Buying a home in Salt Lake City is more than two times as expensive as renting, a new analysis shows.
That’s based on Salt Lake’s median monthly mortgage payment of $3,463 compared to the median rent of $1,627, a so-called “buying premium” of 112.8%, according to the research company Construction Coverage.
Nationwide, the extra paid for ownership is just 21%, based on a U.S. median monthly mortgage payment of $2,382 and a median monthly rent of $1,968. The median home price is much lower for the U.S. compared to Salt Lake City, $355,328 versus $549,528.
Salt Lake City ranked 13th on a list of the most expensive midsize cities in the analysis, behind cities in California, Washington state, Texas, North Carolina and Arizona, where Scottsdale took the No. 10 spot with a buying premium of 125.6%.
Sunnyvale, in California’s Silicon Valley, had the highest buying premium of any midsize city, at 298.1%. The technology hub also had the most expensive cities in the other categories analyzed, with San Jose topping the list of large cities at 205.5% and Santa Clara, small cities at 235.6%.
The analysis looked at 343 U.S. cities, identifying only 32 where buying is more affordable than renting, mostly in southern states like Alabama, Georgia and Texas or in the nation’s Rust Belt, including Ohio and Michigan.
Detroit had the biggest “buying discount,” at just over minus 60%. Among midsized cities, Alabama’s Birmingham and Montgomery ranked No. 1 and No. 2 on the list of places where it’s cheaper to buy than rent, at just over minus 36% and 31%, respectively.
No places in the West made the Top 15 cheapest lists for large, midsize or small cities.
Among the 343 cities in the analysis, Salt Lake City ranked the 306th cheapest in 2025. Last year, the Utah capital was 303rd, with a buying premium calculated at 116.3%.
“Buying a home used to be the financially savvy move but that’s no longer the case for many would-be buyers in America,” the analysis concluded, adding, “renting has become the more affordable choice in most markets.”
The shift occurred, the Construction Coverage analysis stated, as demand during the COVID-19 pandemic started driving up home prices and mortgage rates, at record lows in January 2021, have since more than doubled.