A short video posted to social media this weekend in which a Nigerian woman recounted her landlord raising her rent twice within a year has drawn hundreds of thousands of views, not because the story is unusual, but because it is not. Across Abuja, Lagos and Port Harcourt, what she described is an everyday experience for millions of salaried Nigerians who are losing the race between what they earn and what it costs to keep a roof over their heads.
The woman, who did not give her name, said her rent was increased by ₦700,000 in 2025 and then by a further ₦1.5 million to ₦1.7 million in January 2026. She said she knew of friends in Abuja who had planned to upgrade from one-bedroom to two-bedroom apartments and found the rents had multiplied so dramatically that the move was no longer possible. She framed her frustration not just as a personal problem but as a structural one. “You can’t tell me that someone working a 9 to 5 in Nigeria is supposed to be paying this kind of money,” she said. “Where is the money going to come from?”
The numbers behind her outrage have been independently confirmed by multiple market surveys. Two-bedroom flats in Lagos and Abuja now command between ₦1.5 million and ₦4 million per year, with total move-in costs, including agent fees, caution deposits and legal charges, often rising to between ₦2.5 million and ₦6 million. This stands in sharp contrast to the national minimum wage of ₦70,000 per month and average annual salaries estimated at between ₦2.75 million and ₦3.4 million.
In highbrow Abuja districts like Maitama and Asokoro, two-bedroom flats that rented for between ₦3 million and ₦10 million in 2024 were being quoted at as much as ₦20 million by early 2025. In 2026, the Abuja rental market is forecast to see a further 10% to 15% increase in mid-tier districts, driven by a construction cost surge of over 50% in late 2025 that is forcing a wholesale repricing of older rental stock to match the floor set by new developments.
The structural causes are well established and widely documented. Rental prices in Nigeria’s major cities increased sharply across 2025, consistently outpacing general inflation, with demand driven by rapid urbanisation and population growth that new housing supply has been unable to match. Most developments labelled affordable were, in reality, only accessible to upper-middle-income earners, with entry-level home prices in many cities still exceeding five to seven times the average annual income, far above global affordability benchmarks.
On the supply side, developers point to the cost of constructing a one-bedroom flat rising from approximately ₦75 million in 2024 to over ₦100 million in 2025, driven by inflation and naira depreciation, as the primary reason rents cannot fall without making new development economically unviable. The National President of the Estate, Rent and Commission Agents Association of Nigeria (ERCAAN), Godwin Alenkhe, has described the current rent surge as abnormal, calling on government to subsidise building materials and invest directly in low-cost housing, warning that without proper oversight, prices will continue to spiral.
Nigeria’s housing deficit, estimated at 17 million units a decade ago, has now grown to approximately 28 million units despite repeated policy announcements. The Nigeria Tax Act 2025, which took effect on January 1, 2026, includes a provision allowing businesses earning below ₦25 million annually to deduct up to ₦500,000 of rent from taxable income, but analysts note that this offers marginal relief to a tenant already paying multiples of that amount annually.
Experts have argued that Nigeria stands at a convergence of housing-related reforms in 2026, covering tax changes, land digitalisation through the Land4Growth programme, mortgage recapitalisation at the Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria (FMBN), and new housing data infrastructure, that could reshape access if fully implemented. The consistent warning from housing economists, however, is that policies which have moved slowly for decades are unlikely to deliver meaningful relief to the woman in this weekend’s viral video before her next lease renewal arrives.
