These results are based off of individual samples from the 2013-2017 American Community Survey (ACS) and are weighted to represent all American households; however, due to contrainsts in polling and weighting of the survey results there will be some deviations from reality.
So... yeah, this is not direct, actual direct rent data, its got who knows what kind of weighting manipulation going on, and its ~10 years old, and its spread out over a 5 year timeframe, instead of being specific to each year.
I appreciate the attempt though, really.
Like, I'm not trying to sound like an ass, I am an econometrician, it genuinely is difficult for a person to find high quality, freely available data on this topic that is not some kind of statistically or methodologically dubious.
Doing statistics well, properly, is indeed quite difficult.
If your data source ain't great, neither are your conclusions, GIGO.
Anyway, broadly speaking, from 2015 to 2025, average and median US rent has something like doubled, and the other huge problem is that almost all the new apartments that have been built are all 'luxury' apartments, almost no one has built any affordable rental apartment housing in the last decade.
Indeed, if you look into what is even classified as an 'affordable' apartment, you will usually find that this means something like "rent is 1/3 of 80% of the Area Median Monthly Income"....and then you go look at the population income stats for that area, and you see that something like 20% to 40% of people in that area cannot afford that.
Meaning that 'affordable' apartments... aren't, really.