Garland sits just northeast of Dallas, inside Dallas County, and it is a city most people outside North Texas have never heard of despite being the second-largest city in the county after Dallas itself — an estimated 243,470 residents as of mid-2023, per the U.S. Census Bureau, down slightly from its 2020 base of 246,121. It is almost entirely residential and industrial rather than a destination city: the local economic development office lists manufacturing and distribution as top sectors, anchored by employers like Kraft Heinz — whose Garland plant is the company's largest manufacturer of Lunchables, Oscar Mayer Naturals, Kraft barbecue sauce, and Velveeta Skillets — alongside Sherwin-Williams, Epiroc, and Garland ISD. Its other defining feature is almost purely recreational: Lake Ray Hubbard, the reservoir that runs along Garland's eastern and southeastern border, gives the city a genuine waterfront that most Dallas-area renters never associate with it. That combination — a durable blue-collar job base, lake access, and a location close enough to Dallas to commute into but priced well under it — is exactly the kind of market where published rent figures start to diverge depending on who is doing the counting. Here's what the data actually shows.
Average Rent in Garland by Unit Type
The two major apartment-data aggregators that track Garland do not agree with each other, and the size of the gap says something about how each one builds its number. RentCafe, which draws on Yardi Matrix's property-level lease data, put Garland's average rent at $1,445 as of October 2026 — down 1.3% from $1,464 a year earlier. Zumper, which indexes active for-rent listings rather than signed leases, put the city's median asking rent at $1,795 over the same month, up 8.8% year-over-year. RentCafe's per-unit averages run well below Zumper's across most bedroom counts, which is consistent with a lease-based sample that mixes long-tenured renewals and older in-place rents in with units that just turned over at a fresh asking price — exactly the kind of gap landlords and renters both run into when they compare "the market rate" against what a lease actually says.
| Unit Type | RentCafe (Oct 2026) | Zumper (Oct 2026) | HUD FY2026 SAFMR, ZIP 75040 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Studio | $961 | $1,195 | $1,580 |
| 1 Bedroom | $1,243 | $1,126 | $1,650 |
| 2 Bedroom | $1,578 | $1,610 | $1,930 |
| 3 Bedroom | $1,958 | $2,050 | $2,430 |
Two things are worth flagging in that table before drawing conclusions from it. First, Zumper's own studio figure ($1,195) comes in above its one-bedroom figure ($1,126), which is backwards from the usual size-to-price relationship and almost certainly reflects a thin listing sample for one or both categories rather than a real market quirk — a known limitation of listing-based indexes in a mid-size suburb rather than a major metro core. Second, the HUD figures are consistently the highest in the table, and that is by design, not because Garland's cheapest units actually rent for $1,580: Fair Market Rents are set to approximate the 40th-to-50th percentile of gross rents across the broader Dallas HUD Metro FMR Area and are used to set housing-voucher payment standards, not to describe typical asking rents in Garland specifically. For a broader, if slower-moving, reference point, the Census Bureau's American Community Survey puts Garland's median gross rent at $1,525 for the 2019–2023 five-year period — a figure that lands between RentCafe's and Zumper's current citywide averages, which is about where a multi-year survey average should sit relative to live market snapshots in a market that has cooled and then reheated over that window.
Garland's numbers are also worth sizing against Dallas proper. RentCafe's own Dallas page (drawing on the same Yardi Matrix data source) puts the city's average rent at roughly $1,580 to $1,593 as of mid-2026. On RentCafe's apples-to-apples methodology, that puts Garland's $1,445 average meaningfully below Dallas — a gap of roughly 9 to 10 percent — which lines up with Garland's longstanding reputation among North Texas renters as the more affordable, more residential alternative just across the county line.
Rent by Neighborhood
RentCafe's neighborhood-level data for Garland comes at the level of specific named subdivisions and apartment communities rather than broad district labels, so the list below uses its actual reported figures rather than invented district names. It spans a wide range, from the newer communities near the city's north side to older, lower-cost stock closer to its southern and western edges:
- Villages of Valley Creek — $1,968
- Wellington Run — $1,870
- Shoal Creek — $1,639
- Camelot — $1,415
- Southgate — $1,396
- Lakeview Village — $1,340
- Western Heights — $1,222
- Faulkner Point — $1,045
That is a roughly $900 spread from the top to the bottom of RentCafe's named Garland communities — a wider range than the citywide unit-type averages alone would suggest, and a reminder that "average rent in Garland" compresses a lot of variation between its northern communities and its older southern and western pockets.
2026 Rent Trends
The clearest 2026 read comes from the metro level, where Marcus & Millichap's first-quarter Dallas-Fort Worth multifamily forecast expects renter demand to stay strong — population growth ranking among the 10 fastest in the nation this year — while apartment deliveries fall to less than half of 2025's level and employment grows by an estimated 25,000 jobs. The firm's reporting has put 2026 vacancy improving by roughly 80 basis points (to somewhere between 5.9% and 6.6%, depending on which of its own releases you read) with effective rents rising about 1.8% metro-wide. Yardi Matrix's March 2026 Dallas report tells a more cautious version of the same story at the start of the year: average advertised asking rents across Dallas-Fort Worth were down 1.9% year-over-year as of January 2026, to $1,509, even as roughly 42,700 units remained under construction region-wide. The two firms are measuring slightly different things — effective rents on signed leases versus advertised asking rents on vacant units — which is a big part of why one shows growth and the other shows contraction in the same market over a similar window.
At the Garland level specifically, Point2Homes' May 2026 tracking put the city's average apartment rent at $1,433, down 1.1% year-over-year, with a rental vacancy rate around 4.9% — tighter than the metro-wide figures above, consistent with Garland's reputation as a landlord's market relative to newer, more heavily-supplied submarkets like Frisco or Allen-McKinney where most of the region's new construction is concentrated. An earlier Berkadia forecast (published in December 2024, so it predates current conditions and should be read as dated context rather than a live 2026 call) projected Garland to rank among the metro's top five submarkets for net absorption, specifically because it offers more budget-friendly effective rents than DFW's newer-supply corridors.
Put together, the honest through-line is this: Garland isn't where the region's new supply is landing, which is keeping its vacancy tighter than the DFW average even while metro-wide asking rents wobble between modest growth and modest declines depending on whose number you trust. For renters, that tightness hasn't translated into runaway pricing — Garland's own tracked average was flat to slightly down through the first half of 2026 — but it does mean fewer newly built units competing for a lease than in Dallas-Fort Worth's fast-growing northern suburbs.
One more number worth knowing before signing a Garland 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 a Garland renter actually has.
Finding a Garland Rental Without Broker Fees
Garland's whole value proposition for renters is affordability relative to Dallas proper, and a broker fee tacked onto move-in costs eats directly into that advantage — on a $1,445 average unit, a traditional percentage-based fee can add another month or more of rent before a renter even gets the keys. EMLAKIE lists Garland rentals posted directly by landlords and property managers, 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 a market that's already working hard to stay affordable.
Browse current Garland rentals on EMLAKIE — posted directly by landlords. EMLAKIE adds no broker fee, commission, or middleman markup of its own.