Renting still wins on monthly cost, but falling home prices and rising wages are improving the math for buyers in seven major metros.
Renting a starter home is still cheaper than buying one in all of the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan areas—but that advantage is beginning to shrink.
In July, buying a starter home cost $858 more per month than renting one, according to the July 2026 Rental Report from Realtor.com®. But in Orlando, FL, that premium was just $19.
Jiayi Xu, a senior economist at Realtor.com and author of the report, says it comes down to a favorable mix of cooling home prices and rising wages.
“Together, these trends point to a picture that increasingly favors buying,” she says. “Home prices are falling faster than rents, while rising incomes are putting prospective buyers in a stronger position.”
And for the first time since 2023, a majority of Americans (53%) favor buying over renting or living with family, according to a recent survey from Bank of America.
“Renting may be cheaper today, but that doesn't mean the opportunity to buy is closing or getting worse," Xu explains. "In many places, it is improving when compared to renting.”
Why buying is starting to gain ground
Most of the movement has come from the ownership side of the equation.
For one, home prices are falling faster than rents. The median listing price of a 0- to 2-bedroom starter home across the 50 largest metros fell 2.9% year over year in July, compared with a 1.4% decline in rents.
At the same time, lower-priced homes are becoming more plentiful. There are now 220,000 more homes priced below $350,000 for sale than at the depths of the starter home crunch in 2022, according to a separate Realtor.com analysis. The share of listings below that threshold is also up 1.6 percentage points from a year ago.
All of those factors have helped bring down the cost to purchase, too.
Xu estimates it was roughly $89 cheaper per month to buy a starter home in July than it was a year ago—$57 of that decline came from changes in typical listing prices and $33 came from mortgage rates, which averaged 6.54% in July, down from 6.72% a year earlier.
Then there’s the matter of leverage.
The latest Market Clock Report from Realtor.com found that 70% of the 100 largest metros now favor buyers or are moving in their direction, up from 52% a year ago. It marks the most buyer-friendly second quarter in the measure’s history, which stretches back to 2018.
And while cooling prices can sometimes sour consumers on the idea of investing in homeownership, the opposite appears to have happened. In the Bank of America survey, 90% of respondents said a home was a valuable investment, up from 79% a year ago.
Where conditions are improving most
It's decisive toward buyers overall. But in Oklahoma City; Orlando, FL; Seattle; Miami; Tampa, FL; Las Vegas; and Nashville, TN, multiple forces are moving in buyers’ favor at once.
In these metros, starter-home listing prices fell faster than rents over the past year, while average weekly earnings grew at least as quickly as the 3.8% national rate. That means home prices are retreating relative to rents at the same time buyers' incomes are growing.
Even so, the strength of those tailwinds varies.
Oklahoma City posted the steepest decline in starter home prices, down 9% from a year ago, compared with a 1.5% decline in rents, while wages grew 4.1%. Miami recorded the strongest wage growth, at 5.7%, as starter home prices fell 5% and rents declined 1.3%.
Florida stands out, too. All three of the state’s metros that made the list are already classified as buyer’s markets by the Market Clock from Realtor.com. Nashville is also a buyer’s market, while Oklahoma City, Seattle, and Las Vegas remain balanced but are gradually loosening in buyers’ favor.
But those favorable conditions have translated very differently into the monthly rent-versus-buy equation.
In Orlando, just $19 separates renting and buying
Orlando is the clearest example. The median asking rent there was $1,682 in July, while Realtor.com estimated the monthly cost of buying a starter home at $1,701—a difference of just $19, or 1.1%.
On paper, that puts Orlando remarkably close to monthly rent-buy parity. But Billie Grimes, a local real estate agent, says the improving numbers can be difficult to reconcile with what residents are experiencing.
“We have seen prices cooling a bit, and when I tell people that, they don't believe me, and to be quite frank, I don't blame them,” Grimes tells Realtor.com.
That disconnect is part of what prompted Grimes to conduct his own analysis of Orlando’s housing market and post the findings to Reddit. The post quickly rose to the top of the r/Orlando thread, eliciting more than 320 upvotes and nearly 120 comments.
“Part of it was to put onto paper with actual data what everybody has already been feeling,” he says. “Ultimately, I wanted people to kind of be able to put data to what they were feeling, but couldn't explain.”
The response surprised him. Grimes says he expected pushback, but instead heard from dozens of residents struggling to make either side of the rent-versus-buy equation work.
“It was roughly 60 private messages of, ’We're really struggling. We can't find a place to rent. We just got bought by private equity, and our rent's going up $600,’” he says.
One message, he recalled, came from a bartender whose husband worked for the city: “Is there any hope for us, like, to look at a home?”
Grimes says he sees the same problem among his clients. Even as home prices cool, some prospective buyers still can’t qualify for a home at the prices available.
“I’m working with people who make [sic] $80,000 [annual household income], and they're getting pre-approved for $165,000,” he says. “It's like how I can't find you a house.”
Among the clients who are managing to buy, income remains one of the clearest dividing lines.
“Solid income, solid credit,” Grimes says. “When I say solid income, I mean a solid dual income.”
What the shrinking gap means for renters and buyers
In some of the markets moving toward buyers, renting still offers enormous monthly savings.
In Seattle, renting costs $1,961 less per month than buying. In Nashville, the difference is $1,158; and in Oklahoma City, it is $628. Yet all three also met Xu's criteria for improving buying conditions.
“For those who are still saving, they have the most room to save,” she says. “For those who are ready to buy, the conditions are moving in their favor rather than against them.”
That tracks with what Grimes sees among would-be buyers in Orlando, too. Asked what most often keeps people from making the jump, his first answer was simple: “A lot of it is savings.”
For households that have cleared that hurdle, the significance of a more buyer-friendly market comes down to what happens once they are ready to compete for a home.
“Improving buying conditions don't create the decision to buy,” Xu writes. “But they increase confidence in that decision as market forces are working with the buyer rather than against them.”