Mayo guides·Money·4 min read

Splitting rent when the rooms aren't equal

Equal rent is only fair when the rooms are equal. They rarely are. Here is a method that takes ten minutes and holds up for the whole lease.

If you only read this

  1. 1Score each room out of 10 together, then divide rent by score.
  2. 2Agree it once and write it in the house agreement with the date.
  3. 3A new roommate inherits the room's share, not the old tenant's opinion.

Start from the total, not the rooms

Write down the full monthly rent. That number is fixed. Everything below is about dividing it, so nobody can quietly push their share onto someone else.

Score each room

Give every room a score out of 10 on the things that matter in your house. Size, light, noise, a private bathroom, a closet, distance from the kitchen. Do it together, out loud, in one sitting.

Three rooms, $2,700 a month

Big room with bathroom
score 10
Middle room
score 8
Small room by the door
score 6
Total score
24

Turn scores into rent

Each person pays their score divided by the total, multiplied by the rent. With the example above, the big room pays 10 ÷ 24 of $2,700.

What everyone pays

Big room
$1,125
Middle room
$900
Small room
$675

The gap between best and worst room is $450. If that feels too wide, compress the scores toward each other and recalculate.

Write it down

Put the split in your house agreement with the date you agreed it. When someone moves out, the new person inherits the room's share, not the old tenant's opinion of it.

Things people get wrong

  • Pricing by square footage alone. Light and a bathroom matter more than 20 square feet.
  • Letting the person who found the place set the split by themselves.
  • Revisiting it every month. Agree once, revisit only when someone moves.