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After years of landlords turning the screws on their tenants, average rent prices around the Valley are finally cooling. But still a majority of Valley renters feel like they’re “treading water” by paying rent each month, a new study found.
A March rent report by rental listing site Zumper found that nearly every city in the Valley saw the average price of renting a one-bedroom apartment drop over the past year. That trend appears to be steady. The site also found smaller, similar drops in rent across Valley cities in February.
The biggest plunge was in Glendale, where average rent dropped 15% from the year prior, to just $1,010 — the cheapest Valley rents in the study. Goodyear and Phoenix renters saw relief of about 9% and 7%, respectively.
Rents in the rest of the Valley generally dropped 1% to 6%. Three cities in the study — Tempe (+0.7%), Buckeye (+4.3%) and Surprise (+1.4%) — did see their average monthly rent rise.
Rents around Phoenix are falling largely because a ton of new rental units are becoming available. Phoenix alone added more than 27,000 new rental units last summer. A rising housing supply gives renters more leverage to negotiate or shop around.
And yet, the rent is still too damn high for people in the Valley. The real estate marketplace Zillow and the financial technology platform Esusu found in a nationwide survey that about a third of Maricopa County renters don’t believe owning a home is financially realistic for them in the next five to 10 years. The survey also found that only 30% of Maricopa County renters are consistently paying their rent on time. Perhaps most alarming is that 78% of renters in Maricopa County feel that paying rent is, in effect, treading water.
Rental costs in the Valley exploded six years ago with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. In early 2019, renters paid an average of $850 a month for a one-bedroom apartment in Phoenix, according to Rental Housing Journal. Today, the average rent of a one-bedroom in Phoenix is $1,150 a month — and that’s with the rent coming down.
Wages here haven’t kept pace with the price of housing. The result: struggling renters and, over the past two years, a record-breaking number of eviction filings in the Valley.
Some 87,000 evictions were filed in Maricopa County in 2024, the most the county had ever seen. The next year, another 85,000 evictions were filed. In the first three months of 2026 have eased somewhat, with 20,019 filings in the county so far, according to Eviction Lab.
