The National Multifamily Housing Council (NMHC)’s Rent Payment Tracker found 77.1 percent of apartment households made a full or partial rent payment by December 6 in its survey of 11.8 million units of professionally managed apartment units across the country.
This is a 1.7 percentage point increase from the share who paid rent through December 6, 2020 and compares to 83.2 percent that had been paid by December 6, 2019. This data encompasses a wide variety of market-rate rental properties across the United States, which can vary by size, type and average rental price.
The NMHC Rent Payment Tracker metric provides insight into changes in resident rent payment behavior over the course of each month, and, as the dataset ages, between months. While the tracker is intended to serve as an indicator of resident financial challenges, it is also intended to track the recovery as well, including the effectiveness of government stimulus and subsidies.
However, noteworthy technical issues may make historical comparisons imprecise. For example, factors such as varying days of the week on which data are collected; individual companies’ differing payment collection policies; shelter-in-place orders’ effects on residents’ ability to deliver payments in person or by mail; the closure of leasing offices, which may delay operators’ payment processing; and other factors can affect how and when rent data is processed and recorded.
The December 2021 Rent Payment Tracker data are the last that will be released under the NMHC Rent Payment Tracker. Full month December rent payment numbers will be posted on the NMHC Rent Payment webpage in January 2022. NMHC thanks our data provider partners for their work and contributions over the course of this effort.
Find more information, including the methodology, on the NMHC Rent Payment Tracker.
