The 25 New Jersey Towns Where Rent Jumped the Most This Year

If you renewed a lease anywhere in New Jersey this year and felt your stomach drop at the new number, you're not imagining it. Statewide rent kept climbing through 2026, and depending on your zip code, "climbing" might be generous. We pulled year-over-year rent data for towns across the state to see where renters got hit hardest, and the results aren't just the usual suspects.

A couple of Mercer County towns show up, which tracks with what HUD's own Fair Market Rent data has been flagging all year, but so does a Shore town that's been having a moment for a decade now, plus a handful of quiet Bergen and Essex County suburbs nobody's talking about.

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How We Ranked These Towns

We used average rent data from RentCafe, which pulls from Yardi Matrix and U.S. Census Bureau numbers, and compared each town's current average rent to what it was roughly a year earlier (most towns are measured through August or September 2026). We checked more than 45 municipalities spanning the Shore, North Jersey, Central Jersey, and South Jersey, then ranked the 25 with the biggest year-over-year percentage increase.

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A Couple of Caveats

A few classic Jersey Shore towns you'd expect to see here, like Wildwood, Cape May, and Ocean City, don't have enough large-scale apartment rental data to generate a reliable average, since so much of their housing stock is single-family shore rentals and owner-occupied homes rather than big rental complexes.

This list also tracks apartment rent specifically, not property taxes or home sale prices, so landing here doesn't automatically mean home values are spiking too. With that out of the way, let's count it down.