Average Rent in San Antonio 2026: What Landlords Can Charge

The average residential rental listed on the San Antonio MLS went for $1,832 a month in August 2026, down 2 percent from a year earlier, according to the San Antonio Board of REALTORS. That is the number to start from. It is not the number to put on your listing.

This guide is for the Bexar County owner with a house about to go vacant, or a renewal coming up in sixty days, working out what the property will actually lease for. It covers what the metro average measures, why Cibolo and the east side are not the same market, what the apartment discounting across town is doing to your showings, and how to read the feedback your own listing gives you in its first fourteen days.

What is the average rent in San Antonio in 2026?

$1,832 per month across the San Antonio area in August 2026, down 2 percent year over year, against 5,024 active rental listings. That is the most recent figure published by the San Antonio Board of REALTORS, released on September 10, 2026.

It is worth being precise about what that number is, because most published San Antonio rent figures are measuring something else entirely. The SABOR figure is the average monthly rent across residential rental listings in the San Antonio MLS for that month — it is reported alongside the count of active rental listings, and SABOR does not publish a methodology note separating asking rent from signed-lease rent. Read it as a metro-wide, listing-level average across every property type and size in the MLS, and nothing narrower than that.

Which means it cannot tell you three things you probably want to know: what a three-bedroom rents for, what your ZIP code rents for, or what an actual signed lease closed at. SABOR publishes no public bedroom-by-bedroom split of its rental data and no days-on-market figure for leases. When a number is not published, we say so rather than filling the gap with an estimate.

The second thing to understand is what an average across a fourteen-county MLS footprint can do for you. The San Antonio area runs from Boerne to Seguin and from Bulverde down past Atascosa. It contains ZIP codes where the official two-bedroom benchmark is $970 and ZIP codes where it is $2,140. San Antonio is four rental markets wearing one metro name, and the metro average is the one number that describes none of them.

The San Antonio rental market at a glance

Rent held flat through the spring, slipped in August, and competing supply grew the whole time. That is the 2026 San Antonio story in one line, and it has a specific consequence for how you price this fall.

Month (SABOR monthly market report)	Average monthly rent	Active rental listings
May 2026	$1,863	4,463
June 2026	$1,864	4,642
July 2026	$1,877	4,963, up 5% year over year
August 2026	$1,832, down 2% year over year	5,024, unchanged year over year

Read the two columns together. Rent rose fractionally from May to July, then gave back $45 a month in August — a 2.4 percent drop in a single month. Over the same four months, active rental listings climbed from 4,463 to 5,024, a 12.6 percent increase in the number of properties competing for the same renters. Supply grew; price followed it down.

For context on the ownership side of the same market, SABOR reported 3,104 San Antonio home sales in August 2026, up 4 percent year over year, with homes averaging 82 days on the market, up 11 percent, and 5.87 months of inventory. In Bexar County specifically, the median sale price fell 3.1 percent to $280,999. Softening sale prices and 82-day listing times are the reason a lot of San Antonio owners are becoming landlords right now instead of sellers — which is itself part of why your rental has 5,024 competitors.

Flat-with-more-competition is a very different instruction than falling. You are not in a market where you have to cut. You are in a market where you do not get to stretch. The homes leasing in three or four weeks across Bexar County are the ones priced at the comp, presented well, and available now. The ones sitting past sixty days are almost always priced at what the owner wanted rather than what the block supports.

Why an apartment rent number is not your number

San Antonio apartments were 90.3 percent leased at an effective rent of $1,112 a month in September 2026, with rental rates down 4.0 percent over the prior twelve months, according to the MRI ApartmentData MarketLine report for San Antonio. The average unit in that survey is 882 square feet, or $1.26 per square foot per month.

That is a $720-a-month gap below the SABOR listing average, and it is not a contradiction. It is two different products measured two different ways. An apartment survey measures roughly 900 square feet of professionally managed multifamily; the MLS rental average is dominated by houses and townhomes with yards, garages and school assignments. If your neighbour quotes you an apartment number, they are quoting a different asset class.

