Is Lynn cheaper than Boston?

The typical Lynn rent is $2,342/month as of September 2026 — about 22% cheaper than the wider Boston, MA metro area, where the typical rent is $2,987. That is roughly $645 less per month, or about $7,740 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 34% below the Boston metro; today it is only 22% 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.

And versus the rest of the country?

Step back from the Boston metro and compare Lynn to the whole US: the typical rent across the country is $1,932/month as of September 2026, so Lynn runs about 21% above the national average — roughly $410 more a month, or about $4,920 a year. That's the premium for sitting inside a large, high-cost metro area rather than out in the wider country. And the distance from the national figure has grown since 2018, when Lynn sat about 11% above the US — Lynn rents have outpaced the country. The US line is the same Zillow ZORI series, so it's directly comparable to the Lynn and metro figures above.

Year-by-year: Lynn, the Boston metro and the US

Each year's figure is the average of every month Zillow published for that year — for Lynn, the metro and the US alike — 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.

First published June 28, 2026 · Page last updated November 8, 2026 · rent index data through September 2026.