How to Rent an Apartment in St. Louis: What to Check Before You Sign
Revised August 16, 2026
How much do apartments cost in St. Louis?
That $1,113 is the honest middle, and it is a “gross” figure — contract rent plus the utilities the tenant pays. County by county the same survey runs from $893 in Franklin County to $979 in Jefferson County, $997 in the City of St. Louis, $1,209 in St. Louis County and $1,370 in St. Charles County. On the Illinois side it lands at $1,024 in Madison County, $1,042 in Monroe County and $1,090 in St. Clair County.
Keep reading ↓Imagine it’s a Tuesday in March and the renewal notice is folded under your door in Maryland Heights. Sixty days to decide, and the new number is eighty dollars higher than the one you signed last spring. You open a listing app on the couch, and by ten o’clock you have nine tabs, four saved searches and no real idea which of those buildings is worth a Saturday.
Then the search drifts, the way it always does. A two-bedroom in Affton with a garage. A rehabbed flat in Maplewood over a storefront. Something in Belleville that costs three hundred less until you price the 7:40 crawl over the Poplar Street Bridge. Your sister in St. Charles says just move out there. Your friend in Florissant says the exact opposite, and neither of them has read a lease in years.
The part nobody mentions is the part that decides it: the sequence you follow, the clauses you sign, and the fact that Missouri and Illinois answer the same deposit question in two different ways. Here’s the version worth reading before you tour anything.
How do you find an apartment in St. Louis without losing a month to it?
Set your rent ceiling first, narrow to two or three municipalities second, and only then start touring. Reversing that order is what turns a two-week search into a two-month one. Across the metro, median gross rent was $1,113 a month in the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey five-year estimates covering 2020 through 2024.
How much do apartments cost in St. Louis? That $1,113 is the honest middle, and it is a “gross” figure — contract rent plus the utilities the tenant pays. County by county the same survey runs from $893 in Franklin County to $979 in Jefferson County, $997 in the City of St. Louis, $1,209 in St. Louis County and $1,370 in St. Charles County. On the Illinois side it lands at $1,024 in Madison County, $1,042 in Monroe County and $1,090 in St. Clair County.
Those medians cover every occupied rental, including long-held leases. Listing-site averages are asking rents on units available right now, which is why the two never match. Treat the census figure as the market’s gravity and the listing number as today’s weather. Printed numbers age fast, so verify the current ask on the specific building.
Where in the metro are the apartments actually located?
Renters are about 30% of occupied homes across the metro, but that share swings hard by municipality, and the swing tells you where inventory is. In the City of St. Louis, 55% of occupied homes are rentals. In St. Louis County it is 31%; in St. Charles County, 19%. All from the same 2020 through 2024 Census Bureau five-year estimates.
Zoom in and the map gets useful. Maplewood is 60% renter-occupied, Richmond Heights 46%, Clayton 45%, University City 44%, Maryland Heights 43%, Belleville 40%, Brentwood 37%, Florissant 33%, Edwardsville 33%. Compare that to Kirkwood at 23% and Affton at 19%. Same metro, wildly different odds of finding three buildings worth touring on one Saturday.
The Illinois side reads cheaper on paper — Belleville’s median gross rent is $1,019 against the metro’s $1,113 — and for some households it genuinely is. Price the whole picture anyway: the bridge commute, the parking you may have to buy downtown, and the different landlord-tenant rules covered further down. A hundred dollars of rent savings evaporates quickly at 5 p.m. on Interstate 64.
What do you need to apply, and what is the landlord checking?
Bring photo ID, two recent pay stubs or an offer letter, a bank statement, and contact details for your last two landlords. Most leasing offices underwrite to roughly three times the monthly rent in gross household income, plus a credit, criminal and eviction-record screen. That is an industry convention, not a law, and it varies building to building.