But here is why the apartment number still matters to you. A concession is a discount a landlord gives to get a lease signed — free weeks, reduced deposit, waived fees — that lowers what the tenant actually pays without lowering the advertised rent. And San Antonio apartments are handing them out at scale:

Apartment class (San Antonio, Sept 2026)	Total units	Share offering concessions	Average special
All classes	176,603	67.0%	-11.9%
Class A (newest, luxury)	64,368	81.0%	-13.7%
Class B	58,857	71.0%	-10.5%
Class C	33,193	61.0%	-10.8%
Class D (oldest)	20,185	45.0%	-9.7%

Two thirds of San Antonio apartments are quietly discounting themselves right now. In Class A it is four out of five, at an average of nearly 14 percent off. Effective rents in that survey are already calculated net of those concessions, which is why $1,112 is a real number and not a sticker price.

The practical consequence for a single-family owner in Stone Oak or Alamo Ranch: the renter touring your house on Saturday morning toured a brand-new Class A building on Friday night that offered them six weeks free. You are not competing with that building on rent per square foot, and you should not try. You compete on the things an apartment cannot offer — a garage, a fenced yard, a specific elementary school, no shared walls, and a landlord who answers the phone. Those are worth a premium. They are not worth an unlimited premium, and a market where 67 percent of the alternative is discounted is not a market that tolerates an aspirational list price.

Why the metro average is the wrong number for your house

The official two-bedroom benchmark inside the San Antonio metro runs from $970 to $2,140 — a 121 percent spread across a single metro area. Pricing a Cibolo house off a metro average costs you hundreds of dollars a month. Pricing an east-side duplex off the same average costs you a summer of vacancy.

The table below is our own analysis of HUD FY2026 Small Area Fair Market Rents for the San Antonio-New Braunfels HUD Metro FMR Area, covering 109 residential ZIP codes. It is the most granular official rent benchmark that exists for this market. Fair Market Rent is HUD's estimate of the 40th-percentile gross rent — rent plus utilities — for standard-quality units in a ZIP code, which makes it a payment benchmark rather than an asking price. Treat these as a floor reference. A well-presented single-family home in a strong school district routinely leases above its ZIP benchmark.

City or area	2BR benchmark (HUD FY2026)	vs. San Antonio core city
Cibolo	$2,140	+47%
Stone Oak (San Antonio)	$1,980 avg, $1,820-$2,140 across 2 ZIPs	+36%
Helotes	$1,930	+33%
Schertz	$1,820	+25%
Boerne	$1,790 avg, $1,710-$1,870 across 2 ZIPs	+23%
Converse	$1,740	+20%
New Braunfels	$1,640 avg, $1,620-$1,660 across 2 ZIPs	+13%
Live Oak	$1,630	+12%
Alamo Heights	$1,620	+11%
San Antonio (52 core-city ZIPs)	$1,454 avg, $1,020-$1,970 range	baseline
Universal City	$1,380	-5%
Leon Valley	$1,300	-11%

Three things in that table surprise San Antonio owners every time.

Cibolo, not Alamo Heights, is the metro ceiling. The northeast corridor along I-35 toward Guadalupe County benchmarks higher than the prestige enclave inside Loop 410 — Cibolo at $2,140 against Alamo Heights at $1,620. High sale prices and high rents are different phenomena, and Alamo Heights is the clearest case in Texas of the two coming apart. If you own there, your rent-to-price ratio is thinner than your neighbours assume.

The spread inside the city limits is 93 percent. The core city runs from $1,020 in the near-east ZIPs to $1,970 in the Pearl-area corridor. Two houses both honestly described as "in San Antonio" can sit $950 a month apart on the official benchmark. There is no version of "the San Antonio average" that is useful at that spread.

The northeast suburbs are not interchangeable. Cibolo ($2,140), Schertz ($1,820), Converse ($1,740), Live Oak ($1,630) and Universal City ($1,380) sit within a fifteen-minute drive of each other and span a $760 range. Same highway, same commute, very different rent. Pricing your Converse house off a Cibolo comp is the single most common mistake we correct in that corridor.

For the full ZIP-level version of this dataset, including all 109 residential ZIP codes, see our San Antonio Rent Report 2026.

What actually moves your number in San Antonio

Four things move a San Antonio rent number more than the metro average does: the ZIP code, the school assignment, the military calendar, and whether the house is ready to lease today.

School attendance zone, not district. San Antonio has fifteen school districts inside Bexar County alone, and the boundaries do not follow the streets you would expect. A house zoned into a sought-after Northside or Alamo Heights ISD elementary leases faster and higher than an identical house three blocks away in a different zone. Verify the actual attendance zone before you price. Do not price off the district name.

