A decade-long comparison published by FOX 5 Atlanta puts the increase in the Atlanta-area rent price index at nearly 66% from August 2016 to August 2026. The comparison also reports increases of 56% for restaurant prices and 33% for groceries over that period. These are changes in category price measures—not a calculation of how much every household’s expenses or every renter’s payment changed.
The FOX 5 Atlanta analysis uses U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data to compare August 2016, August 2021 and August 2026, covering categories including gasoline, electricity and grocery staples. Not all figures are Atlanta-specific: gasoline figures are for metro Atlanta, while some other costs, including car insurance and vehicle maintenance, use national data.
Local price comparisons show different rates of change
In FOX 5’s comparison, the Atlanta-area rent index rose nearly 66% over the decade, while restaurant prices in the city increased 56% and grocery prices 33%. Those figures show how price measures for different spending categories diverged; they do not, on their own, describe the change in any one household’s total budget.
Clothing told a different story. Atlanta clothing prices rose only about 13% over the decade, the report's analysis found, a far gentler climb than what renters or restaurant-goers experienced. That disparity is part of why the report cautions against treating any single percentage as representative of a typical household's overall budget.
What the rent index does—and doesn’t—show
The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’ FRED series, using BLS data, measures rent of primary residence in the Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell area as a monthly, not-seasonally-adjusted CPI index. Its change tracks movement in the index, not the asking rent for a particular home or an identical increase for every tenant. Separately, the Atlanta Regional Commission estimated that 48.4% of renters in the Atlanta Metro region were cost-burdened in 2016, meaning they spent more than 30% of household income on rent; that figure provides a 2016 affordability measure, not a later-period comparison.
Other local reporting offers additional measures of housing pressure, but not a count of homes built or affordable units produced. WABE reported in 2019 that the Atlanta Regional Commission was pursuing a collaborative regional strategy to address affordable-housing challenges. In a separate measure, WABE reported that Eviction Lab data recorded approximately 142,047 eviction filings since June 2025 across Cobb, Clayton, DeKalb, Fulton and Gwinnett counties. Filings do not necessarily mean tenants were removed.
National figures add costs beyond housing
On the national side, the numbers are just as striking. A household using 1,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity, a common benchmark for monthly use, would have paid approximately $139 in 2016, $144 in 2021 and $196 in 2026, per the comparison. That means the jump from 2021 to 2026 alone outpaced the five years before it by a wide margin.
Car owners have faced their own squeeze. National car insurance prices rose approximately 73% between August 2016 and August 2026, while vehicle maintenance and repair prices increased roughly 69% over the same period, the report found. Those increases, layered on top of rising rent and restaurant costs, help explain why so many household budgets feel tighter than the headline inflation numbers might suggest.
How the Numbers Were Calculated
The underlying math follows a simple logic: an expense that cost $100 in August 2016 would cost whatever amount its category's price index indicates in later years, using BLS Consumer Price Index figures for August of each year. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis notes that it is more appropriate to rely on CPI index values, rather than raw average prices, to measure how costs shift over time, and its FRED database separately tracks gasoline prices for the Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell metro area, including applicable federal, state and local taxes. A companion FRED series tracks food consumed at home in the same metro area on a monthly, not seasonally adjusted basis.
Information for the broader comparison came from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which supplied gas and food source data, the report notes. Importantly, the $100 examples built from that data are calculated comparisons, not actual average bills or insurance premiums, and individual household costs will vary by household, provider and spending habits.
