Manhattan rents hit another high, median price near $4.7K/month
Photo by Chanan Greenblatt on Unsplash
While January is normally the best time to find deals on apartments, New Yorkers continued to face record-high rents in the first month of 2026. In January, the Manhattan median rent hit $4,695/month, according to the monthly rental report prepared by Miller Samuel for Douglas Elliman. While the price is down slightly from December, which saw median rents for the borough at $4,720, January marked the third-highest rent on record for Manhattan.
The January 2026 median rent increased by 7.9 percent from the January 2025 median, but is still below the record-high prices last November of $4,800/month.
Last month, the average rental price jumped 11.3 percent year-over-year, to $5,711/month, the highest on record.
According to the report, listing inventory dropped year-over-year for the seventh time, declining by 9.3 percent from last year to 7,965 apartments last month.
The report also looked at Brooklyn, which had a 9 percent increase year-over-year in median rent to $3,814/month from $3,500/month in 2025. Similarly, in Northwest Queens, the median rent rose by 10.6 percent from $3,400/month last January to $3,754/month last month.
With mortgage rates expected to remain around 6 percent for the rest of the year, meaning fewer prospective buyers, it’s unlikely renters will see any relief, as demand increases and inventory shrinks.
“We’re just in this mode of steadily rising rents,” Jonathan Miller, the author of the report, told The Real Deal. Until there’s a bigger drop in mortgage rates, Miller said, “that trend is going to be sustained for a while.”
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