Zillow Rental Manager and Apartments.com are the two places most US landlords actually weigh against each other, and the pricing question is harder to answer than it should be. Both are free to post on. Both sell an upgrade. Only one of them will tell you what the upgrade costs before you are standing inside a checkout screen.
Everything below was read from the two companies' own help centers and product pages in September 2026, not from a roundup. That matters more than usual here, because a lot of the pages currently ranking for this comparison still quote Zillow's per-listing weekly fee, which Zillow retired in May 2022. If you are reading a comparison that mentions $9.99 a week, it is describing a fee schedule that no longer exists.
The short answer
Posting is free on both. Zillow publishes its upgrade price openly at $39.99 per listing and runs it for up to 90 days. Apartments.com does not publish its Premium price at all, generates it per property type and market, shows it only on the upgrade screen, and runs it for 30 days. Renter-side fees are close: $35 to apply on Zillow against $32.00 plus tax on Apartments.com, and card rent payments cost the tenant 2.95% on Zillow against 2.75% on Apartments.com. Each fee schedule, with who pays every line, is on our pages for Zillow Rental Manager cost and how much Apartments.com charges landlords to list.
If you want a cost you can forecast, Zillow is the transparent one. If you want the larger share of purpose-built apartment search traffic in a metro, Apartments.com is often it. Neither of those is the expensive part of filling a unit, which is the point the rest of this gets to.
What each one charges, line by line
Two columns are doing the real work in the table below. One is the price. The other is who the money is actually billed to, because roughly half the fees on both platforms are paid by the renter and never touch your account.
| What you are paying for | Zillow Rental Manager | Apartments.com |
|---|---|---|
| Publishing a listing | Free since May 2022. Syndicates to Trulia and HotPads. | Free. Runs across the Apartments.com Network. |
| Upgrade price | $39.99 per listing, published openly. | Not published. Varies by property type and market, shown at the upgrade screen. |
| How long the upgrade lasts | Up to 90 days, one payment. | 30 days from the date of purchase. |
| Does it auto-renew | No. You repost and upgrade again. | No. Under 5 units you upgrade again after it expires. |
| Portfolio or bulk pricing | None. Zillow states it does not currently offer bulk pricing for multiple premium listings. | 5 to 49 units: packages quoted by phone. No self-serve rate. |
| Application and screening | $35 per applicant, paid by the renter. | $32.00 plus tax per applicant, paid by the renter. |
| Application reuse | Reusable for 30 days across Zillow applications. | Reusable for 30 days across up to 10 participating landlords. |
| Rent by bank transfer | Free. | Free. |
| Rent by card | 2.95% credit, $9.95 flat on debit, paid by the renter. | 2.75% on debit, credit, Apple Pay and Google Pay, paid by the renter. |
| Large multifamily | 25+ units handled by the rental advertising sales team. | 5 to 49 units handled by the advertising line. |
RentPlace is not affiliated with Zillow, Apartments.com or CoStar Group. Both sets of figures are the companies' own, and either can change them. The longer breakdowns live on our Zillow Rental Manager cost page and our breakdown of how much Apartments.com charges landlords, both of which cite the specific help center articles.
The upgrade window is the real difference
Most comparisons stop at the sticker price and miss the thing that actually decides what you spend. Zillow's premium upgrade covers up to 90 days. Apartments.com's Premium listing covers 30. Neither renews on its own.
Put a realistic vacancy against that. US units frequently take four to eight weeks to lease depending on the market and the season. A unit that takes six weeks fits comfortably inside one Zillow window and blows straight through an Apartments.com window, which means the Apartments.com upgrade gets bought twice for the same vacancy. A unit that takes eleven weeks buys the Zillow upgrade twice and the Apartments.com upgrade three times.
The perverse part is that this scales the wrong way. The unit that leases in nine days, the one that barely needed help, pays once. The stubborn unit in the awkward layout above the laundromat, the one actually burning your money, pays repeatedly for the privilege of staying visible. Visibility pricing is structured so that the slower the vacancy, the more it costs, which is the opposite of what you would design if you were trying to help the landlord.
What one unit costs on each
One unit, posted free, no upgrade on either platform: $0 on both. This is the honest best case and it is genuinely good. A single landlord with one rental in a healthy market can list on both portals for nothing, collect rent by ACH for nothing, and let applicants pay their own screening fees. There is no argument to be made against that on price, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.
One unit with the upgrade bought on both, leased inside a month: $39.99 to Zillow, plus whatever Apartments.com quotes you, which you will not know until you get there. Call it one charge each. For a $1,800 unit that is roughly half a day of rent in total, and if the upgrade shortens the vacancy by even two days it has paid for itself several times over.
The arithmetic only turns awkward when the unit does not lease quickly, and that is worth sitting with, because the upgrade is exactly the thing you buy when you are worried the unit will not lease quickly.
