Is Lynn cheaper than Boston?

The typical Lynn rent is $2,354/month as of May 2026 — about 27% cheaper than the wider Boston, MA metro area, where the typical rent is $3,211. That is roughly $857 less per month, or about $10,284 a year. But the more useful question is whether that gap is holding — and it hasn't stood still.

Lynn versus the Boston metro, the full series

Has the gap been closing or widening?

It has been closing. In 2018 the typical Lynn rent ran about 36% below the Boston metro; today it is only 27% below. Over those 8 years Lynn rents climbed faster than the metro as a whole — the familiar pattern of renters priced out of the core pushing demand outward and pulling the cheaper edges up toward the middle. Lynn is still a discount to the metro, but a shrinking one.

Year-by-year: Lynn vs the Boston metro

Each year's figure is the average of every month Zillow published for that year, for both Lynn and the metro, so the comparison isn't thrown off by seasonality or by one stray month. Years marked partial don't yet have a full twelve months.

Read this honestly

• The metro line is the whole metro. The Boston, MA figure covers the entire metropolitan area — the expensive urban core and every suburb together — so it naturally sits above an individual community like Lynn. It's a benchmark for "the wider market," not a like-for-like neighbor; for same-size nearby towns see the city comparison.
• Same smoothed index, both sides. Both lines are Zillow's ZORI — a smoothed measure of typical observed market rent, not asking rents or listings — so they're directly comparable, but both lag and mute the sharpest real-world moves.
• Recent months get revised. Zillow restates its latest few months as more data lands (usually under ~1%), so the newest gap here can shift by a few dollars between our updates.

See current Lynn rent and the per-ZIP breakdown, the full Lynn rent history, or how we compute all of this.