One in Five Renters Missed a Full Rent Payment in 2025, Urban Institute Finds, With Middle-Income Households Hit Hardest

Renters across the income spectrum are falling behind, and the group getting hit hardest isn't who you'd expect.

According to a new report from the Urban Institute, one in five working-age renters (ages 18 to 64) said they couldn't pay their full rent on time at some point in 2025. That's up from 16.5% in 2024, according to Multifamily Dive, and it's the highest share the Urban Institute has recorded in its Well-Being and Basic Needs Survey.

Middle-income renters, defined as those earning between 200% and 400% of the federal poverty line, saw their rate of missed or partial rent payments jump from 14.3% in 2024 to 21.6% in 2025, according to Multifamily Dive. NPR reported similar figures, rounding to about 14% in 2024 and 22% in 2025. That's the largest year-over-year increase of any income bracket in the survey.

In dollar terms, the Urban Institute defines middle income as $31,300 to $62,600 for a single-person household, or $53,300 to $106,600 for a family of three, according to NPR.

Low-income renters, those earning below 200% of the poverty line, still have it worse overall. Nearly 28% reported trouble paying rent in 2025, up from about 24% in 2019, NPR reported. But their increase was gradual. The middle class got hit with a cliff.

Even high earners weren't immune. Around 7% of renters in the top income bracket missed a payment last year, a two-point jump from the year before, according to NPR.

The Urban Institute's data shows homeowners' ability to cover their mortgage payments has stayed steady for seven straight years. The pain is concentrated entirely in the rental market, and it's been building since 2022.

Samantha Batko, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and co-author of the report, said the shift among middle-income renters "reflects overall challenges with affordability in the country." She told NPR that a missed or partial rent payment often means a family is "choosing to pay for a child's medication or for food for lunch or dinner" instead.

Utility bills tell the same story. Just over 20% of renters said they couldn't pay their full gas, oil, or electric bill in 2025, according to Multifamily Dive. That's roughly flat with 2023 and 2024, but notably higher than the 2019-through-2022 period, when pandemic-era stimulus and safety net expansions likely cushioned the blow.

A separate Richmond Federal Reserve analysis, cited by Business Insider, found middle-income Americans are now more likely to hold multiple jobs than lower-income workers, and that college-educated Americans make up half of the multiple-jobholder workforce. Middle-income consumer sentiment has also shifted from tracking high earners to tracking low earners, a sign the financial pressure is real, not just perception.

Kathryn Reynolds, a principal policy associate at the Urban Institute's Research to Action Lab, told Multifamily Dive the housing market functions as "one ecosystem." When middle-income renters get squeezed out of homeownership and stay in rentals longer, they compete for the same moderately priced units that lower-income families need. Landlords, Reynolds said, tend to favor applicants with higher incomes and better credit, which pushes the most vulnerable renters further down the ladder.

Multifamily Dive states the Urban Institute has tracked this rent-affordability measure since 2017 and calls the 2025 figure the highest on record for that period. NPR and its syndicated affiliates describe the relevant survey question as having "begun asking" starting in 2019. Neither figure is presented as wrong, but readers comparing outlets should know the two reports don't agree on exactly how far back the baseline goes.

A fair skeptic might point out that this is self-reported survey data covering a single tough year, and that one bad stretch doesn't prove a permanent trend. That's a reasonable caution. But the Urban Institute's own numbers show renter distress climbing steadily since 2022, not spiking in isolation, and the pattern holds across multiple income brackets simultaneously.

None of the sources here identify a specific policy cause, whether that's local zoning restrictions limiting new supply, inflation in food and energy, or interest-rate effects on the broader housing market. The Urban Institute's report frames it as "mounting economic pressures and rising costs of everyday necessities," according to NPR, without assigning blame to any single policy.

What happens next is the open question. The Urban Institute's Well-Being and Basic Needs Survey runs annually, meaning the 2026 data, whenever it's released, will show whether this is a temporary spike tied to a rough economic year or the start of a structural shift in who counts as housing-insecure in America.