The Best Real Rental Yields in America: 628 Cities Ranked by Achieved Rent

The highest real rental yield in America over the last 12 months belonged to Gary, Indiana. Tenants there signed leases at a median of $1,500 a month while homes sold at a median of $90,000, a gross yield of 20.00 percent. The lowest belonged to Beverly Hills, California, at 2.42 percent. Same country, same 12 months, a spread of more than eight to one.

Most yield rankings are built on asking rents, the number in the listing. This one is built on achieved rents, the rent at which listings actually closed, drawn from roughly 3 million closed rental listings. That matters. In our companion study of the same corpus, asking rents ran a median of 8.7 percent (about $200 a month) above achieved rents, positive in 84.1 percent of 993 metros. Rankings built on asking rents inherit that inflation. These numbers do not.

Across the 628 cities (postal areas) that cleared our data gates, the national median gross yield, computed as a median of city medians, was 6.53 percent. 96 of 628 cities (15.3 percent) reached 8 percent or better. Only 9 of 628 (1.4 percent) reached 12 percent.

What we measured

Gross rental yield = 12 x median achieved lease / median sold home price. Gross means exactly that: unlevered, before property taxes, insurance, vacancy, management, and repairs. It is a realized price-to-rent snapshot, not a cash-flow promise.

• •Rents are medians of achieved leases (closed, deduplicated, confidence-filtered) signed in the trailing 12 months. The national corpus kept 2,963,999 achieved leases. Snapshot date: 2026-08-22.
• •Prices are 12-month medians of sold homes: houses, condos, and townhomes. The rent and price windows align to within roughly one week.
• •Gates: a city needed at least 150 achieved leases in the last 12 months and at least 400 closed sales. 628 of 2,191 joined cities (postal areas) qualified.
• •One asymmetry to keep in view: the rent median mixes unit types (houses, condos, apartments) while the price median covers homes. Condo- and apartment-heavy rows are flagged below.
• •A secondary 24-month variant widens coverage to 1,067 cities (median 6.47 percent; 157 of 1,067 at or above 8 percent), but the 12-month basis is the ranking basis throughout.

The top 25 cities (postal areas) by gross yield

Some rows share a metro cluster; rather than capping them, we label them. South Florida holds ranks 4, 7, and 22, and the Cleveland cluster holds ranks 3, 8, and 11.

Three rows need flags, not applause:

• •† Binghamton, NY: its achieved median of $1,900 ran 27 percent above the asking median in the same corpus, on a thin, condo and apartment majority sample (29.9 percent houses; too few house leases for a house-only check). The pattern fits college-town lease selection. It is the least trustworthy number in the top 10.
• •\* Lauderhill and Delray Beach, FL: the house-only column divides a house-only rent by the mixed homes price (no house-only sold price exists in the sales data), so it overstates yield in condo-heavy cities. Lauderhill reads 19.27 percent house-only against 13.82 mixed; Delray Beach 14.25 against 10.12. We never rank on that column; it is a robustness check only. The n/a rows (Binghamton, Dundalk, Lansing) had fewer than 100 house leases.
• •‡ Abilene, TX: $2,499 is not a typo. Its lease sample is about 85 percent houses, and an independent asking-house sample corroborates the level at $2,395 (n = 1,370).

More broadly, five of the 25 rows lean on condo and apartment leases for their rent median: Dundalk (19.3 percent house share), Delray Beach (29.4), Lauderhill (29.8), Binghamton (29.9), and Deerfield Beach (31.6).

What a real 8 percent market looked like

Across the 628 gated cities, the middle half sat between 5.43 and 7.50 percent; the 10th percentile city yielded 4.46 percent and the 90th percentile 8.47 percent. An 8 percent gross market is real but uncommon: 96 of 628 cities, about one in seven.

The table shows what those markets were: cheap Midwest and rust-belt houses. 22 of the 25 rows carried a median sold home price below $250,000, and the two 17-percent-plus cities both had $90,000 medians. Read the price column before the yield column. A 20 percent gross yield on a $90,000 Gary home is not a 20 percent return: property taxes, insurance, repairs, turnover, and management consume a larger share of a low rent, and gross yield counts none of them. High gross yield is where underwriting starts, not where it ends.

The bottom 10

Nine of the ten lowest-yield cities (postal areas) among the 628 were in California; the tenth was Bellevue, Washington. Median rents there ran $3,000 to $7,200 a month, but against $1.2M to $3.4M prices.

Where the states landed

Rolling cities up to states (median of member-city yields, minimum 5 qualifying cities; 29 states qualified):

Illinois led the rollup at 9.17 percent across its 10 qualifying cities, with Ohio and Michigan a hair apart at 8.21 and 8.18. At the bottom of the 29: Hawaii at 4.98 percent (7 cities), California at 4.66 (105 cities), and Massachusetts at 4.49 (8 cities).

Every number above is realized: what tenants paid and what homes sold for over one 12-month window. We make no forecasts here.

Related studies

This ranking is one of three studies built on the same achieved-lease corpus: Does the 1 Percent Rule Still Work? counts the cities that cleared the classic 1 percent screen, and Rent vs Buy by City measures where achieved rent covered a principal-and-interest mortgage payment. The asking-versus-achieved gap that motivates our method is quantified in Asking Rent vs Actual Rent, and when you are ready to turn a gross yield into a net number, start with How to Calculate Rental Property Cash Flow.