June 10, 2025
Renting a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco is now more expensive than it has been in almost five years, according to the online real-estate listing platform Zumper.
However, this month’s median rent still trails February 2020, the last full month before shelter-in-place orders took effect, when the median rent was $3,500. Six years ago, in March 2019, the median rent was $3,700.
But overall, this month’s data tracks with the larger trend in San Francisco’s rental market: Prices are slowly but consistently climbing.
Median one-bedroom rent in San Francisco plummeted from $3,500 per month at the onset of the pandemic to as low as $2,600 around a year later in March 2021. Since then, rents have steadily increased, with San Francisco the second-most expensive city in which to rent.
These costs, of course, are all relative in San Francisco’s notoriously lavish real-estate market. Even its pandemic low of $2,600 a month would, in a year, come out to nearly 30% of the $104,000 the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development set as San Francisco’s area median income for a household of one. The March 2025 median would amount to almost 37% of area median income. Financial experts generally recommend residents spend no more than 30% of their yearly income on housing.
Zumper analyst Crystal Chen said she does not expect San Francisco rents to return to pre-pandemic levels “anytime soon.” That $300 monthly difference between February 2020 and the current rate is still a “notable gap,” she said.
“Since SF rent trends are closely tied to the job market, office return policies, and broader economic conditions, a full return to pre-pandemic levels would likely require more sustained growth across all of these factors,” Chen wrote to The Examiner in an email.
Median one-bedroom rent prices nationwide stayed relatively steady at $1,524 in March, though that was up 2.5% from a year ago.
But prices are still hundreds of dollars shy of The City’s sky-high pre-pandemic rental rates.
The median monthly cost for a one-bedroom apartment in The City in March was $3,200, according to data Zumper published last week. That’s the highest rate since July 2020 — roughly four months after the stay-at-home orders issued amid COVID-19 pandemic led to nosediving rents nationwide — when it was also $3,200 per month.