Application fees are generally non-refundable in both states, and neither Missouri nor Illinois sets a statutory cap on them. That single fact should change your behavior: apply to your first choice, not to five buildings at once. If you are turned down because of something in a credit or tenant-screening report, federal law requires an adverse action notice telling you which company supplied it, so you can get a free copy and dispute errors. The Federal Trade Commission spells out that obligation for landlords.
Screening has limits. The federal Fair Housing Act bars discrimination on race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status and disability, and HUD enforces it. Complaints on the Missouri side also go to the Missouri Commission on Human Rights; on the Illinois side, to the Illinois Department of Human Rights. Reasonable accommodations for a disability, including assistance animals, sit under that same law and are not a pet-policy question.
Unrelated, and we know it — your new building’s gym is probably terrible.
What should you read in the lease before you sign it?
Five clauses do most of the damage: the auto-renewal, the notice-to-vacate window, who pays which utility, the pet and parking add-ons, and the early-termination formula. Read those five before the rent number. A lease that renews automatically unless you give sixty days’ written notice will quietly cost you a month you never planned to pay for.
Month-to-month endings differ by state. In Missouri, either side ends a month-to-month tenancy with written notice taking effect on a rent-paying date not less than one month after the other party receives it, under RSMo 441.060. In Illinois it is 30 days’ written notice under 735 ILCS 5/9-207, and a landlord chasing unpaid rent must serve a five-day notice first under 735 ILCS 5/9-209.
Two local checks are worth the ten minutes. If the unit is in the City of St. Louis, every property sits in a Housing Conservation District, and a rental unit needs a Certificate of Inspection before occupancy, with reinspection every three years or on a change of occupancy — the city building division issues it, and you can ask to see it. And if the building went up before 1978, federal law requires a lead-based paint disclosure and the EPA pamphlet before you sign, per the EPA disclosure rule.
One expectation to reset: neither state caps how much your rent can go up at renewal. Illinois goes further and forbids cities and villages from enacting rent control at all, under the Rent Control Preemption Act passed in 1997. Your leverage at renewal is the lease term you negotiate going in, not a statute.
How much deposit can a landlord hold, and when do you get it back?
In Missouri the deposit is capped at two months’ rent, and the landlord has 30 days after the tenancy ends to return it in full or send a written itemized list of damages with the balance. You also have the right to be present at the move-out inspection. Wrongful withholding exposes the landlord to twice the amount wrongfully withheld, under RSMo 535.300.
Illinois has no statutory cap on the deposit amount, but a tighter clock on the way out. Under the Security Deposit Return Act, a landlord who intends to deduct must furnish an itemized statement with paid receipts or estimates within 30 days of the tenant vacating; without it, the full deposit is due within 45 days. Bad faith carries twice the deposit plus court costs and attorney’s fees. Public Act 103-224 deleted the old five-unit threshold effective January 1, 2024, so it now reaches a single rented condo in O’Fallon, Illinois.
Illinois adds one more wrinkle: in a building or complex of 25 or more units, a deposit held more than six months earns interest, set by the passbook savings rate at the largest commercial bank headquartered in the state, under the Security Deposit Interest Act. Either side of the river, do the same three things: photograph every room the day you move in, attend the walkthrough, and hand over a forwarding address in writing.
What are your rights if the furnace quits and nobody calls back?
Both states give you a narrow repair-and-deduct remedy, and both are easy to blow. Missouri’s version, RSMo 441.234, requires six consecutive months of lawful residence, rent current, a condition that violates local housing or building code, and 14 days’ written notice. The deduction is capped at $300 or half a month’s rent, whichever is greater, never more than one month’s rent, and once per 12 months.
Illinois caps it lower. The Residential Tenants’ Right to Repair Act allows the lesser of $500 or one-half of the monthly rent, again after 14 days’ written notice, and the work must be done by an appropriate tradesman unrelated to you, documented with a paid bill. Owner-occupied buildings of six units or fewer are among the exceptions.
