Every rent figure on this site comes from a published government or industry dataset, loaded unchanged and recomputed on a schedule. This page says what each measure is, what it is not, and how to cite it. Nothing here is an appraisal or a rent quote.
Fair Market Rent is HUD's estimate of the 40th percentile of gross rent for standard quality units in a market, meaning rent plus tenant paid utilities. Small Area Fair Market Rent, SAFMR, computes that figure per ZIP code rather than per metro, which is why a Minneapolis ZIP and a neighboring suburb can carry different numbers.
Three things worth holding onto. FMR is published on a federal fiscal year basis, so FY2026 values take effect in the October before that calendar year ends. It is a percentile of the existing rent distribution, not a forecast and not a ceiling: 60 percent of units in a ZIP rent above it. Throughout this site the 2 bedroom figure is used as the headline benchmark because it is the most common voucher unit size and the most comparable across ZIP codes. Studio through 4 bedroom values are on every ZIP page.
Source: HUD User, Small Area Fair Market Rents, huduser.gov. Coverage on this site runs FY2021 through FY2026 across 914 Minnesota ZIP codes.
ZORI is a smoothed, repeat rent index of asking rents. Zillow tracks the same rental units over time and reports a monthly mean of listed asking rents in the 35th to 65th percentile band, weighted to reflect the whole rental housing stock rather than only what happens to be listed.
Two properties matter for reading it next to FMR. ZORI covers all unit sizes together, not 2 bedrooms alone, so a ZIP heavy in studios reads lower than its 2 bedroom reality. And it measures asking rent on units coming to market, not rent actually collected across every lease in place. ZORI is an index, not a quote for any address.
Zillow publishes ZORI only for ZIP codes with enough listing volume. On this site 172 of 914 Minnesota ZIP codes carry a ZORI series. Where a ZIP has fewer than six monthly points the trend line is suppressed and only the latest value tile is shown, because a two point line implies a trend the data cannot support. Source: Zillow Research, zillow.com/research/data.
The American Community Survey reports median gross rent, rent plus utilities, for occupied rental units by ZIP Code Tabulation Area. It is a survey of what renters actually pay, including long tenured tenants below market, so it typically reads below both FMR and ZORI.
ACS is a five year rolling estimate, so it lags and it smooths. It appears in the bedroom table on each ZIP page where the Census publishes a value for that ZCTA. Source: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey.
Spread is market rent minus the 2 bedroom fair market rent, in dollars. Spread percent is that difference divided by the fair market rent. A positive spread means asking rents run above the voucher payment standard. A negative spread means the payment standard sits at or above what landlords are asking.
Because the two inputs measure different things, one a 40th percentile 2 bedroom estimate on a fiscal year, the other an all sizes monthly index of asking rents, the spread is a screening signal for where to pull comps, not a valuation. It is most useful compared across ZIP codes in the same month, least useful read as a precise dollar figure for one building.
A ZIP is flagged voucher competitive when the 2 bedroom fair market rent meets or exceeds the Zillow market asking rent, that is, when the spread is zero or negative. In those ZIP codes a landlord renting to a Housing Choice Voucher tenant at the payment standard collects as much or more than chasing an open market tenant.
172 Minnesota ZIP codes carry both signals and appear on the Section 8 spread table. The flag is a first pass filter, not advice: local administrative practice, unit condition, and inspection timelines all affect whether a voucher tenancy actually pencils.
HUD publishes Small Area Fair Market Rents once a year, in the fall, for the fiscal year beginning that October. Zillow publishes ZORI monthly, generally in the first week, covering the prior month. Census ACS updates annually.
Pages are regenerated monthly after the Zillow release and again after each HUD release, so the ZIP, county, and Section 8 pages always reflect the newest available vintage of each source. Every page and every API payload carries its own last modified date drawn from the import timestamp of the underlying rows, not from the day the page was rebuilt. Current vintages: HUD FY2026, Zillow ZORI through 2026-07, last updated 2026-09-05.
Four limits are worth stating plainly, because they change how these numbers should be used.
Payment standards are not included. A public housing authority sets its own payment standard anywhere from 90 to 110 percent of the published FMR, and may go higher with HUD approval. Nothing on this site adjusts for the specific PHA that administers vouchers in a given Minnesota ZIP. Treat FMR as the base the payment standard is built from, then confirm the actual standard with the housing authority before you underwrite voucher income.
Unit condition is invisible. Neither FMR nor ZORI knows whether a unit was renovated last year or last decade. Two properties on the same block can rent 30 percent apart.
Bedroom mix differs between the sources. The FMR benchmark used here is a 2 bedroom. ZORI blends every unit size in the ZIP. In ZIP codes dominated by studios and one bedrooms the market rent figure understates what a 2 bedroom actually asks.
ZIP codes are not neighborhoods. A single ZIP can span a downtown core and a low density edge with very different rent levels. The ZIP median hides that range.
The compiled dataset on this site is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Use it, redistribute it, build on it commercially. Attribution is the only condition.
Cite as: Pencilwrite MN Rent Data, pencilwrite.com/rents/. Underlying sources retain their own terms: HUD SAFMR is public domain, Zillow ZORI is published by Zillow Research under its own terms of use, and Census ACS is public domain. Machine readable copies of every table are at the data API, and an agent oriented summary is at /llms-full.txt.
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