Average Rent in Amarillo, TX (2026)

Amarillo is the economic hub of the Texas Panhandle, a flat, wind-swept stretch of the state that looks and functions more like the Great Plains than like Dallas or Houston four-plus hours down the highway. The U.S. Census Bureau's QuickFacts put the city's population at roughly 202,408 as of its July 2023 estimate, up slightly from the 2020 count of 200,393. Two sources that track Amarillo's rental market closely disagree on exactly how much renters are paying, and the gap gets wider the bigger the unit: RentCafe's September 2026 data puts studios at $700, one-bedrooms at $919, two-bedrooms at $1,126, and three-bedrooms at $1,294, while Zumper's October 2026 listings put those same categories at $702, $782, $1,050, and $1,850. Those two sources land close together on studios and roughly $150 apart on both one- and two-bedroom units — but on three-bedrooms they're over $550 apart, with Zumper's active-listing median running well above RentCafe's leased-unit average. Taken together, the market summary is straightforward: Amarillo remains one of the more affordable major rental markets in Texas, even as 2026 rent growth here has outpaced both the state and the nation.

Average Rent in Amarillo by Unit Type

RentCafe and Zumper measure different things, which is the main reason their numbers don't match. RentCafe's figures come from Yardi Matrix's property-level leasing data — a mix of newly signed and renewing leases across managed communities, averaging $1,023 citywide as of September 30, 2026, up 3.89% from $985 a year earlier. Zumper's numbers track active for-rent listings updated daily, so they move with whatever happens to be posted that week rather than with what's actually been signed. Because Amarillo's three-bedroom rental stock is thin and skews toward larger single-family homes rather than apartment-complex units, a handful of pricier listings can pull Zumper's three-bedroom median up sharply relative to RentCafe's broader leased-unit average — which is likely most of what's behind the $556 gap in that row.

*HUD figures via FairMarketRentMap, a secondary aggregator of HUD data for the Amarillo, TX HUD Metro FMR Area (Potter and Randall counties) — not pulled directly from huduser.gov, which returned no usable content on direct attempts. FairMarketRentMap's own page is also internally inconsistent about the fiscal year, labeling the figures FY2026 in its text while captioning the table "FY2027" — treat these as approximate until confirmed against HUD's own published tables.

Zumper also reports year-over-year changes alongside its October 2026 snapshot: studios up 5%, one-bedrooms up 6%, two-bedrooms up 7%, and three-bedrooms up 11%. Those are some of the fastest reported gains anywhere in this blog series, and they line up with Apartment List's broader July 2026 report, which put Amarillo's overall median rent at $1,225 — up 3.7% year-over-year, a pace it says outran both the Texas statewide average (down 2.9% over the same period) and the national average (down 1.2%). A citywide median that high, sitting above RentCafe's $1,023 average and most of Zumper's per-bedroom figures, suggests Apartment List's methodology is weighting toward larger or newer units than the other two trackers — another reminder that "average rent in Amarillo" depends heavily on which slice of the market a given source is sampling. For a slower-moving, non-listings benchmark: Census ACS five-year estimates put Amarillo's median gross rent at roughly $1,049 a month, per a secondary aggregator of that data (census.gov itself returned no usable content on direct attempts) — a figure that blends in long-tenured leases and sits between RentCafe's and Zumper's current citywide snapshots, which is about where a multi-year survey average should land relative to live market data.

Rent by Neighborhood

RentCafe's own neighborhood breakdown for Amarillo (all unit types combined) shows real, if modest, variation across the city — nothing like the multi-thousand-dollar spreads you see in larger Texas metros, but enough to matter for a renter comparing specific pockets of town:

• Historic Route 66 District — $1,192, the highest of RentCafe's tracked Amarillo neighborhoods, reflecting the renovated commercial-and-residential corridor along the old Route 66 alignment through town.
• Downtown Amarillo — $1,051, just above the citywide average, consistent with downtown's ongoing redevelopment push.
• Soncy — $1,037, a west-side retail-and-residential area near Interstate 40.
• Amarillo SouthWest — $1,000, right around the citywide average and one of the city's larger residential districts.
• Old San Jacinto — $923, RentCafe's lowest-priced tracked neighborhood, an older, centrally located district near the original Route 66 corridor.

