TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WCTV) – A new study shows Tallahassee ranks near the bottom in affordable rents, though a University of Florida professor says that’s more indicative of statewide housing issues than capital city problems.
The study, from WalletHub, indicates Tallahassee ranks 158 out of 182 cities studied. Tallahassee residents spend about 27% of their median annual income on rent, the study found. In a separate WalletHub analysis in 2025, Tallahassee was ranked as the most well-run city in the Sunshine State.
Anne Ray, the interim director of the Shimberg Center for Housing Studies at UF, said the data is skewed for college towns like Tallahassee and Gainesville because incomes are “artificially low.”
“In this case, they’re looking at income and rents from the census,” Ray said. “And the income numbers for Tallahassee, for Gainesville, they’re artificially low because they include all the student populations.”
That’s not to say renters in Florida aren’t struggling. A 2025 report from the Shimberg Center found that over 900,000 Floridians who rent were struggling to afford it.
“Housing costs have stabilized, maybe even dropped back a little bit, but they’ve stabilized at those higher levels,” Ray said. “So incomes have not kept pace. So that gap is now kind of baked into our housing cost and income calculations.”
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Tallahassee planners previously said the capital county needs 23,000 new homes or apartments by 2050, and they’ve taken steps in their “comprehensive plan” to both “infill” urban areas and expand into more rural ones.
The Community Redevelopment Agency, overseen by the Tallahassee city commissioners and mayor, has given tax breaks to student housing projects in an effort to ensure housing needs are met. Ray said all types of housing developments are helpful.
“Not surprisingly, international migration is way down to Florida,” Ray said. “And so our population growth has slowed quite a bit. The places that are growing are the places where there’s a lot of new home construction, maybe outside of the major metro areas, places like Polk County, Pasco County, Marion County.”
In comparison to Tallahassee’s 27% of median income, WalletHub found that in the top-ranked city of Bismarck, ND, renters paid about 15% of their incomes to landlords yearly.
Ray said Tallahassee’s economy and housing markets are actually stable, driven mostly by government and university jobs or related careers. But, she added there’s no longer an expectation that someone working their first career job can afford a home, and the relativity of Tallahassee’s market doesn’t help those who are struggling.
“If you’re having trouble affording your housing, if you’re having trouble finding something, the fact that it would’ve been even harder in Miami, that doesn’t really affect you,” Ray said. “You need an apartment and you need a place that meets your needs, where you can get to the grocery store, get to work. It’s not all relative.”
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