Average Rent in Arlington, TX (2026)

Arlington sits almost exactly halfway between Dallas and Fort Worth, and the city has built its economy around being the thing both cities come to rather than the place either one owns. AT&T Stadium and Globe Life Field anchor an Entertainment District that pulls NFL and MLB crowds off I-30 and I-20 all year, Six Flags Over Texas runs a few miles further down the highway, General Motors still operates a full assembly plant on the city's east side, and the University of Texas at Arlington sits a few minutes from downtown, feeding a steady stream of student and young-professional renters into the surrounding apartment stock. None of that is small-city economics — it's the reason Arlington has its own distinct rental market instead of just functioning as a cheaper Dallas suburb or a cheaper Fort Worth suburb. But it also means Arlington absorbs overflow demand from pricier submarkets in both directions, while simultaneously competing for tenants against one of the largest waves of new apartment construction Dallas-Fort Worth has seen in decades. That tension between strong structural demand and a temporary supply glut is what shapes almost every number below. Here's what the data actually shows.

Average Rent in Arlington by Unit Type

RentCafe and Zumper are the two biggest third-party trackers that break Arlington out as its own city rather than folding it into the wider Fort Worth-Arlington metro area, but they build their averages differently — RentCafe weights its figures toward larger, professionally managed communities, while Zumper leans more on live listing data and refreshes its unit-type medians close to monthly. The two don't agree on every number, and where they diverge is informative in its own right.

The two sources land within about $10 of each other on studios and within roughly $60 on one-bedrooms, but split in opposite directions on three-bedrooms — RentCafe's $1,973 average sits more than $160 below Zumper's $2,135, likely because Zumper's live-listing sample skews toward newer, larger-format units that are less common across Arlington's older garden-apartment stock. RentCafe puts the city's blended, all-unit-type average rent at $1,366 a month, up a modest 0.62% year-over-year from $1,357 — essentially flat growth, not a boom or a correction.

For a broader reference point, the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey puts Arlington's median gross rent (which folds in utilities) at $1,389 for the 2019-2023 period — a figure that lands between the two trackers' one- and two-bedroom averages and confirms Arlington's typical renter pays somewhere in the $1,100–$1,500 range depending on unit size. HUD's Fair Market Rents add a fourth data point: for FY2026, the Fort Worth-Arlington-Grapevine HUD Metro FMR Area that covers Tarrant County is listed at roughly $1,075 (studio), $1,300 (1BR), $1,600 (2BR), $2,075 (3BR), and $2,475 (4BR) by FMR aggregator FairMarketRentMap.com — figures that track close to the top of RentCafe's and Zumper's ranges, meaning Arlington's market rents for larger units generally sit at or below the standard used to set housing-voucher payments in the city. That's a meaningful detail for voucher holders specifically: when market rent trails the FMR a landlord can charge up to, Section 8 tenants in Arlington typically face less of a gap to make up out of pocket than their counterparts in tighter submarkets closer to Dallas's urban core, where market rents routinely run ahead of the metro's published FMR.

Rent by Neighborhood

Arlington's rental market doesn't split cleanly into "Entertainment District vs. everywhere else." RentCafe's neighborhood-level averages show a spread of more than $1,100 between the city's priciest and most affordable tracked pockets:

• Harris Crossing — $2,209/month, Arlington's priciest tracked neighborhood
• Westway — $1,713/month
• Downtown Arlington — $1,534/month, within walking distance of the Entertainment District and AT&T Stadium
• Rolling Meadows — $1,398/month
• Parkway Central — $1,387/month
• Parkway North — $1,244/month
• Brookhollow — $1,184/month
• Forest Lake — $1,055/month, among the most affordable tracked neighborhoods in the city

RentCafe doesn't publish a bedroom-count breakdown at the neighborhood level, so treat these as whole-market averages rather than apples-to-apples unit comparisons. Zoomed out to the county, Tarrant County as a whole has averaged noticeably higher than Arlington on RentCafe's own county-level page — a gap driven mainly by higher-end submarkets like Southlake and Colleyville pulling the countywide number up, while Arlington's mix of older garden apartments and mid-rise communities keeps its citywide average closer to the middle of the Metroplex. Proximity to UT Arlington also shapes demand in a way the city-level averages don't fully capture: the neighborhoods closest to campus and to Downtown Arlington's entertainment core tend to carry a premium over equivalent-sized units just a mile or two further out in South Arlington, simply because students and stadium-district workers are willing to trade square footage for a shorter commute.

