Average Rent in Laredo, TX (2026)

Laredo, Texas sits on the north bank of the Rio Grande directly across from Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas — a position that has shaped the city since Tomás Sánchez founded the Villa de San Agustín de Laredo in 1755, and that briefly made it the capital of the short-lived Republic of the Rio Grande in 1840. Today, Webb County's seat and Texas's tenth-largest city (an estimated 269,500 residents as of 2025) is known for one thing above all: trade. Laredo carries the informal title of the largest inland port in the United States, and it isn't just a slogan — the Laredo Port of Entry handled an estimated $353.94 billion in international trade in 2025 according to city and bridge officials, keeping it the nation's top land port even as it slipped to third overall, behind New York and Los Angeles, in a February 2026 ranking that folds air and sea ports into the same list. That freight-and-logistics economy sits directly underneath a rental market that remains inexpensive by national standards but has gotten noticeably cheaper over the past year. Zumper's October 2026 data puts Laredo's citywide average rent at $1,195 a month, down 11% from a year earlier and roughly 37% below the national median; a one-bedroom runs somewhere in the $897–$1,012 range depending on the tracker, a two-bedroom $1,082–$1,203, and a three-bedroom $1,512–$1,841, while studios are too thin a sample across every source to pin down with real confidence. Here's what the data from multiple trackers actually shows, source by source, plus what's driving a market that looks very different from the rest of booming Texas.

Average Rent in Laredo by Unit Type

RentCafe's Laredo page is a dead end for this exercise — the site tracks dozens of Texas cities, but it reports Laredo's own citywide average rent as "n/a," a sign of just how thin the commercial data pool is in a secondary border market. That leaves Zumper (live-listing data across apartments, condos, and houses), HUD's Fair Market Rent (a federal benchmark used to set Section 8 voucher payment standards, not a snapshot of market-rate asking rents), and Rentometer (which samples live listings somewhat differently than Zumper) as the trackers that actually publish Laredo figures by bedroom count.

*Zumper's studio figure is wildly out of line with every other data point in this table — nearly four times its own 4-bedroom average — and almost certainly reflects an extremely small studio listing pool rather than a real market rate. Laredo's rental stock runs heavily toward houses and larger apartments, and a tracker can only average the listings it actually has; treat the $7,500 figure as a sampling artifact, not a studio price, and use HUD's $949 FY2026 FMR estimate as the more reasonable studio reference point instead.

On the unit sizes where multiple trackers agree, the pattern is fairly consistent: Rentometer's figures run highest across the board, Zumper's live listings land in the middle, and HUD's federal benchmark — set near the 40th percentile of the entire metro's rental stock rather than today's asking rents — tracks closest to Zumper on one- and two-bedrooms but sits noticeably below both Zumper and Rentometer on three- and four-bedroom units. For additional context, U.S. Census Bureau data (2019–2023 American Community Survey 5-year estimates, the most recent vintage published) puts Laredo's median gross rent at $1,001 a month citywide — a figure that includes utilities and blends long-held leases signed years ago with current asking rents, which is part of why it lands below most of the current-listing trackers above it.

The honest range to plan around: a one-bedroom somewhere between $897 and $1,012 a month, a two-bedroom between $1,082 and $1,203, and a three-bedroom-or-larger unit anywhere from roughly $1,512 to $1,841 depending on the source, the neighborhood, and the building's age.

Rent by Neighborhood

Zumper's neighborhood-level data shows Laredo's internal spread is real but modest — nothing like the near-two-to-one gaps seen in larger Texas metros, which tracks with Laredo's rental stock being smaller and more uniform than Houston's or Dallas's. Crown Ridge, a newer subdivision on the city's north side, tops Zumper's tracked list at $1,195/month, right at the citywide average. Casa Verde Acres ($1,174) and Calton Gardens ($1,150) run close behind, both a bit above the city median. San Isidro checks in at $1,140, also near the top of the range. On the more affordable end, Las Lomas and Riverhill both average $1,060/month, while the Heights comes in lowest at $1,035 — roughly 13% below the citywide figure.

Zumper's data also flags a couple of smaller submarkets, including Killam Industrial Park and Plantation, with reported year-over-year swings so large (a 97.8% and 62.3% drop, respectively) that they almost certainly reflect a handful of listings churning in and out of a thin sample rather than an actual market move. Worth knowing if you're comparing one specific listing against a neighborhood average that might be built on very few underlying data points — in a market this size, a handful of leases can swing a whole submarket's reported average.

2026 Rent Trends: What's Driving the Market

If there's one number here that should surprise anyone assuming Texas rents only climb, it's this: Zumper's tracked average rent in Laredo is down 11% year-over-year as of October 2026 — a real decline, not a rounding error, and a sharper pullback than most Texas metros are posting right now. That runs counter to the picture in faster-growing parts of the state covered elsewhere in this series, where rent growth has mostly stayed positive even as it cools.

Laredo's economy doesn't look like a typical mid-size Texas metro's, and that's the likely reason. The city functions less like an ordinary regional hub and more like a dedicated logistics corridor: the Laredo Port of Entry — anchored by the World Trade Bridge, widely described as the busiest commercial truck crossing on the entire U.S.-Mexico border — moved an estimated $353.94 billion in trade in 2025 according to city and port officials, up $14.94 billion from 2024. Major freight carriers including Union Pacific, Werner, J.B. Hunt, and Schneider maintain large local operations, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection employs thousands of federal workers processing the thousands of commercial trucks that cross the World Trade Bridge daily. That trade-driven employment base has historically kept Laredo's rental demand relatively steady compared with metros more exposed to swings in tech or tourism.

But it also means Laredo's rental market tracks freight volume and cross-border trade policy as much as it tracks Texas's broader population growth story. Laredo's drop from the nation's single busiest overall port of entry to third overall (behind New York and Los Angeles) in early 2026 — while it held onto the top spot among land ports specifically — coincided with a period of tariff-related trade disruption that port officials have pointed to directly. That's a plausible contributor to softer rent growth heading into 2026, alongside new apartment supply that a market this size doesn't always absorb evenly. Nothing in the available data points to the market tightening back up quickly. A renter moving to Laredo in late 2026 is arriving at a genuinely softer point in the cycle than a year earlier — good timing for negotiating a lease, less a sign that the border economy is accelerating the way it was through 2024 and early 2025.

Finding a Laredo Rental Without Broker Fees

With rent already down double digits year-over-year and a market shaped as much by freight volume as by population growth, there's no reason to add a broker fee on top of an already-softening Laredo lease. EMLAKIE lists Laredo rentals posted directly by landlords and property managers, with no broker fee of its own added on top of the rent — whether you're looking in Crown Ridge, the Heights, or anywhere along the Interstate 35 corridor that carries much of the city's freight traffic. Texas law also gives renters real protections worth knowing before signing: Texas Property Code § 92.103 requires a landlord to refund a security deposit — or send a written, itemized list of deductions — within 30 days after a tenant moves out and provides a forwarding address, and § 92.109 makes a landlord who withholds a deposit in bad faith liable for $100, three times the amount wrongfully withheld, and the tenant's attorney's fees. Texas sets no statutory cap on how large a security deposit can be, so that 30-day refund deadline is the main statutory protection a Laredo renter actually has if a deposit dispute comes up.

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