If you were a millionaire, would you buy or rent in NYC?
- New York is the U.S.’s largest millionaire market with 40,430 households earning $1 million or more annually
- NYC renter households earning $1 million a year tripled in 2024 from 2020 as per a new RentCafe report
Not so surprisingly, NYC is also the top market for millionaire owners. There were 33,134 millionaire homeowners in 2024, up from 14,339 in 2020.
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If you earned a million dollars a year, would you buy in New York City or would you rent? Surprisingly, for a growing number of affluent New Yorkers, the answer is to rent.
In fact, the number of wealthy NYC households that rent tripled in 2024 from 2020. A new report from RentCafe, the national rental listings site, found that New York is the U.S.’s largest millionaire market, with 40,430 households earning $1 million or more annually. Among those millionaire households, 7,296 were renters in 2024, up from 2,730 households in 2020, according to RentCafe’s analysis of Integrated Public Use Microdata Series data.
NYC far outranked second place San Francisco, with 1,863 millionaire renter households in 2024. Los Angeles was in third place (1,532), San Jose in fourth (896), and Miami in fifth (538).
Nationally, the number of renter households with incomes of $1 million or more grew during the same four-year period from 4,500 to 13,700.
Not so surprisingly, NYC is also the top market for millionaire owners. There were 33,134 millionaire homeowners in 2024, up from 14,339 in 2020. Roughly four in five millionaire households in the metro area own their homes, the report said.
Combined incomes
Even though renting in NYC is by no means cheap, wealthy would-be buyers view renting temporarily as a strategic move.
“In New York, renting is often a deliberate choice, not a stopgap. Many wealthy households prefer to keep their capital invested and stay flexible about where they live, and most of these renters reach seven figures through combined household incomes, not a single paycheck,” said Veronica Grecu, senior writer at RentCafe.com and author of the report.
Only 1,274 affluent New York renters earn $1 million a year as individuals, meaning that one in six millionaire renter households is driven by a single seven-figure earner, according to the report. Most reach that income threshold through combined earnings.
Who are these affluent renters and what do they do?
On a national basis, the report found nearly half (49 percent) of millionaire renters are Millennials and 33 percent are Gen X. Gen Z makes up just 2 percent of the total but is the fastest-growing generation, jumping from fewer than a dozen households to more than 400 in just five years, which makes more sense when you consider they were just entering the workforce a few years ago.
Most have high-paying white-collar jobs like tech and finance professionals, roles that are also flexible in that generate steady, substantial income without necessarily tying employees to one company or location.
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