That's roughly a $270 spread from Amarillo's priciest tracked neighborhood to its most affordable one — a narrower range than most major Texas metros in this series, which tracks with Amarillo's overall reputation as a flatter, more uniformly affordable rental market than Dallas, Austin, or San Antonio.

Local Factor: A Panhandle Economy Built on Cattle and Pantex

Amarillo's rental demand doesn't ride on tech layoffs or tourism swings the way many larger Texas markets do — it rides on two industries that are about as stable as American employment gets. The Texas Panhandle feeds roughly 28% of all fed cattle in the United States, according to Amarillo Mayor Ginger Nelson, and the region's cattle-feeding and beef-processing complex is expanding further: Producer Owned Beef, a Panhandle rancher-owned cooperative, broke ground on a $670 million beef-processing plant near Amarillo expected to employ more than 1,500 people once it ramps up, with construction completion pushed to late 2026 after delays. Layered on top of that agricultural base is Pantex, the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration facility just northeast of the city that assembles, disassembles, and maintains the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile. A July 2024 Pantex press release put its workforce at more than 4,600 people, up from roughly 3,100 a decade earlier, and the plant now calls itself the largest employer in the entire Texas Panhandle. Between a growing beef-processing sector and a federal facility with a multi-decade modernization mandate, Amarillo's renter base leans on two employment anchors that don't move with the broader economic cycle the way an oil-and-gas or tech-dependent Texas metro would — a quieter, steadier kind of demand that helps explain why rents here have kept climbing through 2026 even without the population boom driving growth in Austin or the Dallas suburbs.

2026 Rent Trends

Apartment List's July 2026 report is the clearest current read: Amarillo rents climbed 5.0% over the first half of 2026, a sharp reversal from the 0.6% decline the city saw over the same stretch of 2025, and the resulting 3.7% year-over-year gain outpaced both the Texas statewide figure and the national average reported for the same period. Zumper's October 2026 per-bedroom changes point the same direction, with every bedroom size up at least 5% year-over-year and three-bedrooms up 11% — the fastest-moving segment in the city's rental market this year.

Supply context is harder to pin down for Amarillo specifically. The most recent federal housing-market study, HUD's Comprehensive Housing Market Analysis for the Amarillo area, is dated July 2024 and put renter vacancy at 12.1%, down from 12.9% in 2020 — a study old enough that it should be read as historical context rather than a live 2026 figure, but it does establish that Amarillo entered this growth cycle with more vacant rental stock than tighter Texas metros like Dallas or Austin. A statewide view from Buildium notes that Amarillo has seen less new apartment construction than Texas's largest metros, which — paired with the demand anchors described above — is consistent with the accelerating 2026 rent growth both Apartment List and Zumper are reporting even without a hard, current vacancy number specific to the city.

One more figure worth knowing before signing an Amarillo lease has nothing to do with the rent itself: the security deposit. Texas Property Code § 92.103 requires a landlord to refund the deposit — or send a written, itemized list of deductions — within 30 days after the tenant surrenders the unit, as long as the tenant has given a forwarding address. § 92.109 backs that deadline with real teeth: a landlord who retains a deposit in bad faith owes the tenant $100, three times the amount wrongfully withheld, and reasonable attorney's fees, and a landlord who simply misses the 30-day window outright is presumed under the statute to have acted in bad faith unless they can show otherwise. Texas sets no cap on how large a security deposit can be and doesn't require landlords to pay interest on it, so that 30-day refund clock is the main statutory protection an Amarillo renter actually has.

Finding an Amarillo Rental Without Broker Fees

Amarillo's whole appeal for renters is affordability relative to Texas's larger metros, and a broker fee tacked onto move-in costs cuts directly into that advantage — on a $1,023 average unit, a traditional percentage-based fee can add weeks' worth of rent before a renter even gets the keys. EMLAKIE lists Amarillo rentals posted directly by the landlords and property managers who own them, with no broker fee of its own added anywhere in the process, so the rent you see listed is the rent you negotiate, without a third-party commission layered on top of one of the more affordable rental markets left in Texas.

Browse current Amarillo rentals on EMLAKIE — posted directly by landlords. EMLAKIE adds no broker fee, commission, or middleman markup of its own.