The past few days were a big move-in weekend for a lot of renters. May to September are the busiest months for lease turnovers. That’s also often the most expensive time to be looking, because demand is so high.

Depending on who you ask and what data they’re looking at, rents are either still growing slightly year over year, according to the rental platform Zumper, or falling slightly, according to Apartment List. But the bottom line is that these days, renting is much more expensive than it was a few years ago.

New York City, for example, just hit an inauspicious milestone: The median rent for a one-bedroom apartment is now $4,500.

“That’s a 13% growth year on year. That is extraordinary,” said Anthemos Georgiades, the co-founder and CEO of Zumper.

In the decade plus that his company has been around and tracking rents, “we’ve never seen a median rent for one bedroom in any market cross $4,500,” he said.

New York has always been a notoriously expensive place, but he said this is a whole new level: “You’ve just seen supply grow but grow kind of too slowly to kind of absorb all this demand — and this is becoming kind of unsustainably expensive.”

New York may be an outlier, but rents have become unsustainably expensive in much of the country, according to Peyton Whitney, a research analyst at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

“Rents now sit almost 21% above what they were five years ago,” she said. “It’s unattainable for most households.”

Much of that jump happened in 2021 and 2022. These days, rent growth is much slower.

“What we see at our most recent reading nationally is growth of 0.2%, which is significantly different from the 15.3% that we saw in early 2022,” said Whitney.

But the national numbers only tell part of the story; there are big regional differences.

Rent is still rising significantly in some cities — mostly in the Northeast and Midwest — while it’s actually come down in others, namely in the South, noted Apartment List’s senior housing economist Chris Salviati.

“We’re in the midst of really a historic surge of new multifamily inventory hitting the market,” he said. “The places where rents are declining fastest are the places where there’s the most competition happening from all this new supply.”

Like in Austin, Texas. A lot of new apartments have been built there and helped bring rents down about 6% or 7% from a year ago. But Salviati said he doesn’t expect to see rent drop all that much nationally.

“I think maybe what’s more likely is that we would see prices just kind of stagnate and level off for a couple of years, and potentially that gets us closer to where we would have been,” he said.

Where we would have been, that is, if the pandemic and the big rent spike of 2021-22 hadn’t happened.