Alaska residential rental costs used to be the highest in the nation.

Now the typical rent in Alaska is about the same as the national median for the first time on record, and 19 states have higher rental prices, according to an analysis by state economists.

That is a dramatic turnaround from the past.

In the first decades of statehood, rental prices in Alaska were far higher than those in any other state. In 1980, for example, Alaska’s median rent was about 50% above the national level and 18% higher than Hawaii, which then had the second-most expensive rental costs. Even in 2016, Alaska’s median rent was the nation’s sixth-highest, about the same as that in New York and Massachusetts, the analysis found. In a group of numbers, the median refers to the one in the middle, with half higher and half lower.

The analysis is published in Alaska Economic Trends, the monthly magazine of the Department of Labor and Workforce Development’s research section. It uses information from 2023, which is the most recent data available.

The study compares states’ gross rents, as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau, which include utilities.

Alaska’s median gross rent was $1,373 in 2023, the analysis said. California had the highest median rent of $1,992 that year, followed by Hawaii at $1,940 and the District of Columbia at $1,904.

Rental prices have risen over the years in all states, but the increase in Alaska over the past decades has been slower than that elsewhere.

That is not necessarily good news or bad news for Alaskans, and it does not necessarily mean that rents are cheap in Alaska, said Rob Kreiger, a state labor economist and co-author of the Trends article.

“Clearly, rents are moving up at a faster rate in the rest of the country than they are here. But we don’t know whether they are more affordable here than there,” he said. Affordability depends on how much renters are able to spend, he said. “You could have situations where wages are quite low and rent is less affordable,” he said.

Alaska’s rent trends roughly track the ebbs and flows of the state’s economy and demographic changes and the way Alaska conditions have compared to those in the Lower 48 states.

Twelve consecutive years of net outmigration – with more people leaving the state than moving in – was one factor that pushed Alaska’s rent-price ranking lower, the analysis said. So were the job losses related to an oil price slump from 2015 to 2018. The COVID-19 pandemic affected all states’ economies and rental prices, but Alaska had a slower post-pandemic recovery, the researchers note.

The inclusion of utilities as part of gross rents is a factor that may have slowed the increase in Alaska costs. Natural gas provided by utilities is much cheaper than the heating oil that Alaskans relied on in past decades, the report notes.

The findings include information about rental vacancy rates, which are now higher in Alaska than in the nation as a whole. That is a switch in recent years; from 2005 to about 2012, Alaska had a tighter rental market, with vacancy rates that were lower than the national rate, but since then Alaska’s rates have been higher or about the same as the national rate, according to the analysis. That is despite home construction activity that has been consistently lower in recent years than in the past, Kreiger said.

Still, it is difficult to calculate a statewide vacancy rate “because it varies so much from place to place,” he said. Parts of rural Alaska have dire housing shortages, for example.

While the comparison to national rates is new, the department’s research section does regular analysis of rental costs differences within Alaska.

The researchers, in cooperation with the Alaska Housing Finance Corp., publish annual reports on rental costs at different state locations, based on costs each March.

The most recent report found that among 10 regions, median rents in 2024 for two-bedroom apartments were lowest in the Wrangell-Petersburg area, at $1,081 a month, and highest in the Kodiak Island Borough, at $1,713 a month. Juneau ranked fourth highest at $1,561.

• Yereth Rosen came to Alaska in 1987 to work for the Anchorage Times. She has reported for Reuters, for the Alaska Dispatch News, for Arctic Today and for other organizations. She covers environmental issues, energy, climate change, natural resources, economic and business news, health, science and Arctic concerns. This article originally appeared online at alaskabeacon.com. Alaska Beacon, an affiliate of States Newsroom, is an independent, nonpartisan news organization focused on connecting Alaskans to their state government.