What you should not do is simply stop paying rent. That is the fastest route to an eviction filing that follows you through every screening report for years. Call the municipal inspector first, put every request in writing, and get advice before you act — the Missouri Attorney General publishes a plain-language landlord-tenant guide, and Missouri Legal Services covers the same ground for tenants who need help.
What the leasing office is doing on the other side of the desk
Apartment margins are thinner than renters assume. The National Apartment Association’s analysis of 2022 operating statements from Freddie Mac-financed properties found that of every dollar of Missouri rent, 44 cents goes to the mortgage, 32 cents to operating costs, 9 cents to payroll, 7 cents to property taxes and 3 cents to capital reserves — leaving 6 cents of profit. In Illinois, property taxes take 14 cents instead of 7. Add the City of St. Louis inspection cycle — every three years or on a change of occupancy, with an application that starts at $120 and adds $65 for each additional unit at the same address — and the reason a leasing agent hates an empty unit in January is arithmetic: the peak leasing window is roughly May through August, and a vacancy that misses it can sit for months. The operators who fill units are the ones renters can actually find — which is why an accurate, complete listing matters as much as the sign out front.
Related reading: getting around the metro before you commit to a commute.
Ready to stop scrolling and start touring? Browse apartment buildings across the St. Louis metro on St Louis Near Me Directory, then call the two closest to your commute and ask what is available in the next 60 days — the answer tells you whether the building is worth a Saturday.
Frequently asked questions
Where do the wealthy live in St. Louis?
Mostly in a tight cluster of small St. Louis County municipalities west of the city. In the Census Bureau’s 2020 through 2024 five-year estimates, Ladue and Huntleigh both report median household income at $250,001, the top value the survey publishes, followed by Clarkson Valley at $247,000, Westwood at $237,500, Frontenac at $233,425 and Town and Country at $232,534. For renters that matters less than it sounds, because those places are almost entirely owner-occupied.
Where is Millionaires Row, St. Louis?
It is a nickname, not an address, and it points at the Central West End. The City of St. Louis traces the district to the late 1880s, when a 1,400-acre park drew the region’s wealthy elite west of downtown and the neighborhood built out Lindell Boulevard along with the private places — Westmoreland Place, Portland Place and Forest Park Terrace — in what the city calls grand and lavish style. Apartments sit a block or two away in every direction.
How much does an apartment building usually cost?
There is no usable national average, because the price is set locally by land, unit count, construction type and the rent the units actually produce. A four-family in south St. Louis and a garden complex in Chesterfield are not the same asset class. Anyone shopping seriously prices it per unit against recent sales within a few miles, then verifies with an appraisal and a lender. Any published figure is stale the moment rates or insurance move.
How much is an average apartment building?
Buyers do not price apartment buildings off averages. They price off net operating income divided by a capitalization rate drawn from comparable local sales, which is why two buildings with identical unit counts can trade hundreds of thousands apart. Work the math from the rent roll, actual expenses and current debt terms, and treat any headline average as a conversation starter rather than a number to bring to a closing table.
How much does it cost to build an entire apartment complex?
Budget it as five stacked line items rather than one number: land, hard construction costs, soft costs such as design and permits, financing carry during construction, and an operating reserve for lease-up. Construction type moves the total more than anything else, since a wood-frame walk-up, a podium building over structured parking, and a mid-rise price on entirely different scales. Local bids and a lender’s term sheet are the only figures worth planning around.
How much does a 100 unit apartment complex cost?
Unit count alone does not set the price. A 100-unit garden community on cheap suburban ground, a 100-unit rehab of an older city building and a 100-unit new-construction mid-rise with a parking deck can differ by multiples on the same unit count. Land basis, parking, construction type, labor rates and financing terms move the number, and all of those are local and change quarter to quarter.
Written by a dedicated team of St. Louis locals who live, work, and play right here in the St. Louis metro. Founder Lane Forman and team are committed to building the region’s most trusted directory by verifying listings and connecting local businesses with loyal customers across Missouri and Illinois.