On the day rent is due each month, the gender gap between male and female one-person households is enormous, new research has found.
According to RentHop’s annual Singles Index, single women in 50 major cities across the nation spend 124% more of their income on rent than their male counterparts.
The report, now in its third year, calculates the rent burden (how much of an individual’s income is spent on housing, with more than 30% being considered a burden) on one-income renters of studio apartments and found that, as a result of making significantly less money, women bear a much larger burden.
“With housing prices skyrocketing over the past year, many young professionals are now faced with high rent prices as single-income earners,” the RentHop index explained, before going into the fact that, while everyone is impacted by these market trends, they ultimately create a larger challenge for all the single ladies.
“According to Pew Research, the [gender wage] gap barely narrowed in 2022 — for every dollar men earned, women earned only 82 cents,” the report continued. “Translating to housing, the gap means it is harder for women to buy or even rent a home independently.”
The gap is far more extreme in certain cities than others.
At the top of the list, in the dubious first place position for largest gender rent burden gap, is El Paso, TX, where the average man puts 18% of their income towards rent but the average woman puts almost 35%.
In second place is Miami, where all renters put a much higher amount of their income towards rent, but it still comes down to just under 42% of the median male salary and almost 72% of that for women.
While California boasts “some of the smallest gender wage gaps in the country,” according to RentHop, San Jose has the fourth-highest housing cost gender gap of major cities: There, women spend 35% of their income on rent while men only spend 23%.
Only in Arlington, TX do single men and women spend more or less the same amount of their annual income on studio apartments.
At least the genders are united on one front: For both ladies and gentleman, New York City is the most unaffordable city of them all.