12-month leases most common for newer tenants
The second new leasing question on the CPI Housing Survey is the year and month that the tenant moved into the rental unit. Combining the responses to the length-of-lease question with move-in data, CPI Housing Survey data indicate a clear trend.
Newer tenants tend to have a fixed, 12-month lease term. Nearly 92 percent of tenants who have lived in the unit for less than 1 year had such a lease. Yet, as the time living in the unit increases, leases tend to more often be month to month. For tenants who had lived in the same unit for 5 or more years, only 49.7 percent had a 12-month lease, while 50.3 percent reported a month-to-month lease during this period.