SuperNYC's affordability tool needs to answer one question well: can a person earning $X afford to rent in NYC neighborhood Y? Doing that honestly requires picking the right rent number for each neighborhood, sourcing it from a defensible aggregator, and being upfront about which numbers are noisier than others. This page documents the exact answer.
What we report: median asking rent for a 1-bedroom
For each of the 50 neighborhoods in our curated list, the data file reports the median asking rent for a 1-bedroom apartment. This is the rent a new tenant would actually pay to sign a lease today — not the rent that existing tenants on rent-stabilized leases pay, and not the broader American Community Survey gross-rent figure that includes long-tenured renters at below-market rates.
The distinction matters more than it sounds. The NYC Comptroller's spotlight report Working Toward a Sustainable Future for NYC's Rental Housing Market (published January 2024) puts the gap explicitly: median asking rent on StreetEasy in 2022 was around $3,300/month, while the ACS's median gross contract rent across all NYC renters was around $1,680/month. Same city, same year, a 2× gap. The reason: more than half of NYC's rental stock is rent-regulated; those units rarely appear in public listings. ACS captures everyone's contract rent including the long-tenured tenants paying below-market rates. StreetEasy captures the asking rents on the units actually available to rent today.
For a move-decision tool, asking rent is the right number. The user is someone deciding whether to take a job offer or move to NYC — they will be signing a new lease at the asking rate, not inheriting a rent-stabilized contract from 2008.
Why 1-bedroom specifically
We pin to the 1-bedroom median because it's the most-listed unit type in NYC and the most-comparable across neighborhoods. The single-person and couple-without-kids renter is the dominant audience for a move-to-NYC affordability calculator. Studios skew the distribution downward in neighborhoods with many older converted buildings; 2-bedrooms are dominated by family-oriented neighborhoods, which biases their median higher. The 1BR sits in the middle of the unit-mix distribution and gives the most representative price signal.
Primary sources
We aggregate four published sources, each contributing the slice it's best at:
- Leaseswap NYC rent dashboard — per-borough, per-neighborhood 1BR medians for all 5 NYC boroughs. Leaseswap aggregates current listings from StreetEasy, RentHop, Craigslist, and LeaseBreak, updated weekly. This is the practical source for almost every NYC entry on our list.
- StreetEasy Data Dashboard — the canonical NYC listing aggregator. StreetEasy publishes its own monthly per-neighborhood rent index. StreetEasy is one of Leaseswap's inputs, so we don't fetch it directly each quarter; on annual updates we cross-check against the StreetEasy dashboard in a browser.
- Zumper rent research — city-level 1BR figures for the NJ commuter towns in our dataset (Hoboken, Weehawken, West New York, Jersey City citywide).
- RentCafe market trends— sub-neighborhood average rents for Jersey City Downtown and Jersey City Heights, used as inputs to derived 1BR estimates (see the NJ caveat below).
The NYC Comptroller methodology cross-check
The asking-vs-contract gap quoted by the NYC Comptroller is a methodology sanity check, not a per-neighborhood source. We use it to confirm we are reporting the right kindof number for our use case — new-lease asking rent — not to set or bound individual values.
Caveats and known limitations
StreetEasy data lag
StreetEasy's published medians lag actual market conditions by 1-2 months. Our values follow the same lag. For a tool that's accurate "within a couple hundred dollars," this is fine; for a real-time financial decision, the user should pull a current listing in their target neighborhood and compare. We surface this in the affordability tool's FAQ.
Thin listing volume at the extremes
Both the high end (Tribeca, Hudson Yards, Hudson Square) and the low end (deep Bronx, parts of Staten Island) have small monthly listing counts, producing noisier medians that move month-to-month.
We deliberately skipTribeca and Hudson Yards from the curated list because they don't represent realistic options for the move-decision audience — their listing volume is dominated by ultra-luxury units (penthouses, new-build amenity-stack condos) that aren't comparable to anything else.
