Renting in Retirement Has No Major Fixed Costs? A Florida Property Broker Says Otherwise

A short video from financial educator Tyler Gardner has been making the rounds with retirees. It is titled "Thinking about renting in retirement? You're not crazy," and the first reason it gives is this: renting means "no major fixed costs, just rent, no roofs or water heaters to replace" (Tyler Gardner on YouTube).

I am a real estate broker in Central Florida and on the Space Coast, and over the years I have sold homes to retirees, helped others sell them, and priced plenty of rentals for the investors who buy them. Rather than argue the point, I want to show you 36 years of data and let you drag the slider yourself.

The short version: a renter's payment keeps rising. A homeowner's is locked the day they close. And a retiree with a paid-off home has locked in the lowest version of all.

Drag the year and watch whose payment goes up

The tool below follows the actual national rent history from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Case-Shiller home price index, and Freddie Mac's mortgage rates, month by month since 1990. Pick the year someone bought. Their principal and interest never changes for 30 years. Only taxes and insurance move, and in Florida the homestead cap holds the tax side to 3% a year. The renter next door follows what rent actually did over the same months.

Start with the default, a buyer in January 2015. Rent that month was about $1,250 and the owner's full payment, including taxes and insurance, was about $1,095. Today the renter is at roughly $2,000 and the owner is at roughly $1,320. The gap is about $680 a month, every month, and it widens each year.

Now drag the slider to 2007, about the worst timing imaginable. That buyer started out roughly $450 a month above rent. By 2023 they were below it, and they have been pulling away ever since.

Scroll down to the four-buyer chart. Every owner's line is nearly flat. The rent line is not. Rent in this data has risen about 3.3% a year on average for 36 years and has never had a meaningful down year. That is the whole argument, and no amount of framing about roofs and water heaters changes the shape of those lines.

Two things to notice for a retiree. First, those owners still have a mortgage. A paid-off homestead drops the biggest piece of the orange line entirely, so the comparison tilts even further for the people the video is talking to. Second, turn on the 30-year projection and set the purchase year to 2026. That is what a buyer today is signing up for, and what a renter today is signing up for, under the same rent growth we have actually lived through.

Rent is the fixed cost

Now go back to the phrase "no major fixed costs, just rent." Rent is the fixed cost. It is the largest housing bill a renter has, it is due every month for the rest of your life, and it is the one line on the page you do not control.

A homeowner with a paid-off house has the opposite profile. The big items are real, but they are lumpy, not fixed. A roof is a once-every-two-decades expense. A water heater runs about $1,300 to replace, according to Angi data cited by Bankrate, and it lasts years (Bankrate). Bankrate's own study puts total average maintenance at about $8,808 a year, or roughly $734 a month (Bankrate).

Compare that with the rent. A three-bedroom in Melbourne averaged $2,126 a month this summer, and a two-bedroom $1,708 (Rentometer). Orlando's overall median rent sits at $1,522 (Apartment List). At those numbers, a renter writes a check for the full Bankrate maintenance budget every three to five months and then keeps writing it.

So the honest comparison is not "fixed costs versus no fixed costs." It is "a mortgage-free home with lumpy, budgetable upkeep" versus "one very large fixed cost that never stops."

What your rent actually pays for

Here is how a rent number gets built. I have priced rentals for investor clients for years, and the math is always the same.

An investor pricing a rental starts with what the property costs to carry: property taxes, insurance, any HOA dues, a reserve for repairs and replacements, a vacancy allowance, management, and the owner's return. The rent has to cover all of it or the investor will not keep the property as a rental for long.

That reserve for repairs and replacements is the roof. It is the water heater, the air handler, the garage door opener, and the repipe. A landlord does not pay for those out of kindness. The landlord prices them into the rent and collects a little of each one every month from the tenant.

So when the video says a renter has "no roofs or water heaters to replace," what it really means is that the renter has prepaid for them in installments, with a management fee and a profit margin on top, and will never own the roof they paid for. The only difference is who holds the receipt.

The cost that has no cap

This is the part of the chart that matters most for someone on a fixed income: the blue line has no ceiling.

Florida does not allow rent control. State law bars every county, city, and local government from adopting any measure "imposing controls on rents" (Florida Statute 125.0103), and a 2023 preemption law went further by stripping local governments of authority over most landlord and tenant rules (Florida Realtors). When your lease ends, the landlord can set any price the market will bear.

We have watched what that looks like. Florida's median gross rent rose about 39% from 2019 to 2023 (WFTV, citing Census data). Orlando rents jumped roughly 21% in a single year from 2020 to 2021 (Florida Atlantic University). Rents have cooled since then, and Orlando's median is actually down 1.5% from a year ago (Apartment List). That is good news for a renter this year. It says nothing about years five, fifteen, or twenty-five of a retirement.