2026 Rent Trends

Marcus & Millichap's Dallas-Fort Worth 2Q 2026 multifamily market report frames this year as a rebalancing, not a correction. The firm expects metro-wide apartment vacancy to fall to 6.6% by year-end 2026, a 40-basis-point improvement over 2025, while effective rents grow by about 1.8% — a return to slow, positive rent growth after a construction-driven glut pushed concessions higher across 2024 and 2025. The report also credits the metro's population growth, which it ranks first in the nation in absolute terms as of March 2026, with net in-migration accounting for roughly 70% of that gain.

Supply is the half of the story moving most clearly in landlords' favor. Marcus & Millichap projects roughly 21,000 new apartment units delivered across North Texas in 2026, down sharply from about 30,000 in 2025 and more than 44,000 at the market's 2024 peak. CRE Daily's September 2026 coverage of a Northmarq report backs that up from the demand side: Dallas-Fort Worth posted nearly 20,000 units of net absorption at midyear 2026 — more than any other major U.S. market, including New York and Phoenix — while developers delivered only about 13,000 units in the Dallas metro over the same stretch. That absorption-outpacing-supply dynamic is what both firms expect to keep tightening vacancy through the back half of 2026, even though Dallas asking rents were still close to flat (around $1,496, down about 0.5%) as of that report.

Investor activity backs up the renter-demand story in Arlington specifically: multifamily buyers have been targeting North Arlington, drawn by renters priced out of Dallas's and Fort Worth's core submarkets who still want Entertainment District proximity and easy highway access — a dynamic that keeps occupancy pressure on Arlington's existing apartment stock even as metro-wide deliveries slow. That tracks with what Zumper's unit-type data shows locally: Arlington's 2-bedroom and 3-bedroom rents are up modestly year-over-year (4% and 3%, respectively) while studios actually fell 7%, suggesting smaller, often older units are still working through oversupply even as family-sized apartments tighten. For renters, that split cuts both ways depending on what you're searching for: a single renter chasing a studio or efficiency unit in late 2026 is negotiating from a position of relative strength, with landlords still competing on price and concessions in that segment, while a family looking for a 3-bedroom is more likely to find flat-to-rising asking rents and fewer concessions to work with. Either way, the window where DFW-wide supply growth outpaces demand is closing — Marcus & Millichap's and Colliers' construction pipelines both point to meaningfully fewer deliveries in 2027 than 2026, which is typically when metro-wide rent growth starts accelerating again.

Finding an Arlington Rental Without Broker Fees

With Arlington rents spread across more than a $1,100 range depending on neighborhood, and a market that's actively rebalancing between falling studio rents and tightening family-sized units, getting an accurate read on what you should actually pay matters more than it does in a flatter market. Emlakie lists Arlington rentals directly from landlords and property managers, with no broker fee of its own added on top of rent — so the price you see for that Downtown Arlington one-bedroom or Forest Lake two-bedroom is the price you negotiate, not a number inflated to cover a commission neither you nor the landlord asked for. Search current Arlington listings on Emlakie to compare real, up-to-date asking rents by neighborhood and unit type before you sign anything. And if your landlord does collect a security deposit, Texas Property Code § 92.103 gives you the right to a refund within 30 days of moving out — with § 92.109 entitling you to $100 plus three times any amount wrongfully withheld, plus attorney's fees, if they retain it in bad faith.

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