Low-volume entries we do include — New Brighton (Staten Island), Pelham Bay (Bronx), Norwood (Bronx), Weehawken (NJ) — are flagged in code comments. Their quarterly re-verification is more sensitive to outliers, and we treat any quarter-over-quarter move greater than 15% as a manual re-research trigger rather than mechanically updating the value.
NJ submarket estimates
NJ sub-neighborhood 1BR medians are noisier than NYC neighborhood medians because the aggregators report city-wide 1BR but not consistently by sub-neighborhood, and the sub-neighborhood reports they do publish blend across all bedroom types (studio + 1BR + 2BR+ together) rather than 1BR-specifically.
For Downtown Jersey City and Jersey City Heights specifically, our 1BR figure is an estimate derived from RentCafe sub-neighborhood all-bedroom averages, scaled by Jersey City's overall 1BR-to-all-unit ratio (citywide 1BR $3,408 divided by all-unit $3,687, or about 0.924). The two values are flagged in code comments and will be replaced with direct 1BR sub-neighborhood data when an aggregator publishes it.
Submarket-name translations
Some user-recognizable neighborhood names don't map one-to-one to aggregator labels. We translate them:
- "Harlem" in our list refers to Central Harlem on Leaseswap. East Harlem is a separate entry.
- "Ridgewood (Brooklyn side)"in our list refers to the East Williamsburg label on Leaseswap — the strip of Bushwick bordering Queens-Ridgewood is listed by aggregators as East Williamsburg.
- "Long Island City"uses the broader LIC value of $3,950. Hunters Point (the higher-rent waterfront sub-area) sits at $4,089 in the same data; we use the broader value as more representative of the average LIC renter's experience.
How the affordability tool uses these rents
The rent-to-income ratios we use are higher than the textbook 30% rule
The companion affordability tool computes "comfortable / tight / no" verdicts by comparing your net monthly income against the median 1BR rents on this list. The recommended rent-to-income ratios are deliberately higher than the textbook 30% rule:
- Frugal— 30% rent-to-net-income ceiling. Matches the national 30% rule.
- Moderate— 35%. What most mid-income NYC residents actually spend.
- Comfortable— 40%. Upper end of the typical NYC range.
The "30% of income on rent" guideline traces to the National Housing Act of 1969 (originally a 25% rule, raised to 30% by HUD in the Brooke Amendment of 1981). It reflects a national average that NYC has structurally exceeded for decades. NYC renters typically spend 35-45% of income on rent — this isn't dysfunction, it's the equilibrium of a high-income, high-housing-cost city.
The strict 30% rule produces a "no, you can't afford NYC" verdict for nearly everyone below $150k single income, which doesn't match what the millions of NYC renters at lower incomes actually do. We calibrate to local norms to give honest verdicts that match the lived experience of real residents.
A debt adjustment lowers the ceiling by 5 percentage points when monthly debt service exceeds 10% of net income — e.g., moderate becomes 30% instead of 35%. The 30% guideline still has a role here as the safety floor when debt service is eating into the rent budget.
Update cadence
Quarterly.The aggregators update weekly, but neighborhood medians don't move enough week-to-week to justify chasing every update. Each quarter we re-fetch each Leaseswap borough page (5 fetches) and the four NJ commuter pages, then update the rent values and the "Last verified" date.
Next scheduled update: August 2026.
Last verified
- Leaseswap NYC borough dashboards (Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx, Staten Island) — May 15, 2026. Covers all NYC entries except New Brighton.
- Apartmenthomeliving.com search aggregate — May 15, 2026. Covers New Brighton (Staten Island).
- Zumper city-level 1BR — May 15, 2026. Covers Hoboken, Weehawken, West New York, Jersey City citywide.
- RentCafe sub-neighborhood all-bedroom averages — April 22, 2026. Used to estimate Downtown JC and JC Heights.
- NYC Comptroller spotlight on rental housing market — January 17, 2024 publish date. Used as methodology rationale.
See the affordability tool to run the math against these neighborhoods, or browse the per-borough breakdowns.