Feeling a little cramped in your Seattle apartment? You’re not just imagining it, especially if you live in a newer building: apartments built in the past decade in Seattle are the smallest in the country. A recent analysis looked at apartment sizes in the 100 largest cities in the U.S. and ranked Seattle at the top of the list (in a bad way).
Read on for the details!
Although the national average size of apartments started getting larger again in 2024, that trend doesn’t apply to Seattle. According to the study, the average apartment size in the U.S. increased to 908 square feet in 2024.
Meanwhile, apartments built between 2014 and 2024 in Seattle were an average size of 649 square feet. In those 10 years, newly-built apartments shrank by 57 square feet, or almost 10%. The average rent in Seattle is $2,232.
For comparison, here are the average sizes of new apartments in some other large US cities:
- Portland, OR: 668 square feet
- San Francisco, CA: 716 square feet
- Manhattan, NY: 738 square feet
- Chicago, IL: 769 square feet
- Boston, MA: 772 square feet
- Los Angeles, CA: 789 square feet
- Phoenix, AZ: 852 square feet
- Austin, TX: 872 square feet
- Orlando, FL: 969 square feet
Note that this study only looked at newer apartments built after 2014. So if you’re looking for more living space in the Seattle area, you may have more luck with an older apartment building.
You can read the entire analysis in more detail over on RentCafe.