Housing · Single item chart
Rent of primary residence · CPI subindex · all available data
Reading the chart. Rent is shown as BLS's CPI Rent of Primary Residence subindex. There is no comparable national dollar-denominated retail rent series going back to 1947, so the BLS subindex is the most authoritative long-history measure available. Note that this measure is methodologically different from BLS's Owner's Equivalent Rent (OER), which is imputed for homeowners and forms a much larger share of headline CPI.