A household in Auburn must earn $58,160 a year or $36 per hour to afford the average market-rate rental, according to the Housing Development Consortium.

HDC’s Auburn Affordability Snapshot estimated that the average rent in Auburn is about $1,454 a month, a 5 percent increase between 2019 and 2020.

Of the roughly 72,000 people that live in Auburn, the report identified that 37 percent of them are renters.

Of the rental households, 29.6 percent are cost-burdened, meaning that they spend over 30% of income on housing and may have difficulty affording other necessities such as food, transportation, and medical care.

Of the households with a mortgage, just under 13 percent are cost burdened, according to the report.

Auburn’s Housing Action Plan identified that nearly all races and ethnicities in Auburn generally have lower household incomes than the rest of King County.

The report also found that the majority of renters, 82 percent, earned 80 percent of area’s median income (AMI) or less. It also found that the majority of Auburn homeowners, 56 percent, earned 80% of AMI or more.

Twenty-eight percent of renters earn 30 percent or less of AMI, according to Auburn’s Housing Action Plan.