What rent you can actually carry, what a landlord will screen you on, and how both compare to what Vermont really costs.
The median across Vermont’s 12 FMR areas — unweighted by population, so it runs below what a typical resident of a metro pays. Pick a county for a local figure. Two-bedroom FMRs in this state range from $1,007 to $2,140. An FMR is the 40th percentile of gross rent, including tenant-paid utilities — so roughly 60% of units rent for more, and it is not directly comparable to an advertised rent that excludes utilities.
The honest break-even, including what selling costs and what the down payment would have earned if it stayed invested.
What actually reaches your account after federal tax, FICA, and your state's own brackets — with local income tax disclosed rather than guessed at.
Needs, wants, and savings as shares of your TAKE-HOME pay — not of gross, which is the version that never balances.
If your lease ends in December or January, the renewal letter arrives in September or October — and it arrives at the one time of year your landlord least wants the unit empty. Here is the arithmetic of a winter vacancy, what the law does and does not cap, what moving would actually cost you, and how to turn an 8% increase into a 4% one.
Nearly every deposit dispute is really one argument: is this damage, or is it wear and tear? Here is where the line actually sits, what the statutes permit, and the deadline that ends the argument before it starts.
Five gates, in order, each with a number you can compute. Includes the 50-state break-even table built from each state's own property tax, insurance and appreciation — and why that table is not a forecast.
The cash a move actually takes, split into what comes back and what never does — because a deposit and an application fee are different kinds of money and averaging them hides the real cost. Covers the lines people plan for and the ones they do not: the overlap month when two leases run at once, utility deposits, cleaning the old place, and unpaid time off. Gives you the total as a multiple of one month's rent so you can see whether yours is normal, a straight answer on whether your cash covers it, and a before-you-sign checklist built around the evidence that actually decides a deposit dispute.
Vermont guide
Vermont is a small state with two rental markets that do not resemble each other.
Chittenden County — Burlington — has a two-bedroom fair market rent of $2,140. Rutland County's is $1,345. That is a 59% gap across about seventy miles.
The statewide figure is $1,354, thirteenth-highest in the country — and it sits almost exactly on Rutland, not on Burlington.
A note before you start. This is general education, not housing, legal or financial advice. Rent figures come from HUD's Fair Market Rents for FY2026, published under 24 CFR 888.113. An FMR is the 40th percentile of GROSS rent — rent plus tenant-paid utilities — for standard-quality units in a defined rent area, so roughly 60% of units cost more. Vermont's take-home figures carry a caveat that section 5 states in full, and it affects every burden percentage on this page. Vermont landlord-tenant law is outside this dataset.
The three-to-four-bedroom step is $164, or 9.3% — unusually small. In most states that step is 15% to 25%.
Vermont's four-bedroom is the cheapest relative to its three-bedroom of almost any state in this series, which reflects a housing stock of older single-family homes where an extra bedroom is a room, not a different class of property.
The step that costs you is one to two: $227 a month, $2,724 a year.
This is the New England exception and it matters here.
In 46 states HUD defines rent areas by county. In the six New England states — Vermont among them — HUD defines them by town, because New England counties have little administrative meaning and metropolitan areas are built from town-level units.
Two practical consequences:
A county figure in Vermont is an aggregate of towns, not a single measurement. When this page says Chittenden County is $2,140, that is the rent area covering Burlington and the towns HUD groups with it — not a county-wide average in the sense the phrase implies elsewhere.
Read the full Vermont guide →16 min read · Updated 2026-09-01