The JBSA cycle. Joint Base San Antonio — Lackland, Randolph and Fort Sam Houston — is the largest single-employer footprint in the metro, and its permanent-change-of-station rotations put a distinct wave of qualified, relocating renters into the market in late spring and summer. If your house sits within a reasonable commute of one of the three installations, your leasing calendar is partly set by that cycle rather than by the general market. Missing the summer window in Converse or Universal City is more expensive than missing it in Boerne.

Condition, and specifically the first five photos. In a market with 5,024 competing listings, the listing that gets showings is the one whose photos make a renter stop scrolling. Fresh paint, clean flooring, a mowed yard and a functioning HVAC system on a 100-degree September afternoon are not upgrades in San Antonio. They are the entry fee.

Availability date. A house available in nine days and a house available in nine weeks are priced by the market as two different products, because the renter who can wait nine weeks is rare. If you are advertising far ahead of your make-ready, expect to hold longer or price lower.

What does not move your number: your mortgage payment, your Bexar County property tax bill, and what the house rented for in 2022. Those are your costs and your history. The market prices the house against the other houses a renter can tour this weekend, and it does not know or care what you need to clear.

What overpricing actually costs you

On an $1,832 rental, every week of vacancy costs about $422. That is the arithmetic that should govern your list price, and it is the arithmetic almost nobody runs.

Say you want $1,950 instead of $1,832, because the house is nicer than average and you have a number in mind. Suppose the stretch works and a tenant pays it: you gain $118 a month, or $1,416 a year. Now suppose the stretch does not work and the house sits five extra weeks before you reprice and lease at $1,832 anyway. That is roughly $2,110 of lost rent to chase $1,416 of upside, and you still ended at the market price — only now you are five weeks behind on the lease term, and you will be re-listing in the slower part of the calendar next time.

The asymmetry is the point. Overpricing by 5 percent does not cost you 5 percent. It costs you weeks, and weeks are worth far more than percentage points. Underpricing by $50 costs $600 a year with certainty. Overpricing by $120 costs nothing if it works and thousands if it does not, and in a metro that added 561 competing rental listings between May and August, the odds it works are getting worse rather than better.

Your listing tells you which side of that line you are on inside fourteen days. Showings but no applications usually means the price is close and something in the property is losing the comparison — condition, photos, pet policy, availability date. No showings at all means the price is wrong, and no amount of patience fixes a price problem. Two weeks of silence in Bexar County is market feedback, not bad luck.

Can I raise the rent at renewal in San Antonio?

Yes — Texas has no rent control and no statutory cap on how much a landlord may raise rent at renewal, and San Antonio has no local rent stabilisation ordinance. What limits you is the market, not the law.

And in the autumn of 2026, the market is limiting you. With the metro average down 2 percent year over year and two thirds of the apartment stock discounting, an aggressive renewal increase is asking a good tenant to pay above market to stay somewhere they could leave for a concession. Run the same arithmetic in reverse: a turnover on an $1,832 house costs you the vacancy period, the make-ready, and a fresh marketing and screening cycle. If a $75 increase pushes a paying, on-time tenant out and the house sits five weeks, you spent roughly $2,110 of vacancy plus turn costs to chase $900 a year.

A modest increase a tenant accepts almost always beats a large one they decline. That is not softness; it is the same asymmetry as the list-price decision, viewed from the other end of the lease.

The separate question — what notice you owe, when, and what the lease itself permits — is a legal question rather than a market one, and we cover it in our Texas rent increase laws guide. For the wider set of rules governing a Texas tenancy, start with our Texas Property Code Chapter 92 guide, and for what you must fix and how fast, our Texas landlord repair laws guide. This article is about the market number; those three are about the legal frame around it.

Where a manager fits in

You own the house and you make the call. What we do is make sure the call gets made on real numbers rather than on a metro average or a hopeful guess.

On the homes we manage across Bexar, Comal, Guadalupe and Kendall counties, that means pricing from live comps in your actual ZIP code and school attendance zone, listing with photography that earns the showings, screening thoroughly enough that the application you accept is the tenancy you get, and telling you honestly in week two when the market disagrees with the price. Our San Antonio team works out of Stone Oak, and we price Stone Oak, Alamo Heights, Helotes, Schertz, Cibolo, Converse, Boerne, New Braunfels and the core city off their own comps — because, as the table above shows, they are not one market.

