Orlando Rental Market Update — September 2026

One Orlando ZIP added about $116 a month in rent between June and July. Another gave back about $101.

Seven of the fifteen Orlando-metro ZIPs we track moved up. Eight moved down. Not one held flat. So the metro rent figure you'll see quoted this month is an average of fifteen places disagreeing with each other, and it has nothing to tell you about your property.

August's update said rents were flat and costs were climbing. The first half no longer holds. Rents scattered, and the mortgage rate — after five straight weekly increases — turned down twice, then climbed back through its own August peak.

The item on this month's list that can't wait for a judgment call is a filing deadline. If your property is in Orange County, it's a Friday, and it's September 18. If it's in Osceola, it's already Tuesday, September 8 — four days after you read this. Seminole runs its own clock too. See below.

What changed in Orlando's rental market in September 2026?

The 30-year fixed set a new high, rents split, and home values kept sliding. Freddie Mac's survey for the week ending September 3 put the 30-year at 6.71% — two basis points above the 6.69% that had stood as the peak since August 6. Two weekly declines in mid-August, and then straight back up through the top. Values fell in eleven of the fifteen Orlando ZIPs we track.

Walk the ladder: 6.43% on July 2, then 6.49, 6.55, 6.58, 6.66, and 6.69% on August 6. Then 6.67. Then 6.65. Then back up to 6.66, in Freddie Mac's August 27 survey. A week later it went higher still — 6.71% in the September 3 survey, a new high for the run.

Before anyone celebrates: a year earlier, that same rate read 6.50%. Today's 6.71% is twenty-one basis points above where it sat last summer. Two weeks down off a peak was a pause, and the pause is over. Call it a cut when it drops under 6.50%.

On the rent side, Apartment List's August report puts Orlando's median at $1,525, down 2.1% on the year and up 0.2% on the month. That's a city-limits apartment median — a narrower thing than it usually gets quoted as.

The for-sale market thinned in both directions at once. The Orlando Regional Realtor Association's July print had Central Florida sales down 7.4% from June and new listings down 7%, with the median around $410,500 — still roughly $8,000 above a year ago. Fewer buyers. Fewer sellers.

Why doesn't Orlando's rent number mean anything this month?

Because it's the average of ZIPs moving opposite ways. In Zillow's July index, seven Orlando ZIPs rose month over month, eight fell, and none held flat. The spread runs from Baldwin Park at +4.63% to Hourglass/SODO at −5.32%. That's just under ten points inside a single metro, in a single month.

Baldwin Park (32814) sits at $2,622, up 4.63% on the month and 8.0% on the year — the strongest ZIP on the board by both clocks. The Hourglass/SODO ZIP (32806) sits at $1,796, down 5.32% on the month. Eight hundred and twenty-six dollars apart, and moving away from each other.

Zillow's index blends apartments, condos and houses in a ZIP into one number, so use it for direction and don't price a listing off it.

And read both right-hand columns together, because they say different things. The year-over-year column still shows rent up in eleven of fifteen ZIPs, which reads as rents are rising. The month-over-month column shows June into July going both ways. Both are honest; only one of them is recent.

Values went the other way nearly everywhere — down in eleven ZIPs month over month, and in thirteen year over year. Winter Park is the only one up meaningfully at +4.7% on the year (Audubon Park is technically up too, at +0.2%), and at $809,773 it's also the priciest ZIP on the board. Kissimmee, at $286,617, is the cheapest.

There's a floor under the soft ZIPs worth knowing about. Orange County counts roughly 61% of renters across Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford as cost-burdened, and has opened 542 affordable apartment homes across four communities since April. Those 542 units won't touch your pricing in a metro this size. The 61% will — it's the ceiling your soft ZIPs are already pressing against. Our Orlando hub carries the standing submarket picture behind these numbers.

What is the September 18 VAB deadline for Orange County landlords?

Friday, September 18 is the Orange County Value Adjustment Board petition deadline. It matters more than usual this year, because the county's 2026 online filing portal is under construction. That leaves a paper DR-486 — by mail, in person, FedEx or UPS — with a $50 non-refundable filing fee where one applies, payable by personal check or MasterCard/Visa; checks to Orange County BCC — and the county is explicit that a petition isn't considered filed until the fee has been received by the VAB Clerk — in a paper year, mailing the check is not the same as discharging it.

A county filing portal going dark in the one month of the year it's needed is exactly how a routine appeal turns into a missed one. So treat the date differently than you did last year.

