Is Skokie cheaper than Chicago?

The typical Skokie rent is $2,371/month as of September 2026 — about 10% more than the wider Chicago, IL metro area, where the typical rent is $2,163, roughly $208 more per month. But the more useful question is whether that gap is holding — and it has barely budged in years.

Skokie versus the Chicago metro, the full series

Has the gap been closing or widening?

It has held roughly steady. The typical Skokie rent ran about 8% above the Chicago metro back in 2021, and it is about 10% above now. Skokie has tracked the Chicago, IL metro closely over the past 5 years rather than pulling away from it in either direction — when the metro moves, Skokie tends to move with it.

And versus the rest of the country?

Step back from the Chicago metro and compare Skokie to the whole US: the typical rent across the country is $1,932/month as of September 2026, so Skokie runs about 23% above the national average — roughly $439 more a month, or about $5,268 a year. That's the premium for sitting inside a large, high-cost metro area rather than out in the wider country. And the distance from the national figure has grown since 2021, when Skokie sat about 12% above the US — Skokie rents have outpaced the country. The US line is the same Zillow ZORI series, so it's directly comparable to the Skokie and metro figures above.

Year-by-year: Skokie, the Chicago metro and the US

Each year's figure is the average of every month Zillow published for that year — for Skokie, the metro and the US alike — so the comparison isn't thrown off by seasonality or by one stray month. Years marked partial don't yet have a full twelve months.

Read this honestly

• The metro line is the whole metro. The Chicago, IL figure covers the entire metropolitan area — the expensive urban core and every suburb together — so it naturally sits near or below an individual community like Skokie. It's a benchmark for "the wider market," not a like-for-like neighbor; for same-size nearby towns see the city comparison.
• Same smoothed index, both sides. Both lines are Zillow's ZORI — a smoothed measure of typical observed market rent, not asking rents or listings — so they're directly comparable, but both lag and mute the sharpest real-world moves.
• Recent months get revised. Zillow restates its latest few months as more data lands (usually under ~1%), so the newest gap here can shift by a few dollars between our updates.

See current Skokie rent and the per-ZIP breakdown, the full Skokie rent history, or how we compute all of this.

First published June 28, 2026 · Page last updated November 8, 2026 · rent index data through September 2026.