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Published July 15, 2026
California's rental vacancy rate sits near 4.8%, but a city's Census figure can include seasonal and for-sale units too. Here is how to read the real number.
California's rental vacancy rate was about 4.8% in 2025, close to its long-run average of roughly 5.5% and well above its 2016 low of 3.6%, according to the Census Bureau's Housing Vacancy Survey. But a single city's headline vacancy number from the American Community Survey, the kind of blended figure often quoted for a South Bay city like Torrance, usually measures total vacant housing units of every kind, not just units actually available to rent, which is why a city's overall vacancy figure and its true rental vacancy rate can look very different.
The Census Bureau publishes vacancy data in a few different ways, and property owners often see whichever one a real estate blog or listing site happened to quote. The American Community Survey's Table B25004, Vacancy Status, breaks total vacant units into categories: for rent, for sale only, rented or sold but not occupied, for seasonal or occasional use, for migrant workers, and other vacant. A city's overall vacancy rate, the kind you often see quoted as a flat percentage of all housing units, lumps all of those categories together. A beach-adjacent South Bay city with a meaningful number of seasonal or vacation units, or homes sitting vacant during a sale, can show a total vacancy rate well above its actual rental vacancy rate.
The rental vacancy rate specifically divides units vacant and for rent by the total rental inventory (occupied rentals plus vacant-for-rent units). That is the number that actually tells an owner how competitive the local rental market is, and it is almost always lower than a city's blended total vacancy figure.
At the state level, the Census Bureau's Housing Vacancy Survey put California's rental vacancy rate at about 4.8% in 2025, essentially flat from prior years and still below the state's longer-run historical average near 5.5%. At the county level, Los Angeles County's rental vacancy rate has tracked in a similar range, with market data providers reporting figures near 4.7% to 5% through late 2024. These county and state figures are drawn from larger, more statistically reliable samples than any single small city estimate.
At the individual city level is where the ACS numbers get noisy. The American Community Survey samples a relatively small number of households in any one city each year, and for a city the size of a South Bay suburb, a city-level vacancy estimate can carry a wide margin of error, especially in the 1-year estimates. That is a structural limitation of the survey, documented by the Census Bureau itself, not a Schofield opinion: small and mid-size cities should generally be evaluated using multi-year ACS estimates (3-year or 5-year) rather than a single 1-year snapshot, precisely because the margin of error on a 1-year city estimate can swing the reported rate by a point or more.
An owner deciding whether to raise rent, extend a lease incentive, or budget for longer vacancy time between tenants is making that decision based on how tight the local rental market actually is. If you pull a city's total vacancy rate off a real estate website and it happens to include seasonal units, vacant-for-sale homes, and units between owners, you can end up thinking the rental market is looser than it is, and price a unit too conservatively. The opposite mistake, treating a single noisy 1-year city estimate as gospel, can push you to be too aggressive on rent in a market that is not actually running that tight.
When you look up a vacancy rate for your city, check which table it comes from. If a source cites a single blended "vacancy rate" for a city without saying "rental," it is probably the total vacancy figure, which includes seasonal and for-sale units and can overstate how loose the rental market really is. For rent-specific decisions, weight county-level and multi-year city figures over a single city's 1-year ACS estimate, and treat your own leasing velocity, the actual weeks it takes to fill your own units, as the most reliable local signal you have.
We track actual leasing time and applicant volume across our own doors in the South Bay every month, which tends to be a more current read than any annual survey. If you want that context before your next lease renewal, that is a conversation worth having.
This is general information, not legal or tax advice. Confirm with a licensed professional before you act.
Last verified: July 2026.
Topics: market, vacancy-rate, south-bay, census-data, rental-market
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Schofield Properties is a family run property management company at 323 Richmond St, El Segundo, CA 90245. We have managed the South Bay since 1972 and personally oversee about 186 doors today. Book a call to talk about your property.
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