What eight units costs on each
Eight units is where the two models separate properly, because neither platform gives you a portfolio price at that size. Zillow states plainly that it does not currently offer bulk pricing for multiple premium listings, so eight upgrades is eight separate $39.99 charges: about $320 for one 90-day window. Apartments.com routes properties with 5 to 49 units to a phone number for flexible packages, so the honest answer for eight units is that we cannot tell you and neither can they until you have had the call.
Now add the window. If three of those eight are slow and take seven weeks, the Zillow side is unchanged, because seven weeks fits inside 90 days. The Apartments.com side buys three more Premium upgrades. Across a year of normal turnover on an eight-door portfolio, that difference compounds into real money, and none of it appears in a side-by-side feature chart.
Worth noting for the bookkeeping: listing upgrades, portal subscriptions and advertising spend are ordinary deductible expenses against rental income, and they are the exact category that goes missing at tax time because each charge is small and arrives from a different vendor. If you are running more than a couple of doors it is worth having those charges captured and categorized automatically as they hit the card rather than reconstructed from memory in April.
What you get back when someone writes in
Here is the part neither fee table contains, and it is the part that decides how your week actually goes.
A Zillow rental inquiry arrives as a name and a free-text message. An Apartments.com inquiry arrives through a contact form. In both cases, nothing requires the renter to tell you when they want to move in, what they earn, how many people are coming, whether there is a dog, or how long a lease they want. Both platforms collect that properly in the application, but the application comes after the showing, and the showing comes after four days of writing back to strangers to work out which of them are plausible.
So the upgrade does precisely what it promises and nothing more. It makes the pile bigger. Thirty inquiries instead of eleven, all the same shape, all needing the same five questions asked by hand. On one unit that is an irritating Tuesday. On eight units it is the job.
This is the reason we built RentPlace the way we did, and it is worth stating the bias openly: a renter cannot send "is this still available?" through a RentPlace listing, because the listing asks your screening questions before the message will send. Move-in date, income band, occupants, pets, lease length. Every applicant on a listing answers the same set, so the replies line up in a column instead of arriving in thirty different shapes, and the billing is one flat monthly fee for the whole portfolio with no upgrade screen and no window to buy twice.
Where Apartments.com is the better choice
- Purpose-built apartment search. People land on Apartments.com already intending to rent an apartment. Zillow's audience is larger overall but a meaningful slice of it is there to look at houses for sale.
- Larger multifamily buildings. If you run a 30-unit building, the packages and the account handling are built for you in a way self-serve tools are not.
- Free rent comparison reports. Apartments.com gives you comps on nearby listings, days on market and average rents at no cost, which is a genuinely useful pricing input before you set the number.
- Slightly cheaper on the renter side. $32.00 plus tax to apply against $35, and 2.75% on card rent against Zillow's 2.95% plus a $9.95 flat debit fee. Small, but it is your tenant's money and they notice.
Where Zillow is the better choice
- You can see the price. $39.99, printed, before you commit. For anyone who plans a marketing budget, that alone is worth a lot.
- The 90-day window. Three times the coverage per charge, which matters most on exactly the units that are hardest to fill.
- Raw reach. Zillow, Trulia and HotPads from one post is the largest combined rental audience in the country.
- Your own lease. Zillow lets you upload your own lease document for digital signature rather than requiring you to use the platform's template, which matters if your attorney wrote your lease or your state has clauses you need in it.
- Single-family and small rentals. The self-serve flow is built for one to a few doors and does not push you toward a sales call.
The number both fee tables leave out
A $1,800 unit loses about $60 for every day it sits empty. One extra vacant week is $420 of rent you will never bill, and that is larger than every landlord-side fee on both platforms put together.
Hold that next to the decision you are actually making. The gap between Zillow's $39.99 and whatever Apartments.com quotes you is, at worst, a couple of hundred dollars a year on a small portfolio. The gap between leasing a unit in 18 days and leasing it in 32 is $840 on one unit. Optimizing the fee while ignoring the days is the most common and most expensive mistake in this whole category, and both portals are quite happy for you to keep making it, because the fee is the part they compete on.
If you want the number on your own rent rather than our example, the vacancy calculator on our pricing page runs it. Most landlords who put their real figures in stop caring about the listing fee within about ten seconds.
How to decide this week
Post free on both. There is no reason not to, it costs nothing, and the two audiences overlap less than you would think. Then treat the upgrade as a separate decision per unit rather than a policy.
Buy the Zillow upgrade on units you expect to be slow, because the 90-day window means one charge covers the whole realistic vacancy. Buy the Apartments.com Premium on units you expect to move quickly, because 30 days is enough for those and you will not be paying for it twice. If you have more than five doors, make the call to Apartments.com before you need it, so the quoted package is a known number rather than a surprise mid-vacancy.
And before you pay either of them to promote anything, fix the listing itself. Buying placement for copy that leaves out the move-in date, the pet policy and who pays the utilities just buys you more of the wrong inquiries at a higher price. Paste your listing into the free Listing Grader first: it scores the text out of 100, names the facts you left out one by one, and rewrites the headline and description. That is a ten-minute fix that changes the quality of everything the upgrade brings in, and there are four complete sample rental ads to work from if you would rather start with copy that already works.