Life as a renter is more complicated than just making enough money to pay your landlord each month. To qualify for a lease, you might need to show that you earn at least three times the monthly rent.
In Utah, the average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment is just under $1,300, according to Zillow. That means most prospective tenants will have to make roughly $4,000 per month, or $48,000 a year, to get in the door.
For many Utahns, that can be a challenge.
Andrew Riggle was born with cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair to get around. He lived in a downtown Salt Lake City studio apartment for 15 years before health and safety reasons at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic forced him to move back in with his parents in Sandy.
He hasn’t moved out yet, but it’s not for a lack of trying.
“The cost of rent and cost of living were so much lower back then,” he said. “[Now], most market-rate buildings, and especially the ones that market themselves as luxury buildings have a criteria where you have to have income of usually two to three times the monthly rental amount, even before they will consider you.”
Riggle has a steady job as a policy advocate for the Disability Law Center of Utah, which he said is “a little bit of a unique situation for somebody with a disability in that I make pretty good money.”
But he’s just shy of the income threshold for a place of his own with full Americans with Disabilities Act compliance.
Even though a prospective tenant might make enough money to afford each month’s rent, it can come as a shock to some to learn that they still might not be eligible to sign a lease.
There is nothing that requires landlords to implement an income threshold in their leases. Landlords in Utah can ask prospective tenants to verify their credit history, prove income, or show other things like employment or rental history as long as that standard is applied to all applicants.
It’s an issue Riely White deals with on a regular basis. He and his partner own a quadplex near Salt Lake City’s Liberty Park and have been landlords for the last three years. For him and fellow landlords across the industry, those income requirements are pretty standard and do serve an important purpose.
“It's really because leasing a unit takes time and there's costs to us if somebody is to come into the unit and then not be able to pay the rent,” he said. “Either we have to, you know, move them out, or, God forbid, evict them, or they move out on their own.”
And both vacancy and eviction cost landlords money.
In short, there’s a lot of risk for landlords when it comes to their tenants. Think of an income threshold like an insurance policy. If everyone in a building is making at least three times the monthly rent, the risk is pretty low that someone won’t be able to pay.
The catch today is that rents have risen much faster than salaries. The University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute found that from 2016-2021, rent outpaced wage growth in counties along the Wasatch Front by an average of almost 20%.
“I don't think I'm the only one who's, who's who's being affected by this, and having their and having their potential options possibly limited as a result of it,” Riggle said.
According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, more than 75% of Utah’s lowest income households are spending more than half their income on housing. That has many housing advocates, like Utah Housing Coalition Executive Director Tara Rollins, concerned.
“When you look at, you know, how much somebody has to make even working a minimum wage job, you have to work 124 hours [a week] to be able to afford that fair market rent,” she said.
The fair market rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Salt Lake City will top $1,450 in FY2025, meaning an individual will need to make more than $27 an hour to comfortably afford rent.
According to Rollins, it's been common advice for decades that no more than 30% of your take-home pay should go toward housing. But in the current rental and economic landscape, that might not be feasible for many Utahns. Even for middle-income earners, over 17% of households are spending more than that recommended amount on housing.
The good news for renters is that there is a workaround for these income requirements that even landlords are into: roommates.
“We’ll do the collective rent-paying body,” said White. “So if there's two people on the lease, then their income would be combined to qualify. There's been examples of that, where one person is a student, one person is working, and that allows them to both qualify.”
But roommates can come with complications of their own. Think of Riggle, who has special housing needs to meet before he even considers looking for roommates. Things could also get tricky for a family with young children where one parent might have to leave the workforce, effectively making them a one-income household.
For Riggle, he’ll keep looking for housing of his own, but admits that right now he’s “probably more on the discouraged side.”
“Fortunately, I have a supportive family who are letting me be the troll in the dungeon for as long as I need to be,” he said. “We both would like for the situation to change, but I don't think either of us see a way in the foreseeable future for that to realistically happen.”
In the meantime, he asks landlords to be as transparent as possible about any income requirements, credit checks or fees before the application process even starts.
