If you're a recent college grad and want to live alone without a roommate, you may have to move to Houston, Austin, Detroit or Cincinnati to find a rental apartment that won't consume a huge bite out of your income. Houston also has the distinction of being the only metro among 33 studied by Redfin that has shifted from being unaffordable to affordable for solo grads in 2024.

In the remaining metros, the recent grad would likely have no choice but to find a roommate to share the rent with. Redfin's study of 2024 data defined "affordable" to mean asking rent that is no more than 30% of the estimated income for recent college grads. Individuals paying a larger share than that were considered rent-burdened.

Even in San Jose, in the affluent Bay Area of California, where recent grads make an estimated $108,499 a year, they could only escape paying more than 30% by rooming with another person and splitting the rent evenly to bring their costs to 27.8% of their income for the median-priced two-bedroom apartment. That's down from 30.9% in 2023 and helped by a 1.8% slump in asking rents. It was a similar story for roommates in San Francisco, where rents fell 6.7% and new grads earned around $84,388. This city and Sacramento were the only other two in the nation that flipped to affordable from unaffordable for grads with roommates.