Fair Shares and Happy Dwellings: The Ultimate Guide to Splitting Rent with Roommates

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Living with roommates can be an amazing experience that will lead to lifelong friendships, or it can be a difficult experience that will lead to the early termination of your lease. We hope you avoid the latter by exercising due diligence in finding a roommate. Whether you love your roommate or not, you need to find a way to split the rent seamlessly. 

While it may seem easy and obvious to split rent with roommates, it’s not always the case. For example, you may be renting with a couple or in an apartment with very different sized rooms. In these situations, things can get complicated. Luckily, this guide has everything you need to know about sharing rent with roommates in different situations. 

Roommates can share rent in a variety of ways. It all depends on what is best for you and for them. Breaking the rent into square footage, people and number of bedrooms are all common options. If you’re not sure which roommate option works best, check out the following ways to share rent with roommates.  

1. Splitting the Rent by Number of Bedrooms 

Splitting rent by number of bedrooms is a relatively common practice due to its simplicity. To split rent by bedroom, divide the rental price by the number of bedrooms in the property. Anyone who lives in a bedroom must pay rent for that room. 

For example, imagine a four-bedroom apartment where four individual tenants occupy separate rooms.  If the rent for an apartment is $4,000 per month, each tenant would have to pay $1,000 per month rent. This could be a simple but unfair approach depending on the circumstances.  

What if there are more tenants than bedrooms on the premises? If there are more roommates than rooms, roommates sharing a room can pay half what the other roommates pay. In this case, you’ll need to talk to your roommates to find a solution that everyone agrees with. 

If you find yourself paying more rent than you think is right, you can request a change. For example, if there are more roommates than rooms, it might be better to split the rent per person rather than per room. You should discuss this with your roommates and come to an agreement before signing a formal contract.  

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2. Splitting Rent by Total Area 

This shared rental option is ideal for rooms of widely varying sizes. While one bedroom may contain a comfortable king-size bed and an attached bathroom, another may be the size of a small wardrobe. 

In this case, it is typical to split the rental cost by the square footage of each room. It’s a bit more difficult because it requires knowing the area of ​​each room and slightly more complicated calculations. But first you can ask the owner about the square footage of each room to help get started. 

3. Divide the Rent by Bedroom Size 

To divide the rent by the bedroom size, use the following equation: 

(m² of your bedroom total /m² of all bedrooms) x (total rent) = your share of the rent 

To show how this would look in practice, let’s use the example of a $2,100/ month 2-bedroom apartment with a master bedroom and a smaller one bedroom. In this example, you lost out and are sticking with the smaller bedroom.
 

Let’s say the master bedroom is 280 square feet with one bathroom, and the smaller bedroom is just a lot smaller at 120 square feet. First, we add up the square footage of each bedroom to get the total area. In this case, that’s 400 square feet. 

We find the rent payable for the smallest bedroom and plug these numbers into the equation above: 

(120 square feet / 400 square meters) x $2,100 = $630 

In this scenario, you would pay $630 in rent. Your roommate who occupies the larger master bedroom should pay $1,470.