While most major urban hubs across the United States continued to see the average size of apartments shrink in 2024 compared to 2015, one of the few exceptions to this trend was Queens, according to a report by the real estate listing site RentCafe.
New apartments completed in Queens over the ten-year span from 2015 to 2024 increased on average in size by 39 square feet, from 663 square feet to 702 square feet, marking a 6% jump from older rentals. The 39-square-foot increase marked the fourth-highest boost among cities across the country over this period of time, trailing only Marietta, Georgia, at 100 square feet, San Francisco, California, at 59 square feet and Cleveland, Ohio, at 57 square feet.
One of the biggest factors for this upward trend is that developers of buildings in this New York City borough have focused more on increasing the share of two-bedroom and three-bedroom apartments, which are bigger and capable of fitting more residents than studios and one-bedroom units.
Despite the significant boost, the 702 average square footage for apartments in Queens still ranks as the third-lowest among the cities included in the study. The only cities with smaller new apartments were Seattle, Washington, at 649 square feet, and Portland, Oregon, at 668 square feet.
The New York City boroughs of Brooklyn and Manhattan followed similar trends to Queens, albeit at a much smaller scale. The average size of new apartments from 2015 to 2024 rose from 702 to 706 square feet in Brooklyn and from 734 to 738 square feet in Manhattan. While these increases were very slight, these boroughs joined Queens and San Francisco as the only cities in the United States to be ranked among the top 20 smallest average size of new apartments despite having that number rise.
While Brooklyn, like Queens, has had developers of new buildings focused primarily on providing more two-bedroom and three-bedroom units, albeit on a smaller scale, Manhattan’s increase is largely the result of one-bedroom and two-bedroom units there increasing in size. Over the ten-year period, one-bedroom apartments in Manhattan rose on average by 15 square feet. New two-bedroom units in Manhattan spiked on average by 71 square feet.
Across the United States as a whole, the average size of apartments has gone down over the last ten years, from 930 square feet in 2015 to 908 square feet in 2024. However, 2024 marked the second consecutive year to have the average size increase year-over-year, up from 904 square feet in 2023, which was in turn an increase from the lowest point of 891 square feet in 2022.
