Who owns America's rentals? Mostly small landlords

HUD's November 2022 release on the 2021 Rental Housing Finance Survey, run with the Census Bureau, says: “Of the 49.5 million rental housing units in the U.S., nearly 46 percent are located in rental properties of one-to-four units.” By simple multiplication, 49.5 million × 0.46 is about 22.8 million units.

The Terner Center for Housing Innovation looks at the next size up. It defines small multifamily as five to 49 units and says these properties make up “about 17 percent of the nation's rental housing, totaling about 8.2 million units across nearly 500,000 properties.” These are two studies with two size bands and two sets of definitions, so do not add the shares together.

HUD's release says: “For these small rental properties, 70 percent (15.9 million) are owned by individual investors and more than one-third (8.1 million) have a mortgage or similar debt.” Across all sizes: “About 70 percent of rental properties, representing 38 percent of all rental units, are owned by individual investors.”

Read the second sentence slowly. Individual investors own about 70% of rental properties but 38% of rental units, because their buildings are small. Whether landlords are mostly small depends on whether you count buildings or apartments. By buildings, individuals dominate. By apartments, 62% of units (100 − 38) belong to owners other than individual investors.

HUD's release also says: “About 22 percent of small rental properties (1-4 units) are managed professionally.” The comparison at the other end is 84 percent of properties with 150 or more units. By subtraction, 78% of small rental properties are not managed professionally.

The Terner Center found a similar pattern one size up, in a survey of 5 to 49 unit properties from July to September 2022 with 764 qualifying respondents: “almost half of properties (45 percent) were managed entirely by the property owner.” These are different surveys of different size bands, so do not read them as one trend. Together they say that owners running their own buildings are not an exception.

The Federal Reserve Board's Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2025, released in May 2026 from a survey of nearly 13,000 adults, reports: “Twenty-three percent of renters reported that they had been behind on their rent at some point in the past year, up 2 percentage points from 2024 and 6 percentage points since 2021.” By subtraction, that was 21% in 2024 and 17% in 2021.

The limits matter. This is renters' own report over a year, nationwide. It is not a landlord's monthly late rate, and it does not say how many days late. If your residents matched the national sample, which is a big if, 23% of ten households is between two and three households behind at some point in a year (10 × 0.23 = 2.3).

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's January 2025 report on rental delinquencies used purchased rental payment data from September 2021 through November 2024. It looked at late fees: the share of renters paying one in the past 12 months rose from 15.4% at the end of 2021 to 23% at the start of 2023, then “declined to 14 percent by November 2024.” It put the average late fee at “around $85.” The 23% there is a different measure from the Federal Reserve's 23%, and the match is a coincidence. The CFPB data also ends before 2025.

The same Federal Reserve report finds that the burden is uneven: nearly one-third of renters with income under $50,000 were behind on rent. That is a national pattern across income groups and says nothing about whether any one landlord's residents are in that group.

We found no public survey that measures how much of a small landlord's rent arrives late, or what it costs them to chase it. The Federal Reserve and the CFPB see it from the renter's side. HUD and the Terner Center tell us who owns the buildings. The gap between those two sets of data is where a small landlord's own records sit.

Keep your own late-rent record: how many residents were late each month, by how many days, and what you charged. There is no benchmark for small portfolios, so your record is the benchmark.

Write down your late-rent routine once: when the reminder goes out, what the first message says, and what happens at day five. Notices about late rent and deposits are regulated and vary by state, so have those reviewed locally rather than copied from a template.

Decide your late-fee policy before you need it. The CFPB's average of around $85 is an average from payment data, not a standard or a legal limit, and what you may charge depends on your lease and your state.

If you manage yourself, as most owners of small buildings do, choose one place where all resident messages live, so a late-rent conversation is not split between your texts and your email.

PropLane sends rent reminders on a schedule you set and drafts replies for you to approve.