Every quarter two rent reports make the news within a few weeks of each other, and they disagree. In August 2026 Daft put the national rent for a two-bed apartment at €2,204 a month. In May the RTB and ESRI put the national average for a new tenancy at €1,755. Landlords read the first and feel underpaid; tenants read the second and feel overcharged; both are looking at the same country. The gap is not an error. It is two instruments measuring two different things, and knowing which is which decides who wins an argument about rent.
What Daft measures
The Daft.ie Rental Price Report is built from adverts placed on Daft during the quarter. It is an asking-rent index: the figure a landlord or agent typed into the listing, adjusted by Daft’s economists for the mix of property types and locations. Its Q2 2026 report, published on 24 August 2026, gave €2,204 nationally for a two-bed apartment, up 1.4% on the quarter after a 4.4% rise in Q1, and €2,551 in Dublin. It also counted just under 2,400 homes available to rent nationwide at the start of August.
Three properties of that method matter here. It is fast: about seven weeks from quarter end to publication. It captures intent, not outcome: a home advertised at €2,400 that lets for €2,250 after three weeks of no viewings enters the index at €2,400. And it only sees homes that were advertised. Relets to a friend of the outgoing tenant, homes let through an agent’s waiting list, and the large stock of tenancies that simply continue are invisible to it. With 2,400 adverts against several hundred thousand registered private tenancies, the advertised slice is small and skewed toward Dublin and toward homes that were hard to let.
What the RTB Rent Index measures
The RTB Rent Index, compiled by the ESRI for the Residential Tenancies Board, is built from tenancy registrations: the rent a landlord declared to the RTB when registering a tenancy, which is the rent actually agreed. Q4 2025, published on 20 May 2026, used 11,593 new tenancies and 42,914 existing ones. The standardised average rent for a new tenancy was €1,755 nationally, up 5.0% on a year earlier; €2,232 in Dublin, €1,699 in the rest of the Greater Dublin Area, €1,385 outside it. For existing tenancies of at least a year the figure was €1,503, which is the number that describes what most renters in Ireland pay.
Its weaknesses are the mirror image of Daft’s. It is slow: five months from quarter end to publication. It depends on landlords registering, so an unregistered tenancy is missing from it. And it is an average across everything let in the quarter, so a one-bed in Leitrim and a four-bed in Dalkey are in the same national figure; the standardisation corrects for the mix, but a headline number still hides a wide spread. The same registrations feed a second product, the RTB Average Monthly Rent Report published by the CSO as table RIQ02, which gives averages by town, bedrooms and property type. That is the dataset behind our rent prices pages.
Comparing like with like
Put the two on the same footing and most of the gap closes, but not all of it. Take a two-bed apartment in Dublin. Daft, Q2 2026: €2,551 asked. RTB register, Q4 2025: €2,284 agreed (RIQ02, Dublin, two-bed, apartment). That is a 12% gap, but two quarters apart; Daft’s own index rose about 6% over those two quarters, so the like-for-like difference between asking and agreed is nearer 6%. The rest is the advert premium: the discount negotiated before signing, and the homes that never reached Daft at all.
Nationally the comparison is harder because Daft’s headline is a two-bed apartment and the RTB’s is every home. Our RIQ02 pages give the county-by-county two-bed figure for the same quarter, and county by county the pattern holds: asking rents sit above registered rents by a margin that is largest in Dublin and smallest in the counties where most lettings never go on a website.
Which one to use
Setting or reviewing a rent. The law defines market rent as what a willing tenant would pay a willing landlord for a similar dwelling in a comparable area (section 24 of the Residential Tenancies Act), and since 1 March 2026 a Notice of Rent Review must prove it with three tenancies from the RTB’s public register, by RT number. Adverts do not qualify. A landlord who prices from Daft and then cannot find three registered tenancies at that level has a notice that will not survive a dispute. The register is the ceiling; Daft is the weather.
Checking whether you pay too much. The same rule protects the tenant. Your rent is measured against registered rents of similar homes when it was set, not against the adverts you see now. A tenant paying €2,300 for a Dublin two-bed in a building where the register shows €2,100 has a case; the fact that Daft shows €2,551 today does not weaken it.
Deciding what to advertise at. Here Daft earns its keep. It tells you what other landlords are asking this month and how fast the market is moving. Price from the register, then look at Daft to decide whether to list at the register figure or a little above it and be ready to come down.
Reading the news. A 4.4% quarterly jump in asking rents does not mean sitting tenants’ rents rose 4.4%; the register shows rents in existing tenancies rising 4.4% a year, and even that figure includes areas that only came under a cap in June 2025 and homes relet to new tenants in between. When the two reports point the same way, believe the direction. When they point in different directions, the register is describing what happened and Daft is describing what landlords hope will happen next.