf