Where a $1,500 Rent Budget Gets You the Most Square Footage

If you are a renter who wants all the things—loads of natural light, a queen-size mattress, closets galore—but your budget is limited to $1,500, we suggest kicking off your apartment search in Wichita, Kansas. Hear us out.

According to a new report from RentCafe that ranks cities across the U.S. based on where renters can get the most space on a monthly budget of $1,500, you can easily get 1,359 square feet of living space in Wichita. Toledo, Ohio, came in second at 1,345 square feet, followed by a slew of towns in the South and Midwest, until it tapers off to some not-so-surprising space-sucking culprits: Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, and, lastly, Manhattan. The New York City borough tops the list of places where $1,500 gets you the least rental space, coming to a mere 228 square feet. 

The Cities Where You Get the Most Space on a $1,500 Budget

1. Wichita (1,359 square feet)
2. Toledo (1,345 square feet)
3. Oklahoma City (1,302 square feet)
4. Tulsa, Oklahoma (1,277 square feet)
5. Memphis (1,257 square feet)
6. Lubbock, Texas (1,220 square feet)
7. Fort Wayne, Indiana (1,212 square feet)
8. Baton Rouge, Louisiana (1,166 square feet)
9. El Paso, Texas (1,147 square feet)
10. Omaha, Nebraska (1,126 square feet)

There is some good news in all of this. Nationwide, $1,500 translates to 729 square feet of space, on average. And actually, in more than half of the 200 largest cities, renters get even more room for this sum. But if you are like our contributing style editor, Julia Stevens, and happen to live in a roughly 230-something-square-foot Manhattan apartment, you just have to get a little creative. So we asked her: What’s your all-time best space-saving tip?

“Getting a storage bed totally changed the game for me,” says Stevens, referring to her IKEA Malm bed in which the mattress base lifts up. “The bed takes up the majority of the apartment, and rather than letting that become wasted space, every inch underneath is filled with stuff: linens, suitcases, sweaters.” Even better? With no visible handles or drawers, it doesn’t look like a typical storage bed. “No one knows!” she adds.