Where costs are rising fastest, city by city — Zillow observed rents and home values for the fifty largest metros, ranked by yearly change, with the implied mortgage payment. National averages hide enormous spread: metro rent inflation routinely spans several points from coolest to hottest.
Because shelter is a third of the CPI and the BLS measures it with a year-long lag, these market rents are tomorrow's official shelter inflation — metro by metro. Each city links to its own page with its rent and value history.
How to read the table: rent inflation is the year-over-year change in the typical asking rent for a newly signed lease, and home-value inflation is the change in the typical home's estimated value. The two often diverge — a metro where values rise faster than rents is one where buying is getting harder relative to renting, which the implied mortgage payment makes concrete. Asking rents lead: the official CPI rent index averages across every lease in place, most of them signed months ago, so a turn in these numbers shows up in CPI shelter over the following year.
Metro figures are Zillow's (Data Provided by Zillow Group), shown under Zillow's terms; the national figures above are the same indexes for the whole country. For how these rents enter Nowflation's own shelter measure, see the rent inflation page and the methodology.