We charge a flat monthly fee for that, starting at $139/mo on annual billing. Which matters more in a pricing article than it might sound: on a percentage fee, your manager earns more when your rent goes up, which is a strange incentive to attach to the person advising you what to charge. Your management cost should not rise just because your rent did.

If you want a real number for your specific San Antonio-area home rather than a metro average, start with a free rental analysis. For the fuller local picture, see our San Antonio property management page, our guide to choosing a San Antonio property manager, and our breakdown of what property managers charge in San Antonio. Owners comparing Texas metros can also read our average rent in Houston and average rent in Austin breakdowns.

Frequently asked questions

What is the average rent in San Antonio in 2026?

The average monthly rent across residential rental listings in the San Antonio MLS was $1,832 in August 2026, down 2 percent year over year, against 5,024 active rental listings, per the SABOR monthly market report released September 10, 2026.

How much does a three-bedroom house rent for in San Antonio?

SABOR does not publish a public bedroom-by-bedroom breakdown of its rental data, so there is no verified metro average for a three-bedroom specifically. The $1,832 figure covers all residential rental listings together, and a three-bedroom in Cibolo and a three-bedroom near Loop 410 East are not the same product. Price from live comps inside your own ZIP code.

Are San Antonio rents going up or down in 2026?

Slightly down, and the move came late in the summer. SABOR reported $1,863 in May 2026, $1,864 in June, $1,877 in July, then $1,832 in August, described as down 2 percent year over year. Active rental listings rose from 4,463 in May to 5,024 in August — a 12.6 percent increase in competing supply in four months.

Which San Antonio suburbs have the highest rents?

On HUD FY2026 Small Area Fair Market Rent two-bedroom benchmarks, Cibolo leads at $2,140, followed by the Stone Oak corridor at an average of $1,980, Helotes at $1,930, Schertz at $1,820 and Boerne at $1,790. All five benchmark above the San Antonio core-city average of $1,454.

Is Alamo Heights the most expensive place to own a rental in San Antonio?

Not on the official benchmark. Alamo Heights benchmarks at $1,620 for a two-bedroom, below Cibolo, Stone Oak, Helotes, Schertz, Boerne, Converse, New Braunfels and Live Oak. Its sale prices are high, which is a different thing from its rents being high — and that gap is why rental yield there is thinner than owners expect.

Why is San Antonio rent falling when the population is growing?

Supply. MRI ApartmentData recorded the San Antonio apartment market at 90.3 percent leased in September 2026, effective rent at $1,112 a month, and rental-rate growth of minus 4.0 percent over the prior twelve months. Two thirds of the metro apartment stock was offering move-in concessions averaging 11.9 percent off, and that discounting sets the floor renters compare your house against.

How long does it take to rent out a house in San Antonio?

SABOR does not publish a days-on-market figure for leases, only for sales, so there is no verified metro average for how long a San Antonio rental takes to lease. For reference, for-sale listings averaged 82 days on market in August 2026. On the rental side, use your own listing as the instrument: if fourteen days produce no showings, the price is wrong.

What is the difference between Fair Market Rent and market rent in San Antonio?

Fair Market Rent is HUD's estimate of the 40th-percentile gross rent, meaning rent plus utilities, for standard-quality units in a ZIP code. It is a housing-assistance payment benchmark, not an asking price, and a well-maintained single-family home routinely leases above it.

Sources and last reviewed

• San Antonio Board of REALTORS - August 2026 San Antonio Market Statistics report (released September 10, 2026)
• San Antonio Board of REALTORS - July 2026 San Antonio Market Statistics report
• San Antonio Board of REALTORS - June 2026 San Antonio Market Statistics report
• San Antonio Board of REALTORS - May 2026 San Antonio Market Statistics report
• San Antonio Board of REALTORS - San Antonio Area Market Report archive
• MRI ApartmentData - MarketLine Report, San Antonio, September 2026
• HUD - FY2026 Small Area Fair Market Rents, San Antonio-New Braunfels TX HUD Metro FMR Area
• Flat Fee Landlord - San Antonio Rent Report 2026, city and ZIP-level analysis of HUD FY2026 SAFMR data across 109 residential ZIP codes

Last reviewed September 11, 2026 by the Flat Fee Landlord San Antonio team. Market figures are the most recent published at that date; SABOR releases each month's data in the second week of the following month. This article is general information for property owners, not legal advice.