SparkyData

NYC Renter Households: Income, Rent and Rent Burden

Public-use microdata from the article “The six-figure renter”

Not synthetic. Disclosure-protected survey records published by a government statistical agency, cut to the people or households we looked at.

Records
Public-use microdata
Place
New York City
Version
1.10.2,
Licence
CC BY 4.0; code MIT
Built for
The six-figure renter (version 1.10.2)

A six-figure income doesn't settle whether a New York household can afford its rent. About 93,000 six-figure renter households pay 30% or more of their income in rent; the most exposed are roommates pooling smaller incomes and recent movers. Count tax and a basic budget, and families with children join them, most from under the official line. Since 2024, rents have outpaced pay.

The article's own data file, microdata cut to what it analyses, and the script that computes every figure in it. Computed from: ACS 2020–2024 five-year PUMS, NY–NJ–CT extract, with the 2024 one-year file for the sensitivity check; BLS rent index for the New York area and average hourly earnings in New York City to August 2026.

Files

FileRowsSizeWhat it holds
data.csv 26,140 5.2 MB The microdata the article's figures are computed from.
analysis.py 110 KB The script that computes every figure in the article (MIT).

Columns

data.csv: The data (26 columns)

row_id, weight, borough, household_income, monthly_gross_rent, rent_share_of_income_pct, burdened, household_type, household_size, n_adults, n_earners, max_person_earnings, own_children_under_18, householder_age, moved_in, bedrooms, year_built_from, building_units_code, pre1970_building_5plus_units, filing_status_assumed, estimated_tax_2024, take_home, rent_share_of_take_home_pct, tcol_group, basic_budget_2024, left_after_tax_rent_and_basic_budget. The article and its script define each one.

Sources

Licence and credit

The survey records are the publishing agency's, redistributed as published; the columns we derived are CC BY 4.0; the script is MIT. Public-use microdata are disclosure-protected records derived from survey responses, published by the issuing agency so that no respondent can be identified; synthetic records are generated by SparkyData and correspond to no real person, household or address. Neither may be used to identify anyone.

Credit it as:

SparkyData (2026). NYC Renter Households: Income, Rent and Rent Burden (version 1.10.2). Data CC BY 4.0.
https://sparkydata.dev/data/nyc-renter-households-income-and-rent-burden

The article gives the charts, the uncertainty of each comparison and a changelog. Corrections and questions: sparkytech.dev@gmail.com, or see corrections.