South Jersey’s Climbing Rent Prices: A Breakdown By County

Zillow has published its annual look at New Jersey apartment rental prices, and, to no one's surprise, they are climbing.

Rental costs went up 5.5 percent statewide between January 2024 and January 2025, and while they aren't as high as North Jersey rentals, apartment prices in South Jersey counties have increased as well.

New Jersey is the 7th least affordable state for renters, according to the 2024 Out of Reach report released by the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

Most low-income residents need to work two jobs to afford a two-bedroom home, according to the study.

Since Zillow did not have enough data to show year-over-year changes in Cape May and Salem counties, we used 2025 statistics from Apartments.com for those counties.

Atlantic County:

- Jan. 2024 typical rental cost: $1,887

- Jan. 2025 typical rental cost: $1,997

(Yearly change: 5.82%)

Cape May County:

Jan. 2025 typical rental cost: $2,342

Conclusions

New Jersey's poor are the hardest hit by these apartment rental price increases.

Across the state, there is a shortage of affordable and available rental options for extremely low-income households.

The National Low Income Housing Coalition finds that many of these households are severely "cost-burdened", spending more than half of their income on housing.

Severely cost-burdened poor households are more likely than other renters to sacrifice other necessities like healthy food and healthcare to pay the rent, and to experience unstable housing situations like evictions