Market data · CBSA 29620
Lansing-East Lansing, MI
What the federal government actually publishes about rents and home prices in this metro — median rent and home value from the Census, Fair Market Rents by bedroom count from HUD, and the repeat-sales price trend from FHFA. Every figure below is a published number with its release named, not an estimate.
The published figures
Median gross rent
$1,054/mo
22% below the US median of $1,348
Median home value
$205,400
32% below the US median of $303,400
Median household income
$70,886/yr
10% below the US median of $78,538
Median owner cost, with mortgage
$1,162/mo
13% below the US median of $1,331
Source: Census ACS 2023 5-year estimates, tables B25064, B25077, B19013 and B25088, for the Lansing-East Lansing, MI metropolitan statistical area.
HUD Fair Market Rents by bedroom count
HUD sets a Fair Market Rent for each metro every fiscal year — roughly the 40th percentile of rents for standard-quality units, including tenant-paid utilities. It's what housing-choice vouchers pay against, which makes it a published, bedroom-specific rent benchmark that most rent aggregators don't break out.
| Unit size | FY2026 Fair Market Rent |
|---|---|
| Studio | $973/mo |
| 1 bedroom | $1,012/mo |
| 2 bedroom | $1,268/mo |
| 3 bedroom | $1,627/mo |
| 4 bedroom | $1,679/mo |
Source: HUD Fair Market Rents FY2026, for the whole Lansing-East Lansing, MI FMR area.
What the medians imply
Price-to-rent ratio 16.2
$205,400 ÷ ($1,054 × 12) = $12,648 annual rent → 16.2
The median home costs about 16.2 years of median rent to buy outright. Nationally that figure is 18.8, so buying here is less expensive relative to renting than the US as a whole. This is the same arithmetic as a gross rent multiplier — but a GRM is properly a single property's own price over its own rent, so run yours in the calculators below rather than reading it off a market median.
Rent as a share of income 17.8%
($1,054 × 12) ÷ $70,886 = 17.8%
HUD treats housing costs above 30% of income as cost-burdened. Median rent here is 17.8% of median household income — though the two medians describe different groups of households, so read this as a market indicator, not a typical renter's budget.
Owning vs renting, monthly +10.2%
($1,162 − $1,054) ÷ $1,054 = +10.2%
A mortgaged owner's median monthly cost is higher than the median rent by 10.2%. Both figures are all-in monthly housing costs from the same ACS release, but they cover different households and different housing stock — an owner's figure also reflects whatever rate they locked in, which may be nothing like today's.
Home price trend
FHFA's house price index tracks repeat sales of the same homes, so it measures price change without the distortion you get from the mix of what happened to sell in a given quarter. Windows below compare fourth quarter to fourth quarter, ending 2025.
| Window | Change in index |
|---|---|
| 10 years (2015–2025) | +99.1% |
| 5 years (2020–2025) | +48.7% |
| 1 year (2024–2025) | +5.2% |
Source: FHFA House Price Index (all-transactions, not seasonally adjusted), metro-level series for CBSA 29620. An index change is not a dollar change — it says how much the same home moved in percentage terms, not what any particular home is worth.
What this page deliberately doesn't tell you
- No cap rate. A cap rate needs net operating income, and no source here publishes metro-level operating expenses. Dividing median rent by median home value would produce a gross yield that looks like a cap rate and is wrong by whatever the local expense load actually is. Run one on a real property, with your own expense numbers, in the calculator below.
- These are medians of different properties. The median-priced home isn't the median-rented home, so no ratio here describes a single deal — only the market around it.
- A metro is a big place. ACS and HUD figures cover the whole statistical area, and rents and prices vary enormously between neighborhoods inside one metro.
- The releases lag. Census ACS 2023 5-year estimates pools five years of responses, so it describes a recent average rather than this month. The FHFA index is the most current figure on this page.
Informational only, not professional advice. These are published government statistics reproduced with their sources named — not an appraisal, a rent estimate, or a recommendation about any property.
Run the numbers on an actual Lansing deal
Market medians tell you where to look. They can't tell you whether a specific property works — that needs its price, its rent, and its expenses. These calculators open carrying Lansing-East Lansing, MI's medians — $1,054 a month against a $205,400 purchase price — as a starting point to overwrite with a real listing. Every other input stays on its own default: no source on this page publishes expenses, vacancy, or what you'd borrow at.
Related tools
Net operating income as a percentage of purchase price — the standard first-pass measure of what a rental earns before financing, with every step shown.
Open, prefilled →Rental Cash Flow CalculatorThe full monthly pro-forma — gross rent through vacancy, operating expenses, and the mortgage to the cash in your pocket, monthly and annual, with every line shown.
Open, prefilled →Cash-on-Cash Return CalculatorAnnual pre-tax cash flow after the mortgage, as a percentage of the cash you actually invested — cap rate's levered counterpart.
Open, prefilled →Mortgage Payment CalculatorMonthly principal & interest from price, rate, and term — plus taxes, insurance, and HOA — with the amortization formula shown.
Open, prefilled →Other MI metros
Methodology and sources
Every figure on this page is copied from a federal release and recomputed only where a formula is shown in full above. Nothing is modelled, smoothed, or estimated.
- Census ACS 2023 5-year estimates — median gross rent (B25064), median home value (B25077), median household income (B19013), and median selected monthly owner costs for units with a mortgage (B25088), for this CBSA. Five-year estimates pool responses over five years, which is what makes them reliable at metro level.
- HUD Fair Market Rents FY2026 — Fair Market Rents by bedroom count, taken from the FMR area that covers this whole CBSA. HUD publishes these annually for the federal fiscal year.
- FHFA House Price Index (all-transactions, not seasonally adjusted) — the metro-level repeat-sales index. Percentage changes above are computed from the index values directly.
Built & reviewed by Eric, Founder against the cited primary sources shown in the methodology above. Last reviewed August 2026.