This is one ranking we don't want to be at the top of. 

According to a recent report by Zillow, Denver renters have almost doubled the amount they pay for housing over the past decade.

While not all cities have increased at the level of Denver, which came in third on the ranking, the entire nation has seen a large hike in rental costs.

"On Dec. 1, the nation’s renters didn’t just make their last rent payment of the year – their landlords also collected their last rent payment of what was a very lucrative decade. All-in-all, U.S. renters paid roughly $4.5 trillion in rent during the 2010s, capped off with $512 billion in 2019 alone," says the Zillow report.

Renters in Denver are now paying 88.2 percent more for housing than they did in 2010. This isn't a surprise, certainly not for renters, but also for anyone who has tried to navigate Denver's housing boom. Only Austin, with a 99.2 percent hike, and Raleigh, with a 91 percent increase, beat out the Mile High City. 

The lowest rent increases were seen in Memphis (29.7 percent), New Orleans (24.2 percent), and Virginia Beach (22.5 percent). 

The increase is largely due to the booming housing market, which caused more people to rent than buy and filled up rental properties. That made it easier for rates to hike because of the high demand and low availability of rental properties. 

According to the report, the largest rent hike happened in 2015 and evened out a bit in 2017 before taking a slight upswing. Zillow predicts rent will even out in this coming year, pointing to low mortgage interest rates as key to encouraging renters to buy and keeping rental rates sustainable.

"On the rental side, annual rent appreciation has been on the rise since June and currently sits at about 2.3%. We expect this recent uptick in rental growth to continue through the start of 2020 before petering out sometime around the start of Spring. By the end of next year, we expect annual rent growth to fall below two percent, or about a half a percentage point lower than where they currently stand."

Hopefully, this will come to pass and keep rent prices from taking more wild leaps as we saw in the past decade. 

Have you been affected by the rental increase in the Denver area (I know I have)? Let us know in the comments!