Insurance is the clearest example of how landlord costs reach tenants. The Federal Reserve found that real insurance costs on apartment buildings rose more than 75% between 2019 and 2024, from $39 to $68 per unit per month. Owners absorbed most of that in the short run, but they recovered roughly 25 to 40 cents of every added dollar through rent, and the increases landed mostly on existing tenants at renewal (Federal Reserve). The cost the renter supposedly escaped shows up in the renewal letter.

A homeowner's insurance bill rises too. The difference is that an owner can shop it, raise the deductible, harden the roof for a discount, or self-insure part of the risk. A renter can only sign or move.

What Florida does for homeowners over 65

The video was made for a national audience. It does not account for what Florida law does for a retiree who owns a homesteaded house, and it is a lot.

The standard homestead exemption removes $50,000 from the assessed value used for most property taxes (Appeal Desk). The Save Our Homes cap then limits the annual increase in a homestead's assessed value to 3% or the change in CPI, whichever is lower (Appeal Desk). That cap is the small steps you see in the owner lines on the chart, and it is why so many long-time Brevard and Orange County owners pay a fraction of what their newer neighbors pay. It is the closest thing to rent control Florida has, and it only exists for owners.

Then there is the senior layer. Counties and cities that adopt it can grant owners 65 and older an additional exemption of up to $50,000 on county and municipal taxes, subject to a household income limit of $38,686 for 2026. Long-term residents who have lived in the home 25 years or more, with a just value under $250,000, can have the entire assessed value exempted from those local taxes (Appeal Desk). Check with your county property appraiser, because the senior exemptions have to be adopted locally and applied for.

A renter gets none of this. The landlord's tax bill is not homesteaded, it is not capped at 3%, and the senior exemption does not pass through the lease. The tenant pays the full freight.

What the numbers say about retirees who rent

Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies tracks this. In its most recent report on older adults, 56% of renters aged 65 and older were housing cost burdened, meaning they spent more than 30% of their income on housing, compared with 26% of older homeowners. In 88 of the 100 largest metros, at least half of older renters spent more than half their income on housing. Older homeowners had a median net wealth of $499,000. Older renters had $10,100 (Harvard JCHS, via LeadingAge).

Some of that gap reflects who ends up renting rather than renting itself. But the direction is not ambiguous. The group with "no roofs to replace" is the group most likely to be squeezed by housing costs in retirement.

When renting in retirement does make sense

I am not going to pretend the answer is always "own." There are cases where selling and renting is the right call, and I have advised clients to do it.

If the house is a condo facing special assessments and a reserve study you cannot fund, renting can be the safer path. If the home no longer fits, with stairs you cannot manage or a yard you cannot keep, and you plan to move again within a few years, renting avoids paying two sets of closing costs. If you have no cash reserve at all and a roof claim would be a crisis, renting converts that risk into a monthly bill you can plan around. And if you simply want the freedom to try Asheville for a year and then the Keys, renting is the honest way to do that.

Those are all real reasons. Notice that none of them is "renting has no major fixed costs." That one is just wrong.

Run your own numbers in the chart

Go back up to the tool and type in your actual situation. If your home is paid off, set the down payment to 100% so principal and interest drop to zero, and the owner line becomes just your taxes and insurance. Put in your real tax rate and insurance as a share of value. Then set the rent to what a comparable home in your area actually costs today, not the national average. In Melbourne a three-bedroom runs about $2,126, and in Orlando the overall median is $1,522 (Rentometer; Apartment List). Turn on the 30-year projection and look at where the two lines are in year ten.

Add a maintenance reserve on top of the owner line. Bankrate's average is $8,808 a year, or use 1% to 2% of your home's value as a rule of thumb. For most of the paid-off homeowners I sit down with in Brevard and Orange County, the owner line plus that reserve is still well under the rent line, and only one of the two has a cap.

If the gap goes the other way for you, or if one of the real reasons above applies, we can talk about selling. If you want to unlock equity without giving up the homestead, there are ways to do that too, and we have written about them before. Either way, make the decision on your numbers, not a 45-second video's.

The bottom line

Renting in retirement is not crazy. Some people should do it. But "no major fixed costs" is backwards. Rent is the fixed cost. It is the largest one you will have, it carries the landlord's roof, water heater, insurance, and taxes inside it, it has no cap under Florida law, and it never ends. The chart above is 36 years of proof.

A paid-off Florida homestead, with its $50,000 exemption, its 3% assessment cap, and the senior exemptions on top, is one of the most protected housing positions a retiree can hold anywhere in the country. Before you trade it for a lease, make sure you know what you are giving up.