Independent Landlord Rental Performance Report: December 2025

Monthly Tracker of On-Time Payments in Non-Institutional ("Mom-and-Pop") Rental Properties

Key Takeaways

• In December 2025, on-time rental payments in independently operated units rose by 73 basis points (bps) to 83.7%.

• Measured year-over-year, on-time payment rates remain materially lower than a year ago, marking the 29th consecutive month of annual declines.

• Despite weaker on-time performance, full-payment rates have remained resilient in 2025, averaging 96.0% for the year — outperforming the 2024 average.

• Late payments — the primary driver of underperformance in the mom-and-pop sector — remained above 10% throughout 2025, though recent data point to easing at the margin.

• Western states continue to post the strongest on-time payment rates nationally, led by South Dakota, Utah, and Alaska, while New Hampshire remains a top-performing East Coast standout.

• 2–4-family rental properties once again led all property types in December, posting the highest on-time payment rate at 84.2%.

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The Bottom Line Upfront

Recent national data continue to point toward gradual improvement. While on-time collections remain well below post-pandemic highs, the recent positive inflection — combined with improvement since late summer — supports a cautiously optimistic outlook.

As in prior months, underperformance in the mom-and-pop sector is being driven primarily by elevated late payments rather than outright nonpayment. In both 2023 and 2024, late-payment rates rarely reached double digits. In contrast, late payments exceeded 10% in every month of 2025, underscoring the unusual nature of this cycle.

Still, these data also suggest that tenants are continuing to make good on their obligations, even if payments are delayed. Since partially satisfied rents are classified as unpaid in this dataset, the effective income impact to landlords may be less severe than topline on-time figures imply.

Labor market conditions remain an important backstop. While job growth slowed materially in 2025, the environment has been characterized more by reduced hiring than widespread layoffs. With annal apartment rent growth sliding and inflation-adjusted wages rising further improvement in rent collections appears likely as the market moves into 2026.

National Overview

On-time rental payments in independently operated units rose for the third consecutive month in December 2025 — a strengthening signal that the sector is continuing to rebound off its late-summer performance floor. According to the latest data, 83.7% of units paid their full rent on time, an increase of 80 bps from November’s revised estimate (82.9%).Compared to the Septembert 2025 trough, the December on-time payment rate is up by 134 bps

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As additional data have come in, last month’s on-time payment estimate for November — initially reported at 83.7% — has been revised down to 82.9%.

Year-over-Year Change

Despite recent improvement, on-time payment rates remain well below year-ago levels. Compared to December 2024, on-time collections are down by 224 basis points, extending the streak of year-over-year declines to 29 consecutive months.

Encouragingly, the magnitude of annual declines has continued to narrow. After registering drops of approximately 300 basis points during the summer, the year-over-year gap has compressed meaningfully in recent months. With on-time payment rates now more than a percentage point above their 2025 lows, signs of a gradual recovery continue to build.

Note: As of May 2024, monthly data estimates are reported as a three-month moving average.

Full-Payment Rate: Historical & Forecast

The forecast full-payment rate for December 2025 — which accounts for on-time, late, and historically anticipated late payments — held steady from the two prior months, remaining at 95.0%.

Notably, actual full-payment rates have outperformed forecasts in recent months, thanks to late payments being resolved at higher-than-expected rates. While this has weighed on the on-time rate, it indicates that tenants remain committed to making up missed payments.

Omitting the November and December data points, which remain heavily influenced by incoming late payments, the average monthly full-payment rate for 2025 currently stands at 96.0% — landing between the 2023 average (96.6%) and the 2024 average (95.3%).

Late Payments

Late payments have proven to be the primary source of underperformance for the mom-and-pop rental sector in 2025. While late payments are not as debilitating to property-level economics as outright missed payments, they remain a significant source of operational strain, even when those payments are ultimately resolved. Small landlords rely heavily on rental income to meet ongoing expenses.