Paper changes the math on a deadline. A form has to physically arrive somewhere, and 11:59 p.m. from your couch isn't on offer this year. Before you plan your week around the 18th, call the Comptroller's office and ask one question: does a mailed petition count on the postmark, or on the day it lands? With the portal down, that answer is your real deadline.

The clock comes from Florida Statute 194.011(3)(d), which allows a valuation petition "at any time during the taxable year on or before the 25th day following the mailing of notice by the property appraiser." Read that clause again: the twenty-five days run from your county's mailing, not from a statewide date — so another county's deadline can be earlier than Orange's, and one of them is. At least five of the fifteen ZIPs in the table above sit outside Orange County — Casselberry, Winter Springs, Lake Mary and Oviedo in Seminole, Kissimmee in Osceola — and 32792 straddles the Orange/Seminole line, so don't infer your county from your ZIP. Osceola's clerk publishes its calendar: TRIM mailed August 14, petitions due Tuesday, September 8 — four days after this posts. Seminole's property appraiser mailed its TRIM notices August 17, which puts its twenty-five days inside the second week of September — ahead of Orange's. The Clerk administers the board; the exact date is on your notice. Read it today.

Florida Statute 194.301(2) puts the burden of proof on you, the party bringing the challenge, by a preponderance of the evidence. But look at what (2)(a) actually lets you prove — three routes, not one. That the assessed value doesn't represent just value after taking into account any applicable limits on annual increases. That it doesn't represent classified-use or fractional value — which only bites if your property is required to be assessed on its character or use, so for an ordinary rental that route is off the table. Or — the one that rarely comes up in appeal write-ups — that it "is arbitrarily based on appraisal practices that are different from the appraisal practices generally applied by the property appraiser to comparable property within the same county." That's a consistency argument rather than a value argument — a different case to build, and a different set of comps to pull.

The 10% cap is doing less than it looks like it's doing, too. Florida Statute 193.1554 caps the annual assessment increase on non-homestead residential property — nine dwelling units or fewer — at 10% for every levy except school district levies. In a rising market that's a gift. In a falling one, your capped assessed value climbs toward a market value coming down to meet it, and the cushion thins from both ends. Buy in 2025 and you have no cushion at all: the cap resets to just value on January 1 following a change of ownership.

We're not re-running the appeal mechanics here. Our Orlando property tax guide and the statewide appeal walkthrough both carry the form and the evidence that actually wins. Keep two more dates while you're at it — Orange County holds its final FY2026-27 millage hearings on September 10 and September 24, both at 5:01 p.m.

What should Orlando landlords do now?

Two things with dates on them, and one thing to leave alone. File the VAB petition if your notice ignored a falling market. Settle any insurance decision now, while the forecast is still boring. And don't take a metro-wide pricing action off a split month.

The one to get right is the one you don't do. Seven up and eight down isn't an instruction — a metro average built out of a disagreement can't price your house.

I know that's an unsatisfying thing to read in a market update. It's also the true answer this month, and a made-up recommendation would cost you more than an honest shrug.

Orange County: file by the 18th if your numbers support it. Paper only, a $50 filing fee where one applies, and confirm the postmark rule before you trust the mail. Outside Orange County: check your TRIM notice today. Your clock ran 25 days from your county's mailing, so your deadline may land before Orange's — Seminole's TRIM went out August 17, and Osceola's deadline is September 8.

Deal with insurance this week rather than next. As of the National Hurricane Center's outlook issued August 28 at 8:00 p.m. Eastern, the Atlantic carried no active tropical cyclones — two areas of interest, the remnants of Dolly east of the Leewards and a weak low in the northeastern Gulf, each at a 10 percent chance of formation over seven days — and NOAA still held the below-normal season call it made on August 6: 7 to 13 named storms, 2 to 6 hurricanes. Quiet, in other words. But the season peaks September 10, six days after this posts, and what governs your coverage isn't the forecast. Once a watch goes up anywhere in Florida, the window to bind or raise coverage shuts on somebody else's schedule. Our July briefing covers how fast that happened last time.

If you're buying, one side moved your way and one didn't. Home values slid across most of the metro in July's print; the rate went the other way, to a new high for the run. Just don't underwrite at 6.71% — Freddie Mac surveys owner-occupied conforming loans, and your investor quote prices above that.

So what is your number, if the metro figure isn't it? Your ZIP, your bedroom count, and the homes near you that actually leased. Our free rental analysis runs exactly that, property by property.

Two figures above will be stale before you act on them. Freddie Mac reprints every Thursday at noon Eastern, and the Hurricane Center updates its outlook several times a day through September. Check both.