Bay Area Rental Yields, Worked Out in the Open
What a Bay Area rental actually yields, city by city, from published Zillow rent and price data — with the arithmetic shown step by step and every figure carrying its source.
On this page
Most rental-yield figures you will read for the Bay Area are either marketing or arithmetic nobody showed you. This site does one thing: it takes published rent and price data, divides one by the other in front of you, then subtracts the costs that are actually on the bill until what is left is a number you could defend to a lender.
The headline, for September 2026: across the 92 Bay Area cities for which Zillow publishes both a rent index and a home-value index, the ratio of annual asking rent to mid-tier home value runs from 1.52% in Palo Alto to 8.68% in Emeryville. The median is 3.40%.
That spread of more than six points is the whole subject. It is not a spread in how well-run the properties are. It is almost entirely a spread in price per dollar of rent, and it has a clean geography: rent does not fall nearly as fast as price does as you move inland.
The thing to understand before any yield figure means anything
A gross yield is rent divided by price. Nobody collects a gross yield. What reaches a bank account is rent minus property tax, insurance, vacancy, maintenance, management, and — on a condo — an HOA fee that can be larger than all the others put together.
In the Bay Area two of those deserve naming up front, because both are routinely got wrong:
**Property tax is charged on what you paid, not on what the seller was paying.** Under Proposition 13 a California property's assessed value is reset to its purchase price when it changes hands, then rises by at most 2% a year until it is sold again. A listing that mentions a $4,000 annual tax bill is telling you about the seller's basis, which dies with the sale. See California property tax on a rental.
A high gross yield on a condo is often an HOA fee in disguise. Emeryville tops the table above at 8.68% gross. It is also almost entirely condo and apartment stock, where monthly HOA dues on a $429,369 unit routinely run several hundred dollars. See HOA fees and rental yield.
Start here
- How to calculate rental yield — the arithmetic, with every line of a real Bay Area example filled in.
- Gross vs net rental yield — the two numbers, the gap between them, and why the gap is wider here than almost anywhere.
- Why published rental yields are wrong — including the one this site publishes, and what it is and is not good for.
Every Bay Area city, ranked
The full table is on Bay Area rental yield by city. The ten highest and the ten lowest ratios, for September 2026:
| City | County | Asking rent / mo | Mid-tier value | Gross ratio |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Emeryville | Alameda | $3,104 | $429,369 | 8.68% |
| Suisun City | Solano | $2,683 | $530,234 | 6.07% |
| Oakley | Contra Costa | $3,294 | $653,563 | 6.05% |
| Dixon | Solano | $3,009 | $605,822 | 5.96% |
| Clayton | Contra Costa | $4,985 | $1,026,888 | 5.83% |
| Antioch | Contra Costa | $2,814 | $590,401 | 5.72% |
| American Canyon | Napa | $3,347 | $723,023 | 5.56% |
| Discovery Bay | Contra Costa | $3,570 | $775,031 | 5.53% |
| Windsor | Sonoma | $3,528 | $794,051 | 5.33% |
| Vacaville | Solano | $2,627 | $600,979 | 5.25% |
And the other end:
| City | County | Asking rent / mo | Mid-tier value | Gross ratio |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lafayette | Contra Costa | $3,372 | $1,907,310 | 2.12% |
| San Carlos | San Mateo | $4,248 | $2,445,853 | 2.08% |
| Belmont | San Mateo | $3,798 | $2,263,665 | 2.01% |
| Los Gatos | Santa Clara | $4,004 | $2,597,611 | 1.85% |
| Saratoga | Santa Clara | $6,140 | $3,974,406 | 1.85% |
| Los Altos | Santa Clara | $6,886 | $4,591,005 | 1.80% |
| Menlo Park | San Mateo | $4,277 | $2,898,368 | 1.77% |
| Cupertino | Santa Clara | $4,307 | $2,957,922 | 1.75% |
| Burlingame | San Mateo | $4,119 | $2,845,047 | 1.74% |
| Palo Alto | Santa Clara | $4,558 | $3,592,240 | 1.52% |
Cities worked in detail
- San Francisco — 3.98% gross, and what rent control does to the number.
- Oakland — 4.66% gross, the best of the region's three largest cities.
- San Jose — 3.17% gross.
- San Mateo — 2.84% gross, and the million-dollar-condo question worked line by line.
- Palo Alto — 1.52% gross, the lowest in the dataset, and why anyone buys anyway.
- The high-yield East Bay — Antioch, Oakley, Pittsburg, Vallejo and the rest of the 5%-plus band.
The costs, one page each
- California property tax on a rental
- HOA fees and rental yield
- Vacancy and rental yield — with the official figures, and why their margins of error make them unusable for underwriting.
- Mello-Roos and rental yield — the charge that sits on top of the 1% rate in exactly the inland cities that look highest-yielding.
Owning a fraction instead of a whole
A $900,000 house in Hayward at 3.90% gross is not a decision most people can make with a few thousand dollars. Fractional rental ownership covers the structures that let someone own part of a rental property, what changes about the arithmetic when you do, and what to check before you do it.
How this site works
Every figure here is resolved from a published dataset at the moment the page is built, not typed in by hand, so a page cannot quietly carry a stale number. The sources, the method and how this site is funded are on methodology.