The three-month moving average of late payments in independently operated rentals has risen consistently since mid-2024, climbing from a low of 8.4% to a post-pandemic high of 13.4% in September 2025.

However, the fever seems to be breaking. The three-month moving average snapped a six-month streak of increases in October when it fell back to 12.9%.

Gradual improvement is expected ahead, with the forecast late-payment rates for November and December sitting at 12.1% and 11.7%, respectively.

Performance by Property Type

Performance across rental subsectors continues to show a clear gradient. In December 2025, 2–4-family rentals led all property types, posting an on-time payment rate of 84.2%. Single-family rentals followed closely at 83.6%,while multifamily properties trailed at 82.9%.

All three subsectors posted month-over-month gains, reinforcing the broader improvement trend observed at the national level. While levels remain below earlier-cycle highs, recent gains have been broadly shared across property types.

Regional Differences

At the state level, regional patterns remained consistent. Western states continued to outperform the rest of the country, with South Dakota (94.6%), Utah (94.5%), and Alaska (94.4%) leading all states in on-time payment performance.

New Hampshire (92.8%) remained a top-performing East Coast state, while several additional Western and Mountain states populated the top tier. At the lower end of the distribution, on-time payment rates remained concentrated in the high-70% to low-80% range, highlighting the uneven nature of recovery across regions.

Importance of the Report

The Independent Landlord Rental Performance report provides valuable insights into how well non-institutional landlords are managing rental payments. It uses data from property management software RentRedi, showcasing results from 65,418 units. Information is collected and reported monthly by Chandan Economics. The trends highlighted here can serve as a benchmark for investors, brokers, and policymakers to understand the health of independent landlords in the rental market.

About: Chandan Economics

Chandan Economics is an economic advisory and data science firm serving the commercial real estate industry. The firm's primary businesses include real estate data science (REDS), economic & market research, and litigation consulting.

About: RentRedi

RentRedi is the leading comprehensive, data-powered rental management software for smart landlords and investors. It helps landlords and their tenants rent smarter by providing all the tools and intelligence needed to optimize portfolios, boost retention, reduce turnover, and improve the lives of everyone in the rental process. By combining real-time data, user behavior insights, and customer feedback with a modern, intuitive interface, RentRedi delivers solutions that help savvy real estate investors increase revenue, reduce risk, save time, minimize friction, and improve relationships. For landlords, the all-in-one web and mobile app streamlines rent collection, listings, tenant screening, lease signing, maintenance coordination, accounting, and more. For their tenants, it includes online rent payment, auto-pay, credit building and boosting, 24/7 maintenance requests, among other services.Founded in 2016, RentRedi is VC-backed and a proven PropTech leader, recognized by the Inc. 5000, Inc. Power Partners, Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech, and HousingWire’s Tech100. With more than $33 billion in assets under management and nearly 300,000 landlords and tenants using its platform, RentRedi partners with leading technology providers including Zillow, TransUnion, Experian, Equifax, Realtor.com, Lessen, Thumbtack, Plaid, and Stripe to create the best customer experience possible. Learn more at RentRedi.com.

Methodology

Data are reported on a forward basis from March 2020 through December 2025 (current reporting period). As of the latest month of data availability, the reduced unit sample size totals 65,418 Rent charges are measured on a 15th-to-15th-of-the-month basis. Rent charges that are issued after the 15th of the current month are treated as a rent charge for the following rent-tracking period. (E.g., a rent charge sent on November 16th would be treated as a charge corresponding to December's owed rental payment.) Monthly estimates are represented as a three-month moving average.

Only charges designated as "rental income" are included for analysis. Rent charges below $500 and above $10,000 are excluded from this analysis.

Units that have not paid any form of rental income (full or partial) in the previous 60 days at the time a new rental charge is issued are removed from the sample tracking sample. Unpaid units refer to all units that have yet to fully satisfy their owed rents for a collection period. These unpaid units include units that have only partially paid their rent. As a means of reporting standardization, units with more than one monthly rent charge (E.g., rent paid weekly) are removed from the rent tracking sample.