Did WFH Improve Rental Affordability? It’s Complicated

Remote renter households became less rent-burdened after 2020, but the shift appears to reflect who could work from home more than where they moved.

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Did working from home improve rental affordability? At first glance, the data suggest that it did. Since 2020, renter households that work from home have carried lower median rent burdens than renter households that commute.

But the better explanation is not that WFH renters moved into cheaper housing. It is that higher-income renters were more likely to become WFH renters. As remote work expanded, the WFH renter pool became more affluent, pulling its median rent burden down even though WFH renters continued to pay higher rents than non-WFH

In 2019, median rent burdens were nearly identical for the two groups. WFH renter households had a median rent burden of 25.5%, compared to 25.7% for non-WFH renter households.

By 2024, the gap had widened. WFH renter households had a median rent burden of 24.8%, while non-WFH renter households had a median rent burden of 27.6%.

But that does not necessarily mean that remote work helped renters move into cheaper housing. The story appears to be more about who was able to work from home.

WFH Renters Have Higher Incomes

The income side of the equation is the clearest place to start. WFH renter households have consistently had higher median incomes than non-WFH renter households. That was true before the pandemic, and the gap widened meaningfully after 2020.

In 2019, the median household income among WFH renter households was $66,800, compared to $54,000 for non-WFH renter households.

By 2024, median household income among WFH renter households had reached $90,000, compared to $65,500 for non-WFH renter households.

That income gap matters because rent burden is calculated as rent relative to income. If WFH renter households are increasingly composed of higher earners, their rent burdens can fall even if their rents are not falling.

WFH Renters Are Not Paying Lower Rents

The rent side of the equation makes this point even clearer. WFH renter households are not achieving lower rent burdens because they are paying less in rent. In fact, they consistently pay higher monthly gross rents than non-WFH renter households.

In 2024, the median monthly gross rent among WFH renter households was $1,900, compared to $1,560 for non-WFH renter households.

That cuts against the idea that the post-2020 affordability gap is mainly about WFH renters moving to lower-cost rental markets or cheaper units. Remote workers may have gained more location flexibility, but this data does not show them paying lower rents than commuters. Their affordability advantage is coming more through the income channel than the rent channel.

The Composition of WFH Renters Changed

The final piece is the shift in who works from home. Higher-income renter households were far more likely to shift into the WFH category after 2020.

In 2019, 6.2% of renter households earning at least $75,000 worked from home, compared to 3.9% of renter households earning below $75,000.

By 2021, those shares had jumped to 27.5% and 12.6%, respectively. Even after remote work pulled back from its pandemic peak, higher-income renters remained much more likely to work from home. In 2024, 16.2% of renter households earning at least $75,000 worked from home, compared to 8.8% of renter households earning below $75,000.

This is the core finding: the decline in rent burden among WFH renter households appears to reflect a composition effect. As remote work expanded, more high-income renter households moved into the WFH group. These households often paid higher rents, but their incomes were higher by more. As a result, the WFH renter pool became less rent-burdened.

At the same time, the non-WFH renter population became relatively more concentrated among households with lower incomes and less workplace flexibility. That helped push typical rent burdens higher for commuter renter households.

Bottom Line

Working from home did not simply make renting more affordable by allowing renters to move somewhere cheaper. In this data, WFH renters consistently paid higher rents than non-WFH renters.

The post-2020 WFH rent-burden advantage was instead driven largely through the income channel. Higher-income renters were much more likely to work from home, and as more of those households shifted into the WFH category, the typical WFH renter became less rent-burdened.

In other words: remote work changed rental affordability patterns, but not mainly by reducing rents. It changed the composition of who was counted as a remote-work renter.