Fair market rent is a gross number. It already includes the utilities your tenant pays. If you quote it as your rent, you are asking too much and the unit will fail rent reasonableness. Pick a ZIP, a bedroom count, and who pays what.
Utility allowance presets are rough Minnesota placeholders so the arithmetic is visible. Your housing authority publishes its own schedule by unit type and fuel, and that schedule is the one that counts. If you have it, choose the last option and type the real number.
Three things sit between the published figure and what lands in your account.
HUD defines it as rent plus the cost of utilities the tenant pays, excluding telephone and internet. So a $1,090 two bedroom fair market rent in a unit where the tenant pays electric and heat is not a $1,090 asking rent. Subtract the utility allowance and the contract rent is the remainder. Landlords who miss this consistently overprice and then wonder why the unit fails.
Your housing authority adopts a payment standard anywhere from 90 to 110 percent of fair market rent, and it has three months after October 1 to move when a new fiscal year lands. Two authorities in neighbouring counties can sit twenty percent apart on the same HUD figure. The range above shows both ends because until you call, you do not know which end you are at.
Even inside the payment standard, the authority compares your unit to unassisted comparables nearby. You cannot charge a voucher tenant more than you would charge anyone else for the same unit. The payment standard is a ceiling, not an entitlement.
See how the fair market rent for your ZIP has moved over six years, by bedroom size, on the bedroom trends chart. Or compare fair market rent against actual market asking rent on the Section 8 spread table.
