Americans Paid $4.5 Trillion in Rent This Decade

Money doesn’t grow on trees: But if it did, one species would definitely be the rent money tree. With every signature and cash transfer, rent-paying Americans contributed to a total of $4.5 trillion paid to landlords in the 2010s. That’s more than the GDP of entire countries in a year: In 2018, Germany raked in almost $4 trillion. In this year alone, the total rent paid in America rang in at $512 billion. That’s a lot of cash. 

On Dec. 1, the nation’s renters didn’t just make their last rent payment of the year – their landlords also collected their last rent payment of what was a very lucrative decade. All-in-all, U.S. renters paid roughly $4.5 trillion in rent during the 2010s, capped off with $512 billion in 2019 alone.

The total amount of money spent on rent nationwide over the past 10 years is higher than the GDP of Germany (a shade less than $4 trillion in 2018), the world’s fourth-largest national economy. Total rent paid in 2019 alone is higher than the entire 2018 GDP of Thailand ($505 billion) and just short of Argentina’s ($518 billion).

The total amount of rent paid in 2019 was up 2.9% from 2018 ($497.9 billion). A bump in the overall number of U.S. renters in 2019 (to 43.6 million), after a slight decline in the previous year, and rent growth itself that has picked up slightly throughout the year both contributed to a higher overall rent bill this year than last.

Read More