The San Antonio Renter's Report: July 2026 Refresh Is Live

The July refresh of the San Antonio Renter’s Report is published. It is the mid-year update to the aggregated data we pull from the San Antonio Screening & Cost Index, and it covers the things that actually determine whether your application clears: median credit minimums by property class, average mandatory fee stacks in dollars, and current concession depth.

Every figure carries a sample count and a verification month. That is not a formality. A screening number without a date is a number somebody wrote down once and stopped checking, and it will cost you an application fee.

What is in the refresh

The Report is organized around four questions renters actually ask.

What credit score do properties want? Median credit minimum, broken out by property class and by submarket. This is the source behind the credit-band-to-class table published on credit issues.

What does the apartment really cost per month? Average mandatory fee stack in dollars by class, valet trash, pest control, RUBS water and sewer, billing admin, tech and amenity packages, expressed both as a dollar figure and as a percentage of base rent.

Who accepts a guarantee? The share of communities in our coverage accepting third-party guarantees and deposit alternatives, which is the single most useful number for a renter whose file is short on one dimension.

How deep are concessions right now? Concession depth by submarket, with the caveat that individual offers expire without notice.

What changed since the January edition

Three movements worth flagging.

Credit floors softened at the margin. In a market near 10% vacancy, some communities that were holding a 620 have moved to a 580 or added case-by-case review. This is not universal and it is not permanent. Floors move back up when occupancy recovers. It is exactly the kind of change that only shows up if somebody calls the office and writes down the answer.

Fee stacks did not soften. Rents have come down. The mandatory monthly stack has not. The practical effect is that the fee stack is a larger share of your total monthly cost than it was in January, which makes comparing units on advertised rent alone more misleading than usual.

Concession depth widened at the top. Class A rents are down about 3.2% year over year and the luxury-to-mid-tier gap has compressed to roughly $180 a month. Newer lease-ups are competing hardest, which is why luxury is a more interesting question this year than usual, covered on what luxury actually buys you.

How the data is collected

Community by community, by phone and in person, and written down with a date and the name of whoever confirmed it. For every community we work with we record: submarket and class, management company, credit minimum, income multiple, eviction lookback and whether it is balance-dependent, broken-lease policy, property-debt policy, felony and misdemeanor lookback by offense class, which guarantees and deposit alternatives are accepted, the current concession and its expiry, and the full mandatory fee stack.

We publish aggregates, never the raw file

The aggregates are what rank, get cited, and help renters who never contact us. The underlying file is the reason we can answer a question about a specific property in an afternoon. Publishing it would help nobody and end the advantage that funds the work.

What the Report does not contain

No named properties. Only aggregates. Named communities with confirmed criteria go to renters on their verified list, with the date attached.

No invented counts. Where our coverage in a submarket is too thin to publish a median honestly, we say “across the communities we work with” and give a range instead of manufacturing a number. A statistic without records behind it is misrepresentation under TREC advertising rules, and it is also just a bad way to earn trust.

No safety or demographic commentary. We compare submarkets on rent, commute and inventory age. Not on who lives there. That is a Fair Housing line and we hold it, see Fair Housing and how we work.

Cadence and citation

The Renter’s Report publishes each January and refreshes each July. The full current edition sits at The San Antonio Renter’s Report.

Journalists, relocation offices and university housing teams are welcome to cite it with attribution and a link. If you need a figure broken out differently, by submarket, by unit type, by class, ask and we will pull it, at no cost. Publishing these figures is the whole premise of our San Antonio apartment locating service, the numbers stay in front of the form